What The Hell Are We Doing?

“Na Angola na Angola, tudo é diferente na angola” — Mestre Moraes

I was playing reco-reco. It’s a percussion instrument — a dried segment of a large bamboo plant, hollowed out, with ridges carved into it. You play it by running a thin stick across the grooves, back and forth. It makes a sound like a washboard, a zippy scrape. The rhythm is simple: one, two, three, pause. One, two, three, pause. Back and forth.

There I was, singing and scraping, when a question occurred to me. A question that has occurred to me many times since, and that I still haven’t quite answered.

In front of me were two people ambling around each other — flipping, dropping to the floor, throwing kicks, passing legs and arms over and around each other, supporting each other’s weight while kicks sailed overhead. All of this driven by the music. Not just my reco-reco, but the combined sound of eight percussive instruments that make up the bateria of a Capoeira Angola roda. Capoeira Angola is the older flavor of the Afro-Brazilian art that sometimes looks like fighting, sometimes like dancing. It is, to be sure, a little of both. For as long as anyone can document — at least two centuries — capoeira games have been played to music.

What the hell are we doing?

I didn’t answer it that night. I let it sit there, circling under the rhythm like an undertone. The more I practiced, the more the question seemed to attach itself to everything — not just capoeira, but to the moments that followed it.

Why would human beings put themselves into these shapes? Throw themselves to the ground, stand on their hands, contort and leap to the timing of music, letting the energy of the sound drive them into a maelstrom of pretzel-like movement?

Imagine it’s the middle of the night. Most people are in their beds asleep. You’re in a dark warehouse, standing behind two turntables. You matched the start of the record on the right to what you know to be the last eight bars of the record on the left. As you look up, you see out before you hundreds of people, undulating, bobbing, contorting, jumping, ambling. From the perspective of an alien, this gathering would seem extremely weird. There’s no obvious practical reason for so many people to crowd themselves onto an open floor between huge speakers, bathing themselves in sound and writhing to it. And yet it can be one of the most rewarding human endeavors. Again from this perspective, the question arises: what the hell are we doing?

It’s the same question I ask when I try to lock into a jazz tune at the piano with my rudimentary playing, feeling for the moment when something clicks and I stop thinking about the chords and start thinking through them. What is this thing that draws human beings so forcefully to it?

These moments of grace where we lose ourselves in the music and in each other. Where something arises between us — between the drummer and the dancer, between the DJ and the floor, between musicians finding each other in shared time — that belongs to none of us and transforms all of us. Is there some kind of human need, some human capability, that we exercise when we engage in these mutually transformative exchanges?

What fascinates me — what I can’t let go of — is that capability. What I’m interested in is the quality that emerges between bodies in shared time. The kind of mutual transformation that can only happen through sound and rhythm and the willingness to be changed by what another person is doing.

Human beings have inherent musical capability. It dates back as far as our earliest migrations out of Africa — as far back as we can trace. The capability has always been there. And throughout cultures all over the world, we see practices where humans engage through this capability not just to express themselves, but to weave themselves into a kind of shared organism. A temporary, living thing that none of them could produce alone.

It’s particularly central to practices throughout the African diaspora. Capoeira Angola. The social dance floor governed by a DJ. Jazz. Bomba. Rumba. In each of these, something emerges between bodies that belongs to none of them individually.

What is it about these particular practices that produces this quality so reliably? How do they actually work? And — this is what really drives me — can we extract what they’re doing and build with it?

That’s what this book is asking.