47 f
kind of perceived it the way Nora did… as just this music from outer space, so crazy, so hard to get a handle on what is happen- ing in it, I had no idea of doing that.”
But Nora did have ideas that resulted in Banning developing an entirely new guitar style to play with the very complex non- western tuning of timbila, drawing on all of his skill and experi- ence as a musician.
Indeed the band have come a long way since their first meet- ing in Harare in 1996/97 and subsequent acoustic gigs in New York as The Glamour Boys. From an ever-changing line-up, usually fea- turing whichever mbira player was in town from Zimbabwe at the time, they “got to the point where we were just a band of Ameri- cans with nobody who could say they were representing the tradi- tion and we were absolutely completely free to just do whatever pleased us… it was kind of liberating.”
U
Louisa Bradshaw, for example, is a true rock ’n’ roll singer who came on board after visiting Nora’s record store one day: “She can harmonise anything and our voices meshed really well”. Ed Klinger “is a very excellent rock drummer and is quite capable of understanding the African rhythms but that’s not where he’s com- ing from and so he helped us to have a plausible rock vibe.” Bassist Dirck Westervelt has the rock background but also brings years of playing with the Blacks Unlimited to the table.
ltimately, the band’s secret weapon is Bob Holman, poet, friend and owner of the Bowery Poetry Club. Nora invited him to read his poetry over the mbira at one of their gigs. “It was so cool. I said to Louisa… we should grab some of his poetry lines and sing them as a back-up, put them in the Shona melodies and be like the ‘Back Up Shona Babes’ to the poetry. That’s how it started. Now Bob and I write together and I’m going ‘Bob, it has to sound like this’ and then I’ll sing some nonsense and he goes ‘I love that, bril- liant, keep it!’ Sometimes Louisa and I are singing passionately these ridiculous words, like ‘check it and pocket the cha-cha!’ and we have no idea what it means but we’re singing with passion… and now I feel totally confident because it rocks.”
They’ve come to a place now where they are not destroying the mystique around the existing traditional parts. Rather they are adding a new magic through using lyrics and voices as sound rather than meaning.
It’s the mixture of nonsense and poetry that Banning finds most refreshing. “I think that it has the advantage that it’s not try- ing to say anything. There is something that works when people can understand the words but they don’t really know what is being said and that still puts people in a position where they’re being engaged, their sense of language is being engaged but they’re not being directed into any obvious meaning path and so they still have something like the kind of mysterious feeling that you get when you’re listening to music you don’t understand.”
It is clear that they all take great enjoyment from playing the music for the experience of playing together and creating some- thing new.
Banning says, “I have a life where it’s very, very hard to be in a band because I have so many different kinds of commitments and I live in different places… but part of the reason that I really stick with it is that this music is really worth sacrificing a lot for to play… I do really respect just the actual experience that you have when you play the music.”
www.myspace.com/timbila F
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100