This work by Modesto Amegago documents the history, functions and structures of African drumming. The book provides ethnomusicologists and popular music researchers, who may wish to extend their interests towards African instrumentation and performance traditions, with considerable source material about the varieties of drums and drumming across the continent. The book is broad in coverage and, although detailed, is introductory in tone; for musicologists whose specialisation lies in African music there will be some useful information in this book, but the audience that should benefit most from engagement with this work would be scholars and students who feel that their knowledge of African drumming practices is relatively limited.

The structure of the book is clear and thoughtfully laid out. The first three chapters focus on the instruments themselves, providing an overview of the origins of the varieties of African drum, its geographic taxonomy and the social function of the many instruments within the drum family. The situated-ness of the drum in African culture is brought out well in the first chapter, the origins of the many instruments often being tied in a relatively direct way to the environment in which they were produced. The author, however, also brings in interesting questions around the hybridity of African drums and the degree to which, for example, tuning traditions from Indonesia have impacted on the metallophone/idiophone tuning systems that many regard as uniquely African scale systems. The author then describes the distribution of drums across Africa; this section contains many illustrations that are useful in identifying the different families of drums and their relationship to place. Given that this is a rather ‘flat’ classificatory account of the whereabouts of different drums, a set of illustrative maps might have been useful, especially since the geographic classification overlaps with a tribal classification; for non-specialist scholars, this might add some confusion to the understanding of where different forms of drum might be found across different regions.

The book moves on to an outline of the various functions attached to drumming in African societies. The variety and depth of description attached to the many functions are instructive about the manner in which the work of drums may vary across cultures; the author writes no more than a few lines on drumming as entertainment but provides much more by way of information about drums in politics, funerals and even mass cleaning. Taken as read, this is a striking distinction between the functionality of music in Western cultures and in African societies. This chapter reads a little like a list and it would have been perhaps more helpful for many readers to have more sense of the relationship between the performed sounds and the nature of the ritual or occasion. Often, the type of drum was almost the only description tied to the function and this seemed a rather thin analysis of a potentially rich dissection of the ways in which drums may be used.

The book then turns to a consideration of drummers, and their techniques of making and playing rather than the objects themselves. The description of types of drummer, their training and questions of status ranges between fascinating insights into, for instance, the processes of informal learning and some rather anodyne descriptions; the fact that there is ‘usually a feeling of solidarity among drummers within a town or an area although occasionally, there may be some rivalry and conflicts …’ doesn't seem to add very much to our understanding of how musicians in groups work. More informative was the section of the book on the organisation of performing groups and this began to go into rather more detail about rehearsal processes and the formation of drumming groups, an aspect of African drumming that I suspect relatively few Western scholars are familiar with.

The final chapters of the book focus on drum making, playing techniques and the relationship of language to drumming that includes mnemonics and other linguistic means of expressing patterning, and forms of address towards instruments. The book became more engaging and informative as the author delved into these areas of drumming in some detail and went beneath the surface of performance. The section on playing techniques in particular goes into a number of performative aspects of drumming groups – the ways in which processual drumming is organised, the means by which instruments are handled in performance and the various moments of a performance from the setting up of instruments through to the climax of a performance.

As a work of reference, this book provides a really excellent introduction to the many forms of drum and drumming across Africa. There is a quite extensive glossary although the entries are themselves relatively slight. The book is not intended to offer a sophisticated anthropological or critical analysis of African drumming and perspectives on it, and readers who open the work with that expectation may be disappointed. It does, however, offer a useful survey of African drumming, and with the caveat that this overview can at times become so general as to be rather unhelpful, the majority of the chapters in the book do provide a clear and concise entry into the foundations and role of African drumming. It would be a useful addition to reading lists for first-year world music, popular music and ethnomusicology courses at tertiary level.