West African Music

West African music encompasses the diverse traditions of the region from the Sahara's edge to the Atlantic coast, spanning griot praise singing, highlife, Afrobeat and contemporary pop. Its foundations are complex polyrhythm, call-and-response singing and instruments such as the djembe drum, the kora harp-lute and the balafon xylophone, carried by hereditary jeli musicians who serve as historians and praise singers. In the twentieth century the region produced global figures - *Fela Kuti*, *Ali Farka Toure*, *Youssou N'Dour* and *Salif Keita* - and its guitar bands and dance orchestras, from Lagos to Dakar, reshaped popular music far beyond West Africa.