45 f Moon Marimbas
New York’s Timbila are taking the music of Zimbabwe and Mozambique on a planetary cruise. The UK’s own mbira queen Zuzana Novak meets up with kindred spirits Nora Balaban and Banning Eyre.
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n the welcome spring air of April we’re drinking delicious homemade lemonade outside the gorgeously tranquil veranda to the back of Nora Balaban’s East Village apart- ment. A marimba, a wooden xylophone from Zimbabwe, large enough for two people to play, sits inside as if it were a baby grand piano, surrounded by mbiras (also from Zimbabwe) in all manner of tunings. At the foot of the marimba rests an mbila (plural: timbila), the acoustic - ally amplified wooden xylophone of the Chopi people of Mozambique. The apart- ment is spacious and airy but gives away a lifetime of vibrant musical involvement and Nora and guitarist Banning Eyre have kindly given me the time to discuss their band Timbila and the reaction to their first CD, Remembering The Future, (see fR333, hear a track on this issue’s fRoots 36 compilation) which caused quite a stir among Shona circles when it was released late last year.
Banning (long-established African music expert and author of In Griot Time which detailed his time in Mali studying guitar with the legendary Djelimady Tounkara) explains. “I had a very difficult experience when the CD came out and I gave it to Thomas [Mapfumo], because he really took great exception to it on many levels. Fundamentally, he objected to many things about the music starting with, on the one hand, ‘you’re corrupting it and
changing it’ to, on the other hand, ‘you’re stealing from me… you’re doing things wrong, people are pronouncing things wrong, the singing is terrible because it’s violating… it’s not correct Shona, it’s mix- ing things up, it’s…’ He took such pro- found offence to it as an assault on the tradition, he didn’t see it as building bridges [Chartwell Dutiro’s trademark approach to playing and teaching mbira music] or being creative and it’s so funny because he’s always accusing people whose music sounds too much like his of not being original.”
Known as The Lion Of Zimbabwe, Thomas Mapfumo – see fR28 and fR185 – is famous for bringing traditional mbira songs to mainstream popularity in the 1970s by transposing them to guitars and electric instruments in what was coined the Chimurenga style, used to great politi- cal effect during the Zimbabwean libera- tion war of 1966-79.
Banning fell in love with the celebrat- ed Chimurenga songs thanks to a tape of early recordings that his former classmate Sean Barlow (founder of Afropop World- wide) sent him back in the early 1980s.
“I’d never heard of Mapfumo. I had no idea of it and hearing those mbira melodies that were so familiar to me, from having listened to them so obsessively on those Nonesuch Explorer Records [during his studies in Ethnomusicology at Wes-
leyan University, Connecticut], and hearing that on guitar was just tremendously excit- ing to me and I became just… totally fanatical about the whole thing and… I would go down to Washington to this African music record store and buy every- thing on import.”
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When Afropop launched, Banning was part of the trip to Zimbabwe where he met Mapfumo and his band The Blacks Unlimit- ed. Learning mbira guitar from Thomas’s saxophonist and mbira player Chartwell Dutiro, Banning became a strong player and returned as often as possible. He also began research for his book about Mapfu- mo that is currently being edited.
anning is fair when he says “I think that some of the things that Thomas said were perfectly legitimate. I don’t know whether I necessarily agree with him but he has every right to feel that way… I have so much experience of playing with him and playing with his musicians and we use bass lines and bits of guitar lines that come out of some of his songs, you know.” But a very clear line has been marked between everything that has gone before and the direction that Timbila want to take in the style and composition of their new songs. “I just want to completely get away from that in anything further that we record so that at least he won’t feel personally abused by it even if he hates it.”
Photo: Alan Rand
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