Trained as an educator, Ms. Nelson spent 40 years performing music from across the African diaspora as the leader of Women of the Calabash.
Madeleine Yayodele Nelson, the founder and lifelong leader of Women of the Calabash, a percussion ensemble devoted to music from across the African diaspora, died on Sept. 6 in Manhattan. She was 69.
The cause was a heart attack, her son, Ayodele, said. She had returned earlier that week from a trip to upstate New York with past and present members of Women of the Calabash.
Ms. Nelson had spent most of her 20s as an educator, not a professional musician, when she formed the group in 1978 as a quartet. But she had recently learned how to build and play the shekere, a West African and Afro-Latin percussion instrument consisting of a gourd, or calabash, wrapped in shells. She immediately fell in love with it.
All four band members played the shekere while singing and dancing in coordinated steps, drawing on traditional music from across sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and South and North America, and mixing in their own interpretations of reggae and pop songs. In addition to expanding performance opportunities for New York’s female percussionists, Ms. Nelson hoped the group would spread awareness of African cultural practices.
“Being an educator anyway, it occurred to me that if we played this instrument we could have the opportunity to not only perform but to educate,” she said in a 2011 interview on the public-access television show “Sistah Talk.” “We do a lot of teaching from the stage. And so we get a chance to share information from various African cultures.”
Women of the Calabash often performed at clubs, theaters and schools, sometimes using other African instruments, such as the mbira and hand drums. Reviewing a 1984 concert at the Kitchen, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that the group played “songs that reveled in four-part vocal harmonies, anchored by the deep contralto of Madeleine Yayodele Nelson, and in the women’s virtuosity on calabashes.”
The ensemble toured Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, and Ms. Nelson was fond of pointing out that it had performed in front of four presidents: Barack Obama, at a fund-raiser; Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, who was then in exile in Africa; Thomas Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso; and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia and Africa’s first elected female head of state.
Women of the Calabash placed a priority on live performance, but the group did release one full-length recording, “The Kwanzaa Album,” on the Bermuda Reefs label in 1998. The group’s members changed over the years, and it fluctuated between a trio and a quartet, but it remained active until Ms. Nelson’s death.
Throughout her career, a handful of prominent musicians invited Ms. Nelson to perform and record with them. Paul Simon featured her on his hit 1990 album, “The Rhythm of the Saints.” The saxophonist Billy Harper featured her on his album “Somalia,” released in 1995.
Ms. Nelson was hired to create shekeres for the Broadway and London productions of “Fela!,” the 2009 musical based on the life of the Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti.
She was also a member of various other percussion ensembles, including Alakande! Spread Joy!, led by Joan E. Ashley, a longtime member of Women of the Calabash.
Madeleine Alberta Nelson was born on Sept. 16,1948, in Pittsburgh, to Alberta (Hall) Nelson, a teacher who sued for the right to work in the public school system shortly after it was desegregated, and Frank Arnold Nelson Jr., a postal worker who later became the director of a respite-care facility.
After the birth of her son, Ayodele — whose name means “joy arrives” in Yoruba — Ms. Nelson took the name Yayodele, meaning “mother of Ayodele.” In addition to her son, she is survived by two sisters, Judith Nelson Dilday and Melana Nelson-Amaker, and a brother, Herbert Albert Nelson.
While attending Slippery Rock University in western Pennsylvania, Ms. Nelson bought a $10 guitar and taught herself to play from a book of Buffy Sainte-Marie songs — in part, she said, to ward off the loneliness of being one of the few African-American students on campus.
She graduated with a degree in education and moved back to Pittsburgh to teach in the public schools. She moved to New York in the early 1970s and became a teacher there, but quit after one year out of frustration with the school system.
Ms. Nelson was working as a hairdresser on the set of “The Education of Sonny Carson,” a film about a teenager caught up in gang warfare, when she met some West African percussionists who were performing in the movie. One of them taught her how to make her own shekere, and her passion for the instrument was born.
“Not only did I like the way the shekere felt, I liked the effect it had on people,” she said in a 2014 interview for the website of Westbeth Artists Housing, where she had lived since 1982.
Ms. Nelson’s music was always an extension of her background in education.
“If I’m going to play mbira from Zimbabwe, I’m going to tell you that it’s the national instrument from Zimbabwe,” she said. “I’m going to tell you that the Shona have played it for over a thousand years, and that they play songs they pass down through the generations. And then I play it. And the next time you see that instrument, you’ll know something about it.”
