Vaccine (instrument)

Vaksin^[1][2][3] (or vaksen, vaccine^[4][5]), a simple tube bamboo trumpet blown by a musician.

Vaksin (cylinders in rear-left) and Konè (flared horns in center-front), exhibited at the Musical Instrument Museum (Phoenix)

Vaccine^[4][5] (or sometimes vaksin^[1][2][3]) are rudimentary single-note trumpets found in Haiti and, to a lesser extent, the Dominican Republic^[6] as well as Jamaica.^[3] They consist of a simple tube, usually bamboo, with a mouthpiece at one end.

They are thus also referred to as banbou^[7] or bambú,^[6] as well as bois bourrique^[4] (or bwa bourik^[8]), granboe,^[9] fututo,^[6] or boom pipe.^[3] They are not to be confused with other Haitian handmade trumpets called konè or klewon, made of a yard-long white metal tube with a flared horn, called kata.^[1][2][3]

Vaccine players are known as banboulyès.^[6]

Haitian ethnographer Jean Bernard traces the vaksin back to indigenous precolonial peoples of Haiti.^[7] However both Thompson^[7] and Holloway^[10] draw links to the single-note Bakongo bamboo trumpets called disoso, themselves originated in Mbuti hocketing music. Gillis also likens them^[11] to trumpets used in Bambara broto music along the Niger, and Jamaican Kumina.

Traditionally, vaccine are made of a length of bamboo, hollowed-out and dried,^[6] with a node membrane pierced^[4][7][1] and wrapped with leather^[12] or bicycle inner-tube rubber to form a mouthpiece at one end.^[3] One or more segments are taken from higher or lower in the bamboo trunk^[6] to fashion vaccines; usually more than 1 m long and 5 to 7 cm in diameter.^[3] Each one is cut shorter or longer in order to produce a higher or lower tone:^[7][6] bas banbou is long and gives a low-pitched sound, and charlemagne banbou is short and is pitched high.^[7]

McAlister explains^[2] that Afro-Hispaniolan lore involves asking the bamboo plant for its use and leaving a small payment in its place. Landies witnessed this process, which she described as follows: "the harvest of the bamboo was accompanied by an offering. [...] [It] is harvested with the permission of Simbi, a Petwo Lwa who loves water, as bamboo in the Dominican Republic grows in moist land, e.g., along rivers"^[6]

On occasion, iron^[4][13] or plastic^[7] pipes are substituted for the bamboo.

A typical vaccine band is composed of three to five players, usually marching abreast of each other.^[4] Players use a method called hocketing, whereby each individual blows a single tone rhythmically to create an ostinato motif together.^[1][7] These motifs are usually composed through a process of group improvisation.^[7]

To keep rhythm, vaccine players also beat a rhythmic timeline, called kata^[1] with a long stick on the side of the tube, making the instrument both melodic and percussive.^[4][7]

Within an ostinato, vaccine tones stack up in approximate third intervals to each other—creating tritones and arpeggiated diminished chords, but without a harmonic intent^[3]—with the two treble-most vaccines often tuned a semitone apart.^[7][14] Landies also reports^[6] other intervals between the lowest two voices. One of the vaccine serves as the tonal center of the motif.^[3]

Most importantly, vaccines are a key component of rara orchestras. In his 1941 article, Courlander wrote that rara bands "seldom have drums and depend almost entirely on vaccines";^[4] though both Lomax's mid-1930s^[13] and McAllister's early 1990s^[7][2] studies report many more instruments—mostly percussive—as part of rara orchestras.

Scholars also report vaccines used as signal horns by parties of agricultural workers,^[4][1] fishermen,^[4] stevedores^[13] as well as sometimes used in dances of the Congo cycle.^[4]