I'm guessing you're focused on the sound object, but I don't know what other aspects are important to your definition.

Fast improvised rhymed verse with a light accompaniment texture (usually mbira), done by one performer. Performed in public in the American urban north-east in the 1970s but not to a paying audience. That clear enough?

I imagine you'd have heard it in private parties as well but I didn't encounter it there. Calypso/toasting is the closest thing I've heard but but it isn't quite as fast and spontaneous and uses a more conventional backing.

It looks like nobody bothered to record or film in the sort of situations I'm talking about so I'll never have anything I can point to.


As an ethnomusicologist myself, my field's mandate to study "music as culture" -- a musical anthropology -- was set since the 1950s when the term ethnomusicology was adopted, and it's not about "collecting." )

Brenna MacCrimmon calls herself an ethnomusicologist and she certainly does collecting.