ABSTRACT
The transition of the passage was a passage between oceans, epochs and civilisations but it was the 'invisible forms' of memory in song and dance and of hearing the new music of the sea shanties that would eventually create the African-American spiritual and Jazz. One can look at the slave ship as sonority, the sound of the ship, the musical cultures of the passage, of the sea shanty, the hymn and the tune and rhythm of the populations in passage that would have such resonance in the plantation system and such significance for human culture and what Molefi Kete Asante calls 'epic memory' of the people. Across the multiple frontiers of the Atlantic and its territories those connections and interrelationships would be formed. But it was in the sound worlds of communities in movement that one can see the most elaborate and powerful forms of syncretic memory manifest themselves.
