f46 “N
ow, I really do just approach the music as music. I understand its religious and political significance and the way it represented this reclamation of identity and I really respect those things but I also realise that for me it’s
kind of pretentious to act like that stuff is really what is motivating me because it’s really not and… it’s ultimately all about the music.”
Nora comments with a wide grin. “He did say something that I loved…” Banning picks up the thread. “He said ‘You must stop that woman’. As you can see I’ve failed”. He laughs but when you consider the traditions that Nora has pulled together: mbira, tim- bila (for the most part typically male-dominated instruments), poetry and rock music too, one can see why Thomas might feel threatened by the fact that the frontman of Timbila is actually a white, American woman who has always known her own mind when it comes to music.
Her richness of experience in playing African music (marimba, congas, mbira, timbila) is undeniable and she respects the tradi- tions, but tradition is not what she is aiming for with this band. “It’s not the culture that I grew up in so I don’t think I could ever have the same kind of connection with it that Chartwell or any of the other Zimbabweans do. So I think, on one hand I understand it as best I can and I respect it and I also like to make the music my own, do my own thing with it.”
It has always been that way. Of her three years spent playing marimba (she’d accepted the job before she’d even had one marimba lesson) with Brett Stewart’s band Mapenzi in San Francis- co, she remembers. “It was really fun but the whole time I was in that band, I had just come from New York and I was into Patti Smith and Television and Talking Heads and the Ramones and that was where my heart was. So I’d be playing African marimbas and then hearing Richard Hell and Richard Lloyd and all those guys like playing all over them… When I would tell the guys this idea they were mortified and like ‘Oh Nora!’ but that was my idea right from the beginning, and so I developed this incredible passion for the African music while keeping that other passion. I always want- ed to combine it. Nobody understood it.”
She also had her first encounter at this time with what she terms as ‘Shona Scold’ (a very ‘preservative’ approach to teaching and learning with the implicit expectation that you are learning a sacred tradition that must not be tampered with). Whilst taking a couple of lessons with Erica Azim, “She made me pretty much promise her that I would never play any other kind of music on the mbira… well I just said OK because she was the only one teaching and I wanted to learn how to play… and I went home and put a pickup on the mbira and plugged it into all this distortion and all these pedals and I was rocking out and playing… like no one was going to tell me what to do! She taught me probably about six songs and I ended up moving back to New York, plonked my stuff there and went off to Zimbabwe. I was there for a year and I went four times so I really learned to play there. I pretty much lived with the Chigambas…”
From Zimbabwe, Nora made an adventure across the border into Mozambique to find the timbila master Venancio Mbande, whom she’d first heard play on a cassette recording 10 years earli- er (she remembered thinking they sounded “like marimbas from the moon!”).
Banning calls it destiny that, armed only with a Rough Guide, the name of the region and her friend (and mbira legend) Cosmas Magaya, she managed to stumble into Venancio Mbande’s entire orchestra playing outside a hotel on the beach in a one-off perfor- mance for some visiting UK Government officials.
Nora spent weeks with Venancio’s family taking lessons from him and his children, the local way of learning being ‘you watch, you play’. “Yeah, they’re brilliant!” exclaims Nora. “I had all the little kids teaching me really fast and… the only reason they knew how to teach a little bit is because I learned two words in Chopi… ‘slow’ and ‘stop’ and then they learned how to break things down and teach me.”
The Chopi people made a big impact on Nora (search for tim-
bila on YouTube). The civil war decimated the Chopi orchestras that had developed in the mining regions and Nora plans to help Venancio set up a school in his village in order to stabilise the tim- bila tradition in the region again.
“Nora was very emphatic that I needed to go and have the experience of hearing Venancio,” says Banning of the experience. Indeed when he made his pilgrimage to meet Venancio, Banning liked the music but he had no intention of learning to play it. “I
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