Dalton Jansen - JAH! (2024)

The first version of the show was built for Theatre Forever in 2023, played a work in progress show in DeLamar in Amsterdam. I had about five days to develop thirty minutes of music, which is quite a short time. Now, looking back retroactively, it is interesting to see how much of the DNA of this version has remained in the final show that would premiere more than a year later. It featured sounds from the ocean, bird sounds, voices from west african tribes and also a section of spoken word in the form of a speech from Marcus Garvey.

A lot of the techniques used for these music (like vocal isolation from field recordings and stretching those vocals out) I also applied in the final work. The structure of the WIP version was completely different however, it featured a lot of vignettes and blackouts between different sections of material and no overarcing narrative.

"...it’s striking that the soundscape very deliberately creates an atmosphere, while rhythm is more suggested than actually played out. The five Rastas have already done plenty of swaying, wrestling, and mimed passing of joints before a reggae-like beat is finally heard."

Review of the WIP version by Fritz de Jong, 24/8/23, Theaterkrant, translated to English

Research

After the preview we dropped the project for half a year. I felt like I needed a lot more time to research the culture of the sound Dalton was asking me to convey for the show. My research and development coincidentally happened at the same time as when Dalton was on a research trip in Jamaica with his father and a small film crew to shoot a documentary. As a result I was operating in a bit of a vacuum, but the parallel process will become a bit more significant later on.

A "dub" experiment

I played around a lot with dub techniques, running plucked sounds through delay's and also recording everything to magnetic tape, slowing down and speeding up the playback to change the pitch. There were some other experiments like making steel drums sound less 'jolly' for example but those didn't make it to the final show and I would love to finish this portfolio piece at some point so I will have to skip those for the write up here.

After some demo's that were met with radio silence from Dalton having his own journey on Jamaica I saw a story pop up on Instagram from him visiting the Nyabinghi tribe where they were having a musical ceremony. I have a very convenient extension in my web browser that lets me record the audio from a webpage so I used that as a foundation for a small piece of music. I used the same techniques as in the preview to isolate the voices and drone those out, below you can hear the original sample and the resulting demo.

From the moment I heard the sample it was clear that that definitely had to be part of the show and that all the experimenting I had done before were more of a side-quest and my due diligence of researching and refining my understanding of the culture.

Recording Jimmy Pierre

Heartbeats

The main rhythm you can hear in the ceremonial music of the Nyabinghi tribe connects to the heartbeat. After I built the first demo based on the sample we talked about before I had the idea of having a heartbeat run throughout the entire piece. That concept of course was a bit ambitious but it did set me on course for creating a lot of the works by having that heartbeat as a foundation. So the first and final quarter do have a clear audible heartbeat.

In the piece below you can hear this concept blended with some of the Djembe samples. While making this I found out that a typical reggae snare actually sounds exactly like a rim strike on a Djembe which is the dub snare you hear in this composition.

Opening

Text and music

The first half of the music I spent most of the time diverging, creating demo's while Dalton was struggling with injured dancers, delays and other setbacks. After a little break in between Romano Haynes joined the cast as an actor taking up the role of the father in a series of monologues written by Maarten van Hinte.

I used the sections of monologue to establish some more harmony and resolution in the music as a counterpoint to Romano's troubled character. The text is quite abstract and ebbs and flows a lot with the rhythm of the actor which I didn't want to fight with the music. I did try to embellish these tides with the sound of waves and using this articulation in the harmonic work in these sections. In this way I hope to add a backdrop, another layer, to the text instead of just forcing a feeling onto the audience.

Tot slot

I'm skipping over a lot of things in this write up that were a part of the process of making JAH! It really was one of the toughest pieces I ever helped put together due to a multitude of factors but most of all because of the heavy thematics. In the end it is a piece about (post)-colonialism and a man having trouble coming to terms with the world, himself, his son and not really succeeding. Even though the setting is celebratory in association Rastafari has its roots protest and black empowerment but also strict religious beliefs. The entire piece fights with the paradox of finding joy and brotherhood in the worst situations and relates back a lot to the kidnapping of African people made to be slaves across the ocean.

I'm not really sure how to end this write up on a positive note, just as I was having a hard time doing that in the creation of this piece. I think it's an important work that I got to contribute to that I will forever be grateful for. And I hope you, the reader, got a nice glimpse into the kitchen through this write up. Below I will feature a section of the final version of the Nyabinghi heartbeat rhythm track that was featured in the show.

Liberation

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