Because he’s not yet a legal adult, sixteen-year-old master drummer Magatte Sow’s MySpace page is set to “private” and therefore gives precious little information. It tells us that he’s an African-American male and that he lives in Los Angeles, California. Three photos run in rotation: Magatte in a baseball cap over a do-rag; two drums lying on top of each other like lovers; and Magatte playing the talking drum. Next to the rotating photos are the words “mou serigne fallou,” which is Wolof, the language spoken by 90 percent of the population of Senegal and the Gambia, and they convey the facts that Magatte’s parents are Senegalese and that he is a practicing Musilm and a follower of Serigne Fallou, a Senegalese caliph of great renown. Perhaps the most telling thing about Magatte’s MySpace page, though, is his choice of mood icon, the little happy face graphic meant to describe the profilee’s overall mood. Of the many available mood icons (sexy, cheeky, sad, devilish, etc.) Magatte chose a green face with a toothy grin and the word “accomplished.”

By anyone’s standards, “accomplished” is an understatement. Magatte Sow is a master of several West-African percussion instruments: the talking drum or tama, the djembe, and the sabar. Like many other Americans of blended cultural identity, Magatte straddles two worlds: his “drumming life” and his “non-drumming life,” as he describes them. Asked if he considers himself American or Senegalese, he says he is both. He speaks Wolof at home with his parents and listens to Senegalese mbalax and to American rap. He fasts during the month of Ramadan and transferred to a high school farther from his Inglewood home to avoid gang violence. Still, in order to avoid trouble, he has to keep his head down and “stay in class.” He plays basketball on his school team and with his friends, some of whom have no idea about his “drumming life.” His weekends are spent playing djembe for his mother’s dance class, sabar for another class and performing at various events and shows around the city. His hands are often shredded and bloody.

Senegalese society is extremely conservative by American standards. It is devoutly Muslim. Both girls and boys are expected to save themselves for marriages that are still often arranged and respect for elders is deeply ingrained. To western eyes, a striking contradiction is the culture’s intensely sexual sabar dancing, characterized by suggestive gyrations and pure sensual joy. Perhaps Magatte’s American life is circumscribed and given meaning by the Senegalese customs followed by his family. It might explain his innate politeness and the discipline he brings to his playing. After opening for superstar Baaba Maal at a club in Hollywood, Magatte, then fifteen years old and set loose in a club, might have been expected to do what most other fifteen-year-olds would do: head for the bar to try and get a beer. Instead, he positioned himself in front of Baaba Maal’s sabar players and watched their every move.

We’ve come to expect the culture of the immigrant family in the U.S. to sputter its last breaths in the face of the indifference, even the disdain, of the Americanized first-generation children. Not so in the case of Magatte Sow. To be so good at what he does requires dedication and passion for the music, which is to say, the heart and soul of his Senegalese culture. He started playing djembe at age two (his father, Malik Sow, is a drummer) and sabar at age five. His uncle gave him his own tama when he was four, cutting the stick short to fit his tiny hand. For years, Magatte concentrated on the djembe and without ever having had a formal lesson, became a master by the time he was eleven or twelve. He did this while living in L.A., not Senegal. Although he visited there often when he was younger, he has not been back in seven years. There, children born into griot families— that is, families of traditional storytellers and musicians (in Senegal they are called nguewel)— are saturated in traditional rhythms. Not given to bold compliments, they might say about a good young drummer, “It’s in the blood.” Magatte’s mother, Mareme Faye, is nguewel. But no one seems ready with an explanation of how one could have mastered this art in so few years and so far from the land of its birth and practice. Asked what they would think of his playing in Senegal, Magatte shrugs. Perhaps he doesn’t know. There are many boys his age in Senegal who know as much as he does. Yet one wonders how common it is for any musician anywhere to make the music his own the way Magatte does. The question of talent doesn’t really arise in Senegal the way it does in the west. But Magatte’s explosive djembe and sabar, and his deeply expressive tama leave little doubt that by Western standards, he is a huge and precocious talent.

As a teenager, Magatte turned in earnest to the sabar and the tama, both played with a stick and a hand. He studied with the masters Aziz Faye and N’Dongo M’baye, who was for years one of Baaba Maal’s dancers. Although the tama is perhaps the most expressive of the instruments Magatte plays (it is called the talking drum because it is meant to do just that), tama players are the biggest showboaters. The drum is small and held under the arm, so tama players dance around wild-eyed, inciting the audience to throw cash at them and to stuff it into their mouths. Magatte does all of this, and yet his solos are gorgeously restrained and inventive, the work of a mature and sophisticated musical talent. He began playing tama just four years ago, when he was twelve years old. Of the instruments Magatte plays, the sabar may be the most notoriously difficult. Supporting the lightning quick, athletic sabar style of dance, the sabar is a family of six drums of varying pitch played as an ensemble. The polyrhythms are maddeningly complicated and difficult to master. To know all the parts of the sabar is to have memorized hundreds of complicated patterns and breaks (called bakks) and the puzzle of how they all fit together. None of it is written down. To top it off, the principal skill of master sabar player is to seamlessly follow the wildly frantic dancers as they improvise (not the other way around), anticipating each touch of the bare foot to the ground and punctuating it with a loud crack of the stick, as though dancer and drummer were one.

At Aziz Faye’s weekly sabar dance class, Magatte slouches into the room wearing baggy jeans, do-rag and T-shirt in neutral, non-gang colors. He checks his cell phone and then checks his look in the mirror. When he starts playing, a switch is turned on, his love of this music an electric current running through his tall thin frame. Within minutes, his drum is up on a chair and he is standing, pounding on it fiercely, stylishly, thumping his foot for those who have lost the beat. Shy no more, he catches the eye of whoever is watching as though to say “Watch this,” and then launches into a fiery lick. He moves from one drum to another as needed in deference to the older drummers, some of whom he has easily and almost embarrassingly surpassed. Occasionally he jumps out of the pack of drummers for a herky-jerky dance solo of his own. Pape Diouf, a master sabar player who drums with Magatte, nods his head and says in typical Senegalese understatement: “He’s ready.”

But ready for what? Great artists tend to defy categorization and maybe Magatte Sow is one of these. Watching him play begs the questions: How good can this kid get? Where does he go from here? Will he parlay his musical mastery into Western stardom, go to college, teach drumming like his father? For now, Magatte has more immediate concerns. He needs to finish school. He needs to earn money to fix the drum skins he regularly thrashes. He hopes to go to Senegal this year where they might well ask where this American kid learned to play so well. Just as it can be inferred that the culture of his parents is what guides Magatte through the stresses of being young and black in L.A., it is also true from the Senegalese perspective that the luck of his American birth keeps him from the grinding poverty of West Africa. On a recent Sunday after a particularly scorching dance class, Magatte helped carry the drums to the sidewalk where he was met by a couple of friends, all speaking Wolof. Indistinguishable from thousands of other L.A. teenagers in a woolen hat and black sweatshirt, Magatte waited for Aziz Faye to come out and pay him for providing the soundtrack for the dancers. He thanked Faye for the cash, put his leathery hands into his pockets and headed off with his friends to the Crenshaw Mall.

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Laurie Lathem is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.
Images and YouTubes: Lynette Wich. Thanks Lynette!