At a simple gathering at Gambi’s house in Niamey, a group of more or less experienced women come together to sing, like generations of married women coming together to sing at an actual wedding. The spontaneous nature of a typical Niamey wedding results, especially with a plastic bottle also used as a percussive device.
These plastic bottles are international and local soda bottles that get recycled for homemade juices, that are sold in neighborhoods and at social gatherings, including weddings. Found objects often find their way into more participatory, as opposed to performance-based, music genres in crude form. In more professional contexts, a found object, like a can, might be manipulated to become an integral part of an instrument, a crafted, finished product.
The sticks are also found in this more modern setting, which also points to an absence of millet or sorghum stalks that would be used in a rural setting in the days of these women’s grandmothers. The lack of agricultural fields does not affect the striking clack sounds that two women share, with different rhythms, over the same inverted calabash.