Chief Baba Neil Clarke. Photo by H. King. Visit BAC Neighborhood Clinic Healing Installations to learn more.
In BAC’s Wellness Studio Blog, we invite you to share the passion we have for healing arts, and show how you can use featured Brooklyn traditions from our global diasporas to nurture and heal your body, community, and soul.
Today’s featured artist: Chief Baba Neil Clarke!
In our first Neighborhood Clinic Healing Installation, internationally renowned percussionist Chief Baba Neil Clarke offered African drumming as a healing practice. Chief Clarke abstracted, contemporized, and unveiled traditional West African drum resonances as sonic pathways to deeper breath and higher consciousness.
West African drumming originated in West Africa in 1300 AD. It is performed as a form of communication to rejoice, lament, and as a source of inspiration throughout times of peace and war, planting and harvesting, and birth and death. The Djembe drum, Dundun drum, Bata drum, Bougarbou drum, and Ngoma drum are examples of West African drumming that is usually played using both hands or a stick during rituals, ceremonies, festivals, and celebrations. Join Chief Baba Neil Clarke in this Neighborhood Clinic Healing Installation in the healing tradition of West African drumming.
Neil Clarke is a master percussionist of legendary status. Born in the spring of 1951 and raised in Bedford-Stuyvestant, Clarke is internationally acclaimed as a percussionist who has been involved with African drumming and the percussive arts, traditionally and internationally, for more than half a century. Neil Clarke has made it his mission to continue the pioneering work of his mentors and collaborators who include Randy Weston, Miram Makeba, Harry Belafonte, and many more.
In honor of that collective of elders who played a pivotal role in bringing African cultural traditions to North America, South America, and the Caribbean in the late 1950's and early 1960's, Chief Clarke has helped keep those traditions alive and taken them to stages around the world. He continues to practice for audiences and communities both ritually and on stage.
BAC Neighborhood Clinic Healing Installations continue Brooklyn's legacy of self-determination by allowing each featured artist to define "healing" in the terms of their own culture and practice.
Visit BAC Neighborhood Clinic Healing Installations to learn more about Chief Baba Neil Clarke.
Cover Image: BAC Neighborhood Healing Clinic. Chief Baba Neil Clarke at Weeksville Heritage Center, 2021. Credit: Ryan George, Videographer. Doug Sharf, Video Editor.