The beat of the drum: African diaspora traditions inspire these Binghamton alumni

Music is a polyrhythm of sorts, an intricate combination of histories and cultural knowledge that spans generations and oceans. Keeping that song going requires the next set of learners and drummers.

Among those rhythm-keepers are two Harpur alumni who find their inspiration in the traditions of the African diaspora.

Born and raised in Bomba-Plena in the New York Puerto Rican community, Kenneth Otero-Walker ‘22 is a singer, herbalist and priest in the Afro-Cuban Lucumi tradition. This fall, he and fellow alum Keaton Rood ’10, MA ’15 returned to give a campus workshop on Puerto Rican Bomba music and dance, teaching traditional songs, drumming and dance styles from the island.

At Binghamton, Otero-Walker majored in Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACAS), with an Africana Studies minor. He’s interested in both ethnobotany and economic botany, focusing on spiritual and medicinal plant use, biocultural diversity, natural history collections and biodiversity conservation. During his last year at Binghamton, he interned at the Institute of Economic Botany and the New York Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, under the direction of ethnobotanist Ina Vandebroek, a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies.

Currently, he’s the project manager for a National Science Foundation-funded program at the New York Botanical Garden that aims to secure and share its biocultural diversity collections. The project involves physically securing, digitizing and increasing access through the enhanced curation of 10,000 objects.

Otero-Walker first became interested in Afro-Caribbean musical traditions as a child, when his paternal grandmother exposed him to multiple genres, including Bomba, plena, salsa and rumba. Bomba, connected strongly with his grandmother’s Afroboricua heritage, stood out.

“It was the music of her mother and her grandmother before her. Through the influence of singers such as Ismael Rivera, Bomba entered into the popular music scene with a heightened level of race consciousness evocative of Aime Cesaire’s Negritude and ideas of global blackness,” Otero-Walker explained.

He also has roots in an African diaspora religion known as la regla Lucumi.

“My paternal family was largely Catholic, yet the family matriarch, my great-grandmother Doña Petra, had been a curandera, botanica owner, as well as a vidente in espiritismo de la mesa blanca, or white-table spiritism,” he said.

The latter combined African elements with Kardecism spiritism, which inspired Otero-Walker to explore Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions in his native New York City.

Unlike Otero-Walker, Rood doesn’t have ancestral ties to the African diaspora. The Binghamton native approaches its musical traditions with deep respect, with a focus on secular music accessible to all. A French major who went on to earn a master of arts in teaching, Rood began studying percussion with Associate Professor of Music and Africana Studies James Salinas Burns in spring 2007, traveling with him to Ghana in 2010 as a research assistant.

The secular and the sacred

“This was a pivotal moment for me because I knew that I needed to go and live in Africa to learn for myself about music, culture, language and how they intertwine in an African village,” Rood said.

That research trip inspired him to join the Peace Corps, which sent him to Gbainty Wallah, Sierra Leone, as a secondary English and French teacher. There, his understanding of traditional music took a distinct turn: The only music available came via secret societies for men and women, which required initiation to play and even witness.

“I came to understand that not all music is for everyone to enjoy, and the roots and significance of the music go far beyond the language in the songs, the dance steps, the rhythms and the history,” he reflected. “It’s a feeling and an inherent understanding that some of us outsiders will never quite understand.”

Respecting the closed nature of these traditions, he could only listen at his door during the societies’ midnight processions. After his time in the Peace Corps ended, he decided to focus on secular music.

His path led him to Costa Rica and then Guadeloupe, where he was introduced to GwoKa, the island’s style of dance-drum music. He joined a performance group and performed with them around the island at an international music festival in Peru. He and his wife Miranda, also a Binghamton alum, then moved to Puerto Rico, where he worked as a French teacher and studied Bomba under Marién Torres of Taller Tambuyé.

Today, Rood teaches secondary French in a town near Plattsburgh, New York, where he runs a percussion and dance ensemble called Beekmantown Conjunto. He also teaches adult percussion and dance at the Strand Center for the Arts.

“Little by little, my personal studies led me to Caribbean dance-drum music, which I see as more accessible here in the United States. Today, my focus is in secular, traditional dance-drum musics of the Caribbean,” he explained. “In short, I am a community percussionist. The camaraderie is what draws me to the music that I participate in.”

The two alumni met through the Nukporfe African Drum and Dance ensemble during Otero-Walker’s first year at Binghamton; Rood was a master’s student at the time. They bonded over their shared love for Afro-diasporic musical styles and formed a salsa band, Griot Rumbero, with musicians from Ithaca.

The fall workshop was a chance to reconnect, and also to share what they have learned through the years and miles of travel.

“Sharing and teaching the roots and fundamentals of these ‘folkloric’ traditions helps to keep them ‘lived’ even as they are transformed into something different, something more encompassing, yet which remains true to many of its core elements,” Otero-Walker said. “It is truly a great joy bringing some of these musics to a wider audience and creating community for those who may be interested in learning and knowledge-sharing on a deeper level.”