I'm playing this Sunday (1/21) at the Baked Potato in Los Angeles with Armand Sabal-Lecco (bassist on the big Paul Simon tours in the '90s), with Joel Taylor on drums and Toshi Yanagi on guitar.  And like every musician I know from west Africa, Armand has this incredibly highly evolved approach to rhythm and time, so sophisticated that it takes the other 3 of us a good while to get our heads around some of the tunes we play.  The song below is a good example.  Like a lot of polyrhythmic music from Cameroon, it starts off in a way that makes you think "I got this".  But then, about 10 seconds in, you start to think "oop...maybe this isn't where I thought it was".  And about 40 seconds in:  "Ooh.  I don't got this".  See if you can tap your foot to that groove, or to the funny, lopsided "montuno" thing that happens on the electric piano after (this is just Armand's demo of this tune).  The first part sounds almost like an old English sailing or drinking, or drinking-and-sailing song;  you can pat your foot 1-2-3-4.  But when the drums come in?  What is that person thinking?  And finally, you get to where it's actually in 9/8, like 4/4 with a wart on it.  And all 3 of us non-Cameroonians have to come up with a way to count this so we could at least stay in sync while we assimilated the groove enough to play it without chapping our lips counting it.  Now that I've been shedding on it for 3 weeks, I feel it pretty naturally the way it's meant to be felt.

I think.