Moving
Towards Africa: Strong Winds and Soft Earth Landings
Will
Menter
How did Chartwell
Dutiro construct his image of Europe and England? I don’t know.
His name itself might offer a clue. Chartwell House is the historical
home of the Churchill family in the southeast of England. Winston Churchill—could
we say he was the Nelson Mandela of his time? No, of course not, because
unlike Mandela, he was not a leader of a politically oppressed group fighting
for their own human rights and indeed had some opinions and attitudes that were clearly racist . But all the same, he was a politician who
at a certain level was almost universally admired, symbolising the defeat
of Hitler’s fascism. A national leader who became a world statesman,
some of whose policies transcended national interests in favour of the
whole of humanity. Could his aura have been sufficient to inspire a mother
in a distant colony to name her son after his house? We might infer this,
but we would be mistaken. We ask Chartwell, and quickly discover that
the name came not from his mother, but from staff at the mission hospital
he was taken to soon after he was born. His mother named him Shorayi,
as later Shorayi-Chartwell was to name his own son. But the name Chartwell
stuck. And, strange to tell, years later, during negotiations for Zimbabwe’s
independence in 1980, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office still
deemed Churchill’s standing in their former colony of sufficient
value to send his son-in-law, Christopher Soames, to preside over the
talks.
Wherever one lives in the world it is almost impossible to have a realistic
notion of other continents or countries one hasn’t visited. Each of
us creates his or her own world through direct experience of the near and
through mediated experience of the distant. It may take many years to arrive
in another continent and in the process it may be necessary to deconstruct
ideas that have previously seemed useful.
Often the way we construct the distant is in response to how we perceive the
near. We are able to do this in a much freer way, without risk of contradiction,
than we can with the world directly around us. The distant world can feed
a fantasy. It can more easily become what we want it to be or need it to be
than can the near world. To take two pertinent examples: it is easy for a
European addicted to the consumer gadgets of modern life to see Africa as
backward or uncivilised; equally, a European who feels uncomfortable with
the anonymity or soulless nature of modern urban life can easily construct
an idealised idyllic and positive image of the warmth and sharing of traditional
African village life.
Psychological constructs must be placed in the context of our knowledge of
history. Africa and Europe—especially Britain—have been intertwined
and interdependent for many hundreds of years, and of course the relationship
has never been mutual or equal. But in the detail of individual lives lived
in the context of an exploitative relationship between continents, there have
been gains and losses on both sides. There are always choices, but the range
of choices at any given time or in any given place will be distinct. Today,
we talk of cross-cultural collaboration between artists. What we are actually
experiencing is individual people’s lives intersecting in a way that
may gradually change communities and how they relate to each other and to
the world. In the modern age, each person increasingly creates their own culture
as they travel through life, drawing on influences much wider than the place
where they were born or the community and family they were born into.
The subject of this paper, Strong Winds and Soft Earth Landings, was a project
I initiated to bring together musicians and artists from Zimbabwe and Britain.
The project itself lasted only a few months in 1994 but had far-reaching effects
for some of the people involved. For musician Newmas Kunatsa it was his last
foreign tour before he died, later the same year. For mbira maker and musician
Chris Mhlanga it was his first foreign tour and paved the way for subsequent
work in the USA and for many sales contacts for his instruments. Chartwell
Dutiro, already a seasoned international performer with Thomas Mapfumo and
the Blacks Unlimited, was able to use the project as a stepping-stone both
to starting a career as a solo artist and for pursuing academic studies in
Britain. He settled in Britain when the project ended. The Strong Winds group
included three Zimbabwean musicians, four British musicians, a Zimbabwean
writer, a Zimbabwean sculptor and a British filmmaker. It was a very diverse
group, but even amongst the Zimbabwean musicians three very different lives
were intersecting. For a project of this size, where all the individuals are
being asked to give of themselves, each has a different story to relate. But,
rather than speculate about the stories of others, I prefer to rest within
an area I ought to have a more legitimate authority over. That is, my own
life and personal culture, how from a distance I constructed my Africa,
and how I arrived at the point of realizing the Strong Winds project.
I
As a young child, I really had very little concept at all of Africa. Actually,
I had an African uncle, but I never met him. He was the husband of my mother’s
sister and they lived together in what was then the Gold Coast but was soon
to become Ghana, the first British colony in Africa to regain its independence.
But he divorced when I was four, and I don’t remember meeting him. I
knew him only through my two cousins, his children, who were about my age.
I certainly didn’t have any concept of them being African—they
just seemed good fun to be with. There was one thing, though, that did intrigue
me. The name of my older cousin, Kofi, I was told meant “born on a Friday”.
Every child born in Ghana, I learnt, had a name which referred to the day
of the week when they were born. At the time this was an isolated fact that
didn’t seem particularly significant, but it already suggested to me
that Ghanaians had a different attitude to individuality.
How did a wider concept of Africa develop? Geography lessons at school? Not
much, apart from the vague memory of a lesson about cocoa plantations in West
Africa. A visiting teacher from Rhodesia (pre-majority-rule Zimbabwe) in my
primary school, a Mr. Phillips I think. He seemed happiest in the open air,
and my only memory of him is in the school field digging up a plantain with
his penknife to show us the root, though why, I don’t know. “I
shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, “but actually its good
for the knife. It cleans it.” I have a vague recollection that he wasn’t
too highly regarded by the other teachers.
Did I experience any African culture at school? I don’t think so. Or
if I did, it didn’t make a big impression. I also don’t remember
learning anything about the famous European explorers and colonisers of Africa.
Anything I now know about Stanley or Rhodes or others of their ilk was learnt
much later, prompted by my own political and historical investigations. No,
the first serious encounter with Africa was during my teenage years, in the
late 1960s, through jazz and also through a developing socialist consciousness
that felt solidarity with African independence movements—especially
Zimbabwe. This was the era of Ian Smith’s UDI, Unilateral Declaration
of Independence, or IDI, the first ‘I’ standing for ‘illegal’,
as Harold Wilson, then British prime minister, labelled it. A white colonial
government declaring independence from its colonial master to avoid a negotiated
move to majority rule. In Zimbabwe’s neighbour, South Africa, it was
the era of Vorster and Vervoerd, apartheid was firmly entrenched, and Nelson
Mandela was already incarcerated on Robben Island. In Rhodesia, apartheid
was less firmly embedded in the legal system, but the significant difference
was that Rhodesia was officially still a British colony, so the government
had a responsibility towards it. While still at school I bought a book called
The Right To Say No (London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972) by Judith
Todd. Todd, then in her early twenties, was the daughter of Garfield Todd
who was the last British-appointed prime minister of Southern Rhodesia. She
opposed Ian Smith’s UDI and supported majority rule. To me, as I remember
it, support of socialist causes was a simple matter of logical thought. How
could you do anything else but support humanitarian causes? Then, as now,
this was my perspective, but now I can also see that part of my reasoning
reflected the social context in which I grew up: a leftish intellectual middle-class
family with a comfortable and secure life in a British university city.
If the feeling of socialist solidarity with African liberation movements came
from an intellectual milieu, the way that jazz led me to Africa was through
feelings in my body. The excitement of jazz rhythm. The feeling that swing
produced deep in my gut. My brother Ian, two years older than me, got there
slightly before me, but we pursued our interests together. Miles Davis, Charlie
Parker, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane. And a little bit before
them blues singers like Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson. Our secondary
school had a jazz club, named with mock pomposity “The Jazz Appreciation
Society”, where we listened to records and discussed what we heard in
the lunch break. Where did this music come from? I started reading books about
it. The first answer was black America. New Orleans (where was that?) and
then it somehow travelled on riverboats up the Mississippi to Saint Louis
(sint loo-y as I pronounced it; it was many years before I discovered that
Saint rhymed with quaint and Louis sounded the same as Lewis). The second
answer was Africa. All the books agreed: jazz was developed from African rhythms
and songs brought to America by imprisoned slaves, which they then gradually
merged with European harmony and scalic formula as they learnt how to play
European instruments.
Somehow, I gradually developed the belief that the more authentic jazz was
closer to Africa. Without having much notion of what African music actually
sounded like, I felt that the true jazz was tougher, rougher, more direct,
more percussive, more intense, more ecstatic, more complex, more soulful…and
therefore more African. It was, then, the sound that first drew me to Africa.
I liked the feelings it gave me. But from the sound I was beginning to construct
my Africa. I was constructing general ideas about how Africans feel.
And eventually ideas about how Africans live. Or I thought I was, but of course
it was still American jazz that I was listening to, so the inferred feelings
were black American feelings, and the life was black American life. (I pause
to ask myself a question: was Chartwell’s Britain built up
from music in a comparable way? I very much doubt it.)
My interest in jazz led me to opinions about black people. I remember discussing
racism with my mother—maybe I was twelve or thirteen, or ten, I’m
not sure—Why are so many British people critical of black people, I
asked? Surely, if anything, blacks are better people and more talented than
whites? No, my mother quickly put me right, you mustn’t make general
statements like that, that’s almost as bad as the attitudes you are
criticising. There is no need to judge like that and you should look at people
as individuals. Then, in the late 1960s, still in our teens, my brother and
I discovered African jazz musicians working in London, the South African team
of Dudu Pukwana, Chris McGregor, Mongesi Feza, Louis Moholo and West Africans
like Osibisa and Guy Warren. Gradually I heard more. A few years later, travelling
to Chicago and New York to further my interest in jazz, I ironically actually
met African musicians playing African music on African instruments for the
first time, notably the kora player Foday Musa Suso.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, from my home-base in Bristol in the
southwest of England, I elaborated my concept of Africa. I read books about
Africa. I played in a band led by a Ghanaian drummer and singer. I listened
to lots of African music on record and at concerts. I was involved in putting
on concerts of traditional African music in Bristol where I lived. And, crucially,
I found my own special African music that somehow touched my heart
very deeply. This was the Shona mbira music of Zimbabwe, discovered through
the two Nonesuch records and book by Paul Berliner. Enamoured by the instrument
itself as much as the music, I started making them, using instructions given
in Berliner’s book, and I began to teach myself to play.
Why? Why this particular music? What was so special about it? What was it
that touched me where I had never been touched before? I can list certain
things about it, but ultimately it is a mystery that I can’t answer.
Top of the list is the way the patterns played by two mbiras interlock to
make multiple layers of what Berliner terms “resultant melodies”.
In listening, there is always a different layer to follow, a new path through
the music. Then there is the way the singing voice often picks out these melodies
in wordless vocals. The jumps in register, or yodelling in the voice. The
overall downward contour of the melodies. Other vocal sections express feelings
and opinions with words, but even without understanding these words, the patterns
and sounds produce strong emotions in me. The list continues: the way the
buzzing bottle-tops attached to the resonating gourd emphasise different rhythms.
And the rough edges in the sound. The slight differences in tone of each mbira
key. But this list is about what rather than why. I think an approach to answering
why would come more at a social and psychological level. Famously, mbira makes
me “think deeply”. Overall, this music gives me a warm feeling
about humanity. Yet it also acknowledges real pain and sorrow in a way that
eschews sentimentality. It somehow paints a picture of peaceful coexistence
of opposites. Strands weave in and out of each other; they don’t tie
each other in knots. There is no quest for dominance or for achievement within
a time frame. The music lasts as long as it does. No longer and no shorter.
It portrays a world I would like to live in: my Africa.
In 1985, I was amazed to discover that one of the groups featured on the records,
Mhuri yekwaRwizi was to play in London at the Shaw Theatre. I had always imagined
that if I were to hear this music live I would myself have to travel to Zimbabwe,
and yet here they were about to play almost on my doorstep. It wasn’t
part of my Africa that traditional African musicians would get on aeroplanes
and fly to London to perform. I went to the concert and the music was ecstatic
and deeply moving. The group’s leader, Hakurotwi Mude, made a speech
saying how he had never imagined that one day he would be playing mbira on
a stage in London. So his Africa at least had something in common with my
Africa. A week later I saw the group perform again in Cardiff. The feeling
was still ecstatic and full of life, but I sensed that Mude himself was less
present. He gazed into the distance. He seemed to be “thinking deeply”
and it made me think too. I knew that in Zimbabwe this music is played for
the spirits of the ancestors, and at this time my interpretation was that
Mude’s ancestors had not made the journey with him and he was missing
them. He felt he was giving his music to people who couldn’t understand
it….But that was my Africa imagining, and I never had the chance to
ask Mude himself.
A few months later I heard an African pop group live for the first time. Thomas
Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited played at the Western Star Domino Club in
Bristol, and this was my first sighting of Chartwell Dutiro, who was playing
tenor sax in the band. They played late into the night. I and the rest of
the packed audience loved it. The most exciting thing for me about this gig
was that it was a development of my own special African music: it
was mbira music played on electric guitars.
II.
In 1987, I had reached the age of 35, and my Africa was at least
20. When I first set foot on African soil at Harare airport in July of that
year it seemed long overdue, and I was pleased at last to have the opportunity
to learn about African culture by direct experience. My aim was to find out
more about making and playing mbira, but at the same time to soak up everything
I could of the culture and environment to develop and intensify my Africa,
which until then had grown principally by means of the mediated experience
that I described at the beginning of this paper. Harare was the obvious place
to start. Early on in my visit I made my way down to the Queens Hotel not
far from the city centre and a regular venue for the Blacks Unlimited, where
I was thrilled to see the band in its home environment. They played a range
of music influenced by soul and reggae as well as the mbira-based music that
I had heard in Bristol. Although I stood close to the guitarist, trying to
understand how he was playing mbira lines on guitar, it was the trumpet player,
Everson, who approached me and struck up a conversation in the interval. If
you like mbira, he said, you must meet Chartwell our sax player. He also plays
mbira. So we were introduced. We talked a little, and arranged to meet next
day in a very smoky hotel room where the band was having a business meeting.
Chartwell understood my motivation. He already had a concept of mbira as being
international music and sensed my strong affinity with it. Rather than be
an academic merely gathering research materials, I was keen to be involved
actively with the musicians whom I met. I wanted to give as well as to take.
So, I was travelling with my saxophone and one of the mbira-related karimba
I had made. The actual experience of joining in would provide enough material
for a whole chapter in itself, so I shall leave the retelling for a later
time. Anyway, Chartwell invited me to join in with the Blacks Unlimited, which
I did at a rehearsal, and even to join them on a tour of Zimbabwe, which I
didn’t do because my programme wouldn’t allow it. However, as
I travelled around the country independently, I shared music with two pop
groups, a school choir, a church choir, a group playing ngororombe music on
panpipes, a school marimba band and several mbira players in different areas
who played in different styles. I found this all very stimulating and exciting,
and often the question came up as to whether anything could develop from this.
I was asked several times if I could help a group play in England; normally
I replied that I was not a promoter, but that I would look out for any opportunities.
On this first visit, as well as developing a friendship with Chartwell, I
took mbira lessons from Mondrek Muchena and spent time with mbira maker Chris
Mhlanga. The general atmosphere of the country was buoyant, but seven years
after the arrival of majority rule there was also some doubt developing as
to whether President Mugabe was the liberating Messiah that had been hoped
for. Equally, there was doubt about the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund, and their policies of structural adjustment, which they were imposing
on struggling African countries like Zimbabwe. I found the country comfortable
to be in. In most situations, I could find English speakers to communicate
with, and somewhat surprisingly, I experienced less culture shock than when
I first travelled to the USA.
Or, rather, that was the way it was until I attended a bira. I knew that the
centre of mbira music was the bira, the name given to the extended ceremonies
where spirit mediums talk to the ancestors, who are invoked by mbira music.
These are community events, not aimed at outsiders, least of all tourists.
I did not want to barge in, but towards the end of my visit I began to feel
I would have missed something important if I didn’t manage to go to
at least one bira, so I asked my teacher Mondrek if he would take me. He must
have judged that I was ready for this experience and he was happy to oblige
by taking me with him to a bira where he was playing the following weekend.
We drove from Harare for a couple of hours to a small village near Rusape
arriving in the early evening. Although I knew something of the form of a
bira, as the party developed through the night and developed its own momentum
I found I was unprepared for the mixture of alcoholic intoxication, physical
exuberance and spiritual communication that was at its heart.
The whole village was involved, but at different levels. Some were certainly
more interested in drinking and dancing than in mbira music. Although mbira
was at the centre of the ceremony, I was shocked by the fact that most of
the time you could hardly hear it. My Africa situated music at the centre
of the culture. I had come to Africa for music and as a musician. Here I was
at the heart of it, communing with my special African music and yet
it seemed most of the people present were simply not giving the music the
attention I felt it deserved. Three mbira players were seated on the ground
playing as loudly as they could, playing their hearts out to my ears, but
unless you were right next to them they were drowned out by the sounds of
hosho shakers, drums, singing and general chatter and excitement. My Africa
wanted to tell everyone to be quiet and listen to the music like you would
at a western concert, or at the very least like you would at a jazz club.
But at the same time I felt excited myself by the party atmosphere and privileged
to be present, so I bit my tongue and remained silent. Most of the evening
I sat with the musicians, but occasionally I walked around and struck up conversations
with villagers. Once I had explained my presence, I was treated as a friend,
although I remember one difficult moment when a fairly drunk young man spoke
at great length on the virtues of reconciliation between black and white communities,
which was indeed the government policy of the time. However, this man was
so insistent to the point of belligerence, that I wondered if in fact he believed
the opposite of what he was saying. This was understandable to me: I could
easily draw parallels to drunken conversations in British pubs.
When it came to the time when the main spirit medium was possessed, I found
very little in my former experiences from which I could draw. The atmosphere
became less frenetic. The medium started shaking her body—her arms,
her shoulders, her head. She breathed heavily through her mouth, her lips
vibrating. She snorted through her nose. I became a little frightened. I knew
in advance roughly what to expect, but to see it in reality was something
for which I was unprepared. It didn’t seem to make sense to me. My idea
system couldn’t cope. Was she having a fit? Was she acting? Neither,
of course, but rather she was being possessed and the spirit of one of her
ancestors was talking through her. I knew all this, but still I found it difficult
to cope with. A small group of people around her talked with her seriously
but quietly. Part of the reason for the bira was to give thanks for a three-piece
suite—yes, it was as practical as that—but people were also asking
advice about diverse problems. Then came another shock. Several small children
were brought forward. Each in turn was held in front of the medium. She took
a swig of maize beer from the bowl beside her and sprayed it at the face of
the child. I had no idea at all what was going on and felt at once like a
complete outsider and a helpless child out of my depth. The bira continued
through the night and into the next morning, and I tried to stay with it,
but when I couldn’t, I slept for a while or walked around the village
talking to people. We eventually drove back to Harare the following evening,
the musicians showing no sign of tiredness, but me exhausted.
My Africa had been jolted. I felt I had reached the limit of my participation.
But it was a jolt I needed and wanted: it helped me define my aims. I could
see that understanding the bira at a deeper level would only be possible if
I immersed myself in the culture for much longer. I felt I would almost have
to become a Shona myself, although this, I knew, I didn’t want to do.
I wanted to be involved with Shona music and with Shona musicians, and I wanted
to know and respect the social context from which the music came. But I wanted
to stay a musician myself, with my own background in Western music and jazz.
When I returned to England I began to reflect on what I could do with my experiences
and with the personal contacts I had made. An idea began to develop. Although
I had heard much Zimbabwean music, it was still mbira music that touched me
most deeply, and I wanted to develop a project that would revolve around this
instrument. As a novice myself, I certainly wasn’t going to play it,
but I wanted to somehow shape a project that would be unique, that could only
be made by the particular people involved. Gradually, I came to the idea of
making the relationship between the two countries central to the content of
the project. In this way, I could actually contribute to the friendship between
us. My Africa had transformed into my Zimbabwe through this
first visit, and it had become a place populated by individuals, all with
their own stories and their own life journeys, a few of which I could envisage
intertwining with mine. I stayed in touch with Chartwell. Of all the musicians
I had met, he seemed the ideal collaborator. He had been deeply rooted in
mbira music from his infancy but he had also studied Western music, gathering
knowledge which he put to good use in his saxophone playing with the Blacks
Unlimited and the police band he had been in previously. This broad experience
was exactly what I needed in at least one of my collaborators. The only problem
I saw was that he was a lynchpin of the Blacks Unlimited, and I didn’t
want to endanger his position there for something that I saw as a short-term
project.
Two memories circulated in my head as I contemplated the project. The more
recent were the concerts of Mhuri yekwaRwizi,. The more distant came from
my childhood: the reason Mr Phillips came to teach at my school was that he
was on an exchange with Miss Taylor, a teacher at my school who went to teach
in Rhodesia. This had been in another era, at a different point in the friendship
between our countries, and I kept wondering what the experience had been like
for her. How did she respond to working in a structurally racist society?
Did she enjoy her stay? Or, since she taught nature studies, had she been
more interested in birds and wildlife? Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask
her because she had died many years before, but perhaps I could create a fictionalised
account of her experience travelling to Rhodesia that would parallel mbira
players travelling from Zimbabwe to Britain?
III.
I gave the project a descriptive working title ‘The Zimbabwe Britain
Migration Project’, and during two subsequent visits to Zimbabwe in
1991 and 1993, I set about finding partners to work with. The writer Musaemura
Zimunya was enthusiastic from our first meeting. We discussed eight or nine
possible themes for short stories, and eventually settled on commissioning
two. ‘The Mbira Player’ would tell the story of a Zimbabwean musician,
Hakuna, whose life is dedicated to mbira and who travels to London to perform
his music to a British audience. ‘Cultural Conflict’ would tell
of a Zimbabwean woman who travels to England to train as a nurse and marries
a black British artist. Together they travel back to live in the newly independent
Zimbabwe, and there they encounter strong hostility from her family. I decided
three stories could be told in an evening, and the third would be ‘The
Birdwatcher’, based on my schoolteacher, and told from a British perspective.
I looked for a suitable writer, and at one point even approached Doris Lessing,
but eventually decided that the content was so personal to me that I should
write it. I commissioned sculptor Tapfuma Gutsa to make sculptures to surround
the musicians and filmmaker Ingrid Sinclair to edit archive film that would
be projected behind them. The performances were to be cross-art form as well
as cross-cultural. But music remained at the centre.
Part of the idea behind the project was that the stories and the music would
gain extra resonance from the fact that some of the performers were actually
living the story they were relating. For example, in ‘The Mbira Player’
Zimunya describes the preparations Hakuna makes for travelling to London.
He asks village elders for advice: “Never go tide watching,” he
is told, and this comment became the theme for a song. During rehearsal in
Bristol, we took the group to look at a local landmark, the Clifton Suspension
Bridge, but none of the Zimbabweans wanted to walk over it. So, back in the
rehearsal room we added the line, “Don’t walk over high bridges”,
to the song. Later on in the tour, we had the chance to walk on the beach
at Skegness. The first thing Chris Mhlanga did was run to the sea, put his
hand in, and scoop water into his mouth. He wanted to prove to himself that
the sea was salty, as he had heard. He filled a bottle with sea water to take
back to Zimbabwe. And, later, the Zimbabwean musicians discussed whether the
bad dreams and sleepwalking that one of them was experiencing were caused
by the British diet or because he hadn’t made the correct preparations
before he left his country. That is, he hadn’t consulted village elders
and ancestors.
Although ‘The Mbira Player’ was not specifically about Chartwell,
he strongly identified with the content. The idea for the story started when
I related to Zimunya my experience of seeing Hakurotwi Mude perform in London.
I told him how moved I had been, and went on to explain the questions the
Cardiff performance had raised in me. Zimunya, in writing the story, took
a different perspective. More than anything, he emphasised the positive side,
and the story ends with the ecstatic feeling of deep communication experienced
by the mbira player during his first performance on a London stage. This brought
together and resolved all the tensions and struggles in Hakuna’s life,
and the experience was transcendent: mbira became a way of revealing our shared
humanity rising above local and personal differences. This, too, is how Chartwell
sees his mission.
We approached the music not in a single way but as a meeting of individuals.
Chartwell helped me assemble the Zimbabwean group. We needed a minimum of
two mbira players to create the interlocking patterns that generate the excitement
in the music. Chris Mhlanga I knew only as a maker, but Chartwell knew him
also as an expert player, so we invited him. We also needed a singer equally
at home singing in Shona and English. I knew Newmas Kunatsa as a strong singer,
guitarist and extrovert performer who I had seen giving concerts with his
British partner Erin Macdonnell, also an mbira player and singer. I invited
both to take part. I also asked two other British jazz-based but flexible
musicians whom I worked with regularly, the percussionist Henry Shaftoe and
the bass player Julian Dale.
I didn’t impose strict rules on making the music, but suggested some
guiding principles:
· The music should help tell the stories, but should also exist in
its own right.
· Some traditional mbira pieces would be used as a basis, but would
have non-traditional instruments such as double bass and saxophone added to
them.
· Any ideas or pieces suggested by any of the musicians would be tried
out at rehearsal.
· I would write some completely new pieces, some developed from mbira
patterns, and some more jazz-based.
Where did the musics meet, and what were the difficulties we encountered?
To my ear, Shona mbira music is nearer to jazz than to British folk music.
Most Shona pieces are based on a repeating chord sequence like jazz, and the
commonest form is a four-part sequence that forms a basis not unlike the twelve-bar
blues that is so prevalent in jazz. For British musicians, including myself,
the biggest problem we faced was feeling the multi-layered rhythm of mbira
music. We are so used to counting ‘1-2-3-4’, but this is not appropriate
for mbira, or for much African music. The patterns of mbira are equally regular,
but they are normally conceived as a continuous cycle rather than having a
fixed beginning and end. If you listen to just the mbira pattern, it is impossible
to define where it starts and ends, or even exactly what the main melody is.
To my western ears, that is a large part of its beauty. Having said that,
it is also true that the hosho shakers normally play a rhythm that is close
to the western 12/8, and we found that the best way to play was to think 12/8.
This worked most of the time, but probably lost some of the rhythmic subtlety
of the music. On the traditional pieces Chartwell helped us work out marimba
and bass lines, or more accurately, to extract the lines from the complex
mbira parts. The soprano sax we treated more like a voice that moved in and
out of the pattern as in jazz, but Chris and Chartwell both pulled me up sometimes
because the lines I was playing didn’t sit properly on the rhythm. Chris,
in his turn, sometimes found it difficult to remember the exact arrangements
we made for each piece—the fixed details of what would happen in what
order—having been used to the more flowing loose structures of mbira
music.
Two of the new pieces that I wrote had written mbira parts. For one I used
the traditional technique of having two instruments play one pulse apart,
but over a chord sequence that was nearer jazz. This worked well, and in the
same piece I wrote a pentatonic vocal melody that floated on top of the chords.
I wanted Newmas to sing this, but he found it just as difficult to get into
the rhythmic feel of it as we, the British musicians, had with the traditional
pieces, and so, although he could do it, because it sounded stiff, I gave
it to Erin to sing instead. The second piece was for two karimba, a smaller
type of mbira that Chris also makes and plays. I thought I had written idiomatic
lines that sounded almost Shona, but when Julian asked Chris if it sounded
African to him he smiled and quietly replied in the negative. However, Chris
was still happy to play it, and he and I both played karimba—I had to
splay out the keys of an instrument I had made to fit Chris’s large
hands for him to play it, and I played an instrument Chris had made. From
the karimba line I worked in a wordless vocal melody which Newmas and Erin
both sang. Even though both Newmas and Chris had to work hard to learn this
piece, it was worth the effort and became a good convincing piece, possibly
the most “fused” or “between continents” of all the
music.
Another of the new pieces I wrote had a guitar-based chord sequence and I
built the piece up from a Shona dance rhythm called jerusarema. The theme
turned out to be close to a song that Newmas already knew and the three Zimbabweans
between them quickly adapted new words to fit the place in the story where
it came, and they and Erin worked out there own harmonies for the chorus.
We used two saxophones in this piece, one soprano and one tenor, trying to
imitate the way mbira lines interlock.
I loved all the music we played. My only regret was that we couldn’t
do more. We toured to about a dozen venues around Britain and by the last
gig we were feeling strong as a group and confident and proud of our music.
Economic practicalities prevented us from taking it further. The project had
only been possible because of generous support from the Arts Council of Great
Britain, Visiting Arts and other organisations, and we couldn’t afford
to prolong it. Chartwell, as it happens, decided to stay in Britain and develop
his career here, but this wasn’t an option for Newmas and Chris, so
they returned to Zimbabwe. It was, in a sense, a pilot project that would
feed into our future careers in different ways. I had foreseen this from the
start, but nevertheless I shared everyone else’s disappointment that
we couldn’t find a way of continuing. To make a long-term project would
require a company with a much more substantial administrative base than we
had, as well as a much greater flow of income, either from grants or from
box office and sales.
IV.
How can Strong Winds be evaluated as a cross-cultural project? Because
it was set up in Britain within the framework of British arts networks,
it is much easier to evaluate from a British rather than a Zimbabwean
perspective. I received written feedback from all the venues, and talked
repeatedly to all the participants. The performances were billed as cross-cultural
collaboration, and for me one of the main objectives was that we should
present material that could only be done in a cross-cultural way, but
that, at the same time, none of the individuals should have to compromise.
Talking to the musicians afterwards they were unanimous that we had achieved
this. It would have been interesting to ask them again about the experience
a year or more later, or perhaps to find a more independent way of discussing
the issues we were exploring, and especially to build a more Zimbabwean
perspective.
The feedback from the venues was more varied. Mostly, it was appreciative
of the work we had put in and positive about the results achieved. The
musicians were singled out for praise by different people. There was criticism
of details and a lot of discussion about whether we had achieved an appropriate
balance between the two cultural foundations, Shona mbira and jazz. Probably
most of the people we performed to had never heard traditional mbira on
its own and sometimes the response was that they wished we had had more
of that in the performance. Other people found the mbira music unfamiliar
and difficult and would have preferred more jazz. One venue proffered
a more serious criticism of the balance, saying the “Africans”
(the term used rather than “Zimbabweans”) had been seriously
restricted by having a western concert structure imposed on them. They
had, it was felt, been stifled by the formal context. I do not agree,
and to do so would mean that the project was a failure. I sensed his
Africa talking, one markedly different from mine, but it was a pertinent
reminder that many of the people coming to the performances must have
come with expectations created from their own Africas and it would have
been fascinating to know more about how our work related to these, and
whether it changed them in any significant way.
Projects such as Strong Winds can create a forum for personal world-views
and cultures to develop and engage. At one level, such collaborations
can stimulate intellectual political debate but, at another, more instinctive,
level the engagement is made simply by sharing a music that is created
in a cross-cultural way. Instincts can develop and change too, independently
of conscious analysis, and, seen in this way I believe music can help
us live and enjoy our lives together and help our communities grow.
next : the bumping of the logs
searching for a zimbabwean hocket
writing by or about will
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