Amanda Vincent Villepastour is a London-based musician and scholar who has done significant comparative research about the bà tá in Nigeria and Cuba. Since the mid 1990s, Amanda has been moving between West Africa and Cuba working with Yorùbá master bà tá drummers, most notably Chief RábÃù Àyándòkun and in Cuba, masters including the late Regino Jiménez and Cha Chá Estéban Vega.
Amanda teaches at Goldsmiths College in London where she leads a specialized music teacher training. She is currently on sabbatical and doing a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
Amanda’s first book, Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá Bà tá Drum, is about drum language and will be published by Ashgate in 2009. With Michael Marcuzzi, she is also co-editing a collection of articles titled Wood That Talks: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives on the Orisha of Drumming.