107: Churchical Chants of the Nyabingi, by the Church Triumphant of Jah Rastafari

Church Triumphant of Jah Rastafari (Jamaica)
Churchical Chants of the Nyabingi (1983)
10 tracks, 42 minutes
YouTube playlist

We know a lot of Rastafari religious music in the form of roots reggae, but it’s not that often that we hear much of the ritual music of the Rasta church, the nyabinghi. This album is a great place to start. It’s a recording of an actual ritual – one of the biggest ever nyabinghi gatherings, as it happens – and so it captures the true musical form of the worship. A particularly interesting element of this recording is its context: the reason it was such a big gathering was in response to a visit to Jamaica by Ronald Reagan in 1982, during his presidency. The event was a reaction against the honour with which the Jamaican government was receiving its guest. As such, the songs that are on this record are not only chants to Jah and to Ras Tafari, Haile Selassie I, but they’re also filled with righteous anger directed at Reagan, the Pope and religious and white supremacist imperialism in general. The whole gathering lasted for seven days. Heavy stuff.

The music itself is all percussion and voice. The percussion is made up of three types of drums and various rattles and shakers that bring strongly to mind West African drum ensembles. The voice, however, is really a mix of things: there is lots of overlapping call-and-response between the leader and the congregation, but the harmonies and melodies obviously owe lots to the Christian tradition of hymns. The whole effect make the nyabinghi bear a lot of musical resemblance to the spiritual music of other Afrodiasporic religions in the Americas, especially Vodou in Haiti but also to some degree Santería in Cuba and Candomblé in Brazil. Rastafari is a bit different from those religions though; whereas the others developed organically from West African religions (most notably of the Ewe, Yoruba and Fon) incorporating elements of Christian practice and imagery to ‘hide in plain sight’ when the Africans’ religious practices were banned, Rastafari was somewhat more explicit in its construction, with its religious practices and rituals built from pre-existing cultural elements of Christian, Ethiopian, West African and Afrodiasporic religions as well as secular political beliefs. It’s not impossible that nyabinghi was directly influenced by the music of Vodou and similar traditions.

Listening to nyabinghi also allows for a bit of a glimpse into the creation of reggae: you can hear how, with the addition of influences from soul, gospel and rock music, this style could move towards the direction of roots reggae. But then again, this recording was made in the 1980s, when reggae was already a huge phenomenon. However it came about, and whichever cultural factors were at play Churchical Chants of the Nyabingi is a great document of a particular and epic event, and also a great document of a deep religious practice that is widely known of, but not often known about, at least in any detail.