Kalimba Magic NEWS
Volume 3, Number 7
July 11, 2008
In This Issue:
Kalimba Magic's Happy Birthday Sale
Our Trip to Africa to Visit AMI
Chromatic Kalimba News
New Instruments from AMI
Kalimba Magic is 3 Years Old!
And You Can Save 15% on All Kalimba Magic Purchases
My business, Kalimba Magic, was started June 20, 2005, when Christian Carver sent me an email and asked if I would help his company, African Musical Instruments (AMI) by selling their kalimbas at my performances. AMI makes the Hugh Tracey kalimbas, which were the original kalimbas and are my favorite kalimbas—the ones I've been playing for 22 years. I jumped at the opportunity to help keep the Hugh Tracey kalimbas alive and well. Today, Kalimba Magic is the world's leading distributor of the Hugh Tracey kalimba, and we are also the top web site for distributing information about the kalimba, its history, and how to make wonderful music on it.
To commemorate the start of Kalimba Magic, each year we have a sale which we advertise through our newsletter, which is distributed to you, our loyal customers. This year, we are offering you 15% off from July 7-20, 2008. To get this discount, select the items you want from the Kalimba Magic Shop and enter the code 3years when you check out. As this web store does not accept international orders, any orders from outside the USA must be submitted via email.
I should add that (a) Kalimba Magic offers Hugh Tracey kalimbas at a substantially lower price than most sellers around the world, and that (b) due to rising fuel and materials costs, AMI is having an unprecedented mid-year cost increase of 5%, which I am NOT passing along to you at this time (a favorable exchange rate between the South African Rand and the US Dollar permits me to keep the same prices)—though I expect another 10% price increase around the first of the year, at which point we will be raising prices. All things considered, this is an especially good time for you to purchase a kalimba. And, given that Deb and I have just returned from Africa at our own expense, it is an especially good time for Kalimba Magic to SELL kalimbas.
Our Trip to South Africa in Search of the Wild Kalimba
We just got back from Africa this week. Here is the first installment about our trip.
Deb and I saw these giraffes on a
wildlife preserve in South Africa. Deb Holdaway, the Kalimba Magic archivist, took a lot of photos and video on the trip, and these materials will form the core of many upcoming newsletter stories.
Bruce, a customer of AMI (African Musical Instruments, the makers of the Hugh Tracey Kalimbas), walked into the AMI store and found me performing for 40 minutes on various kalimbas for the staff of AMI. I was showing AMI just what I do on the instruments that they make. He had come to purchase karimbas, but when he heard me playing, he stuck around and listened. He asked me later, "Do you know what serendipity is?" Bruce ended up purchasing both of my CDs, Two Thumbs Up (my more joyful CD from 2000), and Between the Dark and the Light (my more 'multi-culti' CD from 2006).
That sums up our trip to Africa—serendipity—well, and also paradox.
Foremost among the reasons of going to Africa was my desire to meet, in person, the team of Xhosa and mixed race men and women who make the Hugh Tracey kalimbas which I play and sell, to meet Louise Fuller-Sloman, who administers the work and the orders at AMI, and Christian Carver the director and owner of AMI. As the premier seller of kalimbas world-wide, I have a responsibility to know that the workers who make the kalimbas I sell are fairly compensated for their efforts, and I needed to meet these people and understand their work situation.
I also had a keen interest in meeting Andrew Tracey, Hugh Tracey's eldest son, former director of ILAM (the International Library of African Music), who could provide perhaps the clearest links between the modern commercial AMI kalimbas and the traditional kalimbas of Africa.
Everywhere I went in Africa, I was confronted with serendipity and paradox. I showed my kalimbas to each black African I met and asked "Do you know this instrument?" And to my surprise, the answer I got was always, "No, I don't know this." I got the same blank looks from most white Africans too. Maybe the most important work I did in Africa was to play the kalimba in line at banks, at gas stations, or while waiting in line for coffee. I introduced people to the kalimba everywhere I went. Paradox!
Part of the reason why nobody knows the kalimba is that the old ways are dying out all across the planet. But part of the reason was that we were in the wrong part of Africa for kalimbas. ILAM (the International Library for African Music) and AMI (African Musical Instruments, where they make the Hugh Tracey kalimbas) were born in Roodepoort in 1954 and 1955, near Johannesburg in northern South Africa. This location is at the southern extent of the traditional range of the mbira and similar instruments.
Upon Hugh Tracey's death in 1977, Andrew Tracey (Hugh's eldest son) took over ILAM and Heather Tracey (Andrew's wife) took over AMI. ILAM was a unique resource for ethnomusicologists, and was a prestigious institution, and when Rhodes University in Grahamstown in far southern South Africa agreed to host ILAM, the Traceys moved ILAM and AMI to Grahamstown around 1978. Grahamstown offered some great advantages: nice climate, a wonderful academic community, and the annual National Arts Festival, which not only provided a great venue for high profile performances featuring the instruments made at AMI, but also ensured a steady stream of top level musicians coming to visit AMI, some of whom would take up the kalimba or marimba, some of whom would push AMI in new directions. Grahamstown is an exciting place for ILAM and AMI to be located.
Latozi Mpahleni, the most famous player of the uhadi
and
umrhube African bow instruments,
came to AMI while we were there.
But there is a distinct disadvantage to putting AMI in Grahamstown—it is out of the mbira belt. Most of the skilled workers at AMI are Xhosa or mixed race people. None of these people have a historical tradition which includes instruments like the kalimba. So, the people in Grahamstown who work on the kalimba are in the same situation I find myself in—we have to create a new tradition of kalimba playing and kalimba music.
Of the seven black Africans who make the Hugh Tracey kalimbas, only one of them, Mark Komsana, plays the kalimba. He owns four kalimbas himself. A kalimba costs about half a week's pay for the kalimba workers, which seems quite high, but AMI has given kalimbas to each of their workers as a way of saying, "Thank you." In the same vein, there is a full set of five AMI marimbas, worth thousands of US dollars, which belongs to the AMI workers, and at each break and during lunch time, the joyful sounds of traditional-sounding Xhosa music transcribed for the marimbas can be heard throughout the AMI workshop. The marimba, though traditional to many parts of Africa, was introduced to South Africa only in the 1960s but, increasingly, marimba ensembles embody the African musical values of community and interconnectedness across the country.
I have long felt a close connection with Mark Komsana, the one kalimba maker who does play kalimba. When I met him in person, I found out that he and his wife Brenda had married on November 22, 2007, the exact same day that Deb and I were married half a world away in Tucson, Arizona.
Deb and I visited with Mark and Brenda in their home. Mark is paid a fair wage by local standards. In the townships, the neighborhoods where most of the black people of Grahamstown live, unemployment and poverty are the rule and good jobs are rare. But AMI covers half of all medical expenses and manages retirement savings accounts for all AMI employees. Says John Roff of AMI director Christian Carver, "I think Christian treats all his employees well." There is a great deal of attention to safety with the power tools. Every AMI employee has all 10 fingers, workers wear respirators and ear protection when they cut wood, and the few accident reports are mostly when people "drop things on their feet." AMI is a safe shop. And Christian Carver goes beyond the requirements of being a good employer, he cares about each employee on a personal level. When torrential rains and floods threatened the houses in Grahamstown a few years ago, Christian drove around town and distributed big sheets of plastic to each AMI employee and helped them put the sheets around their houses to protect them from the rain.
Christian is a knowledgeable creator of tools and jigs and instruments, who is guided by a higher vision for the roles that traditional African music can play in African society. He believes that the brilliance and ideals embodied in traditional African music and pride in the technical achievements of traditional African instruments should play a more central role in South African society.
Christian Carver, director of AMI, will be featured in
an upcoming interview. I am really impressed with him as
an instrument maker - a manipulator of raw materials to create
something beautiful - and also as an idealistic pragmatic
who cares deeply about the future of Africa and the roots
of African music.
Yet, visiting with Mark and Brenda in their small two room house, with electricity but no running water inside, no heat (though that is actually very common in South Africa - Christian Carver's house also has no heat), a ceiling that is caving in and a roof that leaks, it was clear to me that great global inequality is at work here. I am making my living (luxurious by comparison) from the work that Mark does with his able hands, yet he can only afford substandard housing. I believe that AMI is currently doing the best they can here as far as wages are concerned - they are pinched very tightly. There is fierce world-wide competition among kalimba makers - AMI in Africa, and what I call illegitimate kalimba makers in Pakistan and Indonesia (who have even claimed that the kalimba was a traditional Indonesian instrument in order to boost their sales). How can I help the situation of the kalimba makers at AMI?
First, by selling more kalimbas. Increasing the number of kalimbas sold will help solidify AMI's financial status. But that is certainly not all of the answer. I am envisioning a future where the excellent work of people at AMI is more justly rewarded. And I have faith that, indeed, this entire kalimba community will enjoy economic success. As Kalimba Magic becomes more successful, we will be starting the nonprofit organization Giving Back to Africa. We will be aiming to improve the quality of life for the people who make the kalimbas, the people in the Grahamstown area, and people in other communities in Africa. AMI pays for half of all employees' medical bills. For starters, we can start a fund that will help pay for the rest of medical costs for AMI employees and their families.
We've got many other great ideas about how we can give back to Africa, and in the future, we will be giving back a significant chunk of money from every kalimba sold to Africa, as well as enable you to donate directly to the various projects we will be working on in Africa—as well a few in the USA. Another part of my dream is to fund American kalimba masters to take their kalimbas into the schools and to teach children about the heritage of African kalimbas and African music, and to make that musical tradition alive and accessible to them.
Mark Komsana and Mark Holdaway.
We plan to collaborate on Xhosa songs with
kalimba.
To get back to the paradox: I came to Africa, a continent where black Africans invented the mbira and its relatives over a thousand years ago, yet the people who know the most about these instruments now are white Africans. Black Africans have in large part left behind their traditional culture and lives for the ways of the cities. They have bought into western culture. Hip Hop is on radio and TV. South African FM public radio did have a sound clip with real kalimba music, but it also had several midi kalimba clips (i.e., played on a keyboard with a sampled kalimba sound patch). The black man who served me coffee in the Johannesburg airport sang along to the late 70's hit playing on the sound system: "So I'm never gonna dance again, guilty feet ain't got no rhythm," and he had no clue of the African origins of the kalimba in my hands.
The effect of western cultural imperialism is the disappearance of tribal ways and traditional African values, such as those found in music—values of community and belonging and being part of something bigger than the individual. This taking on of western culture paves the way for western economic imperialism.
When I walked into the mall in Mtata, I was the only white face for a full 30 minutes, but every bit of merchandise looked like I could have found it in New York City or Tokyo or Tucson, Arizona. When Hugh Tracey travelled around Africa recording traditional music, this music was still alive and well. Now there are some communities, such as the mbira community of Zimbabwe, which are still healthy, but there are many mbira instruments on the walls at ILAM which are extinct: there are no players left in the world, and nobody knows how to play the musics which had been played on these instruments. This technical expertise required to make these instruments and the musical expertise to play them attracted the smartest members of society to them. Today, where are the smartest people drawn? Most are drawn to more lucrative economic opportunities, to academia, to politics, to health work, to a thousand different places before building traditional African musical instruments.
Part of the issue is race—my hosts were white, and for the most part, the ways for whites and blacks in South African society to interact are surprisingly limited. The crime rate and the murder rate in South Africa are amazingly high, and white people all over the country warned us very strictly to be careful and told us where not to go. This is certainly based on fear, but it seems to be based on prudence as well. While much violence and crime stems from fighting among the nine different black ethnic groups in South Africa and newer arrivals, the social tension between the Haves and the Have Nots seems to be the driving dynamic of high crime in South Africa. Craig Woodson at PASIC advised us to go out into rural places in Africa to understand what African music is about. Deb and I did seek out and find interactions and ways of coming together with black South Africans in situations independent of our white hosts, but, either because of our fear or because of our prudence, we did not venture out into the rural places.
Educating people about the value of traditional African musical instruments is of paramount importance. Christian Carver stresses the strength of design of these instruments. The wood that an instrument is made from was chosen for a reason - kiaat wood, the traditional wood for mbiras, and also for kalimba, is a very resonant wood. The shape of the instruments also serves a purpose. Andrew Tracey shows me the tines on historical mbiras that have been pounded such that the different modes and overtones have been tuned (a truly remarkable feat). Compare these to the tourist kalimbas that are made and sold by the thousands nowadays. These instruments, made by modern day black Africans, are not even tuned, nor are they even tunable! They are not even meant to be played, they only point to the idea that Africa once had magical musical instruments. Western economic forces are ruining African music, replacing a majestic past with a cheap toy.
Andrew Tracey, son of Hugh Tracey (in photo to the right)
and former director of ILAM, the International Library of African Music, a repository for thousands of hours of recordings
of traditional and emerging folk and popular African music made by
Hugh Tracey in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Andrew Tracey and Mark Holdaway discussing the different
kalimbas and mbiras on display at ILAM. Some of these instruments
are "culturally extinct" with no living players and no documented
songs.
There are more people seeking new understandings and new connections through music and dance. John Roff is a naturalist at Hilton College near Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, and he seeks to help his students make connections with the African land and nature through playing kalimbas and other instruments. Geoffrey Tracey, Andrew's son and Hugh Tracey's grandson, is becoming a traditional Zulu healer, using traditional song and dance as part of his art. Both of these people are forging a new path using African music and instruments in a very personal way. Christian Carver has a vision that black Africans will rise up in confidence and creativity, regaining the majesty of the past.
John Roff, a South African naturalist who seeks to inspire
students to learn about their natural surroundings through using
traditional instruments such as the kalimba.
I wish to point to a number of coincidences which left us in awe.
We spent one night at the Kings Lodge on Hogsback, a magical mountain resort that inspired JRR Tolkein's forest of Mirkwood in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—a mountaintop rainforest of supreme beauty. While travelling to Pietermaritzburg to meet John Roff, we traveled through the town of Komga a few hundred miles from Grahamstown, and stopped for a coke. The woman who was running the store had a Hogsback jacket on, and it turned out that she had stayed at the Kings Lodge, in the same room and in the same bed as we had, one night after us. Maybe it is not so amazing that we had missed each other by one night in this mountain top resort, but it is amazing that we found out about it.
A view on top of Hogsback, a magical mountaintop
retreat near Grahamstown, South Africa.
Then while we were visiting Jon and Jo Roff and their family, they brought over their neighbors Rob and Hilary Inglis, who run a small communications company, Jive Media. Coincidentally, their logo is a kalimba, and they are currently developing a poster that will illustrate the scientific principles of traditional African musical instruments. But there was a greater coincidence that blew me away.
My former job before I founded Kalimba Magic was in Radio Astronomy. Rob and Hilary had worked on a PR campaign for a prototype project of the Square Kilometer Array, or SKA. I had been at the Meeting in 1991 when Robert Braun first proposed the concept of a radio astronomical array with a square kilometer of collecting area (about 100 times more sensitive than the VLA). South Africa is constructing the Meerkat Array, a small "proof of concept" project for the SKA, but some of the local people have become freaked out that this telescope might somehow be radioactive or dangerous. In actuality, the array simply collects naturally occurring cosmic radio emissions that constantly shower Earth from space—it is not dangerous. Human-made radio emissions from cell phones or microwave ovens swamp the "radio light" from outer space; hence the location of the array in the middle of a sparsely populated desert.
Rob and Hilary have created a comic book with the purpose of educating South Africans about what the Meerkat array does. I was reading through the comic book when I came across a page with a real radio astronomical image on a cartoon computer screen, and on that screen was the only actual radio astronomical image in the whole comic book: it was the image of the supernova remnant W50, which I myself had made about 12 years ago. What are the chances of THAT?! Leaving Radio Astronomy to become the kalimba guru, travelling around the world to learn about kalimbas only to come face-to-face with a radio astronomical image that I myself had made!
After our meeting, Hilary and Rob were even more excited about getting together with Christian Carver and Andrew Tracey to work on their poster showing how technologically advanced traditional African musical instruments were, as well as purchasing several kalimbas from AMI.
A page from the comic book on radio astronomy made by
Rob and Hilary Inglis, which includes a radio image of the W50 supernova remnant that I made 12 years ago (on the computer monitor). Click for enlargement.
Seeing that image in the comic book echoed another experience we had. Like Kalimba Magic, AMI has just come out with a new catalog of their musical instruments. I got a shipment of kalimbas from AMI right before we left for Africa, and we had to scramble to ship 88 kalimbas on the very day before we left for Africa. We were so busy that we didn't have time to read through the new AMI catalog until we were on the plane. But, on the last pages of the catalog, I saw that the books written by Kalimba Magic and my CDs are featured. Indeed, our kalimba books have fundamentally changed the way kalimba can be learned around the world, and this has most clearly impacted kalimba sales. The prominent inclusion of Kalimba Magic materials in the AMI catalog underlines the importance of Kalimba Magic in the world-wide kalimba market.
AMI's new catalog is available. I was tickled that my books
and CDs are featured prominantly on the inside back cover (click to see).
Race is an issue for everyone in South Africa, and it is more complex than you can imagine. Jo Roff told me that many of her white friends were leaving Africa. "What good will THAT do? Do we want to be like Zimbabwe?" Christian and Mandy Carver had left South Africa for England during the final desperate years of apartheid, but they never felt accepted in England. They were African through and through, and eventually returned to their home in Africa.
Born in Kenya, raised in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe before black rule), and having made his living in South Africa, John Roff helps people connect with and honor the land and creatures of Africa. John said simply: "If you are born in Africa, you are an African." And more than any other person I met, John helped me to connect with the kalimba's organic origins. He took Deb and me to a private wildlife refuge on the banks of the Umgeni river near Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, where we saw giraffe, zebras, wildebeast, and several types of antelope. From the river banks, we could see the tree, high up above steep sandstone cliffs, under which John and Jo had been married 7 years earlier.
John and Jo are connected with this place - they were married
under a tree on top of this cliff.
John was connected, deeply connected, with this spot and all that grew there. People had been farming this area for centuries. You can still see the terraced fields where people probably grew corn and millet, long since overgrown by wild bush. Archaeological work on this site indicates that people were using iron to make tools there 1300 years ago—the same age that Gerhard Kubick dates metal-tined kalimbas in the Zambezi river valley a bit further north. After I shot a dozen photos of a group of four giraffes, John bent down and picked up two "stones" from the road: one, an ancient pottery shard, the other a piece of slag, a by-product of iron production. "A gift for you, my friend," he said as he put them in my hand. I asked if he should be giving these to me, and he said that they had been washed out onto the road and were no longer of archaeological interest as they had been removed naturally from their orginal context.
I paraphrase John Roff: "I would like to imagine that 1300 years ago, people living here made mbiras. Maybe they made an mbira from the iron that left this slag, drank beer from this pot and played mbira around the fire. This land is where the mbira belongs, where it came from. There is a deep and natural connection between walking on this land and playing the kalimba, and now you are walking in this place, playing your song." And I felt totally at home, walking on that land within earshot of giraffe and zebra, playing my modern day kalimba and dreaming about the people who had lived here and played the music of the landscape centuries ago. I had a profound sense of rightness, peace, oneness—a feeling I hope to carry with me around the world to that other pole of kalimba music for me: Tucson, Arizona.
Thank you, John, for sharing that connection with the Earth and with the people from another time. I will want to return to feel that again.
What am I to make of all these bizarre coincidences? I believe I am standing in the exact right place in my life. The planets seemed lined up for us, and the people we met in Africa were good to us. When Deb and I return to Africa, we we will go back as Giving Back to Africa—and we invite you to come back with us!
In the meantime, we have collected materials for interviews and kalimba stories that will be forthcoming in future newsletters. Our next newsletter will feature our first interview with Andrew Tracey, which was largely done over a year ago but was finished on this trip. Also, look for interviews with Christian Carver, Louise Fuller-Sloman, AMI shop foreman Patrick Martinez, Kalimba team leader Stanley Mngambe, and kalimba enthusiast and naturalist John Roff.
Patrick (Paw Paw) Martinez, the AMI workshop foreman, and Stanley Mngambe, the head of the kalimba team at AMI, are two shining lights in the kalimba community. We'll be hearing more from them in a future newsletter.
More Hugh Tracey Chromatic Kalimbas Available
We Just Brought Them Back from Africa
Please contact me if you would like a chromatic kalimba. I had sold out all from the first order, but I have returned from Africa with a few more.
Also, remember to check out the chromatic kalimba resource page. The chromatic kalimba is a fundamentally new instrument that nobody (except Sharon Eaton) knows how to play, this is going to take some fiddling around to get it right. I am now working on an old mandolin song I wrote called Mando Swing - it will be pushing my abilities on the chromatic kalimba!
New Instruments from African Musical Instruments
Kalimba Magic is asking: are you interested in these AMI instruments?
I've just come back with a variety of instruments made by AMI, and I will be evaluating them in the coming weeks. I will try to have sound recordings and photos in the next newsletter. If you are interested in purchasing one of these instruments, contact me to express this interest.
The instruments we have come home with include:
- The Ugandan Amadinda Marimba
Two people sit across from each other to play these instruments, striking the ends with wooden beaters, as opposed to striking the center with softer mallets. Apparently there are many songs which Gerhardt Kubick has documented for this marimba. This one comes in larger and smaller versions, in kiaat or sneezewood varieties, and in western pentatonic or traditional African nearly equal-tempered tunings (I got the kiaat, smaller, African-tuned version). Look for photos and more information in our next newsletter. - Kiaat wood claves
Also available in the brighter, more resonant sneezewood. - Bass claves
A hollowed-out cylindrical piece of kiaat or sneezewood with a solid beater, this makes a lower tone. - Tone blocks
Even lower than the bass clave, with sneezewood sounding wood mounted on a kiaat box. -
Shakers!
These are wicker versions that emulate the sound of hoshu gourd shakers, but have a somewhat softer sound, so that they do not overpower unamplified kalimbas. - Leg shakers
These are traditional shakers that you tie to your legs and you can dance as you play kalimba to get some percussion going. I myself am going to be using these in my performances, since I move so much when I play.
There are many other instruments which AMI makes: Orff Marimbas, a set of Marimba Band Marimbas (soprano, tenor, baritone, bass, contrabass), each with wooden resonators with buzzers; and traditional African musical bows called uhadi (with a resonating gourd) and umrhube (which uses the mouth as a resonator). We will be looking into the possibility of importing these other high quality musical instruments from Africa, but the larger sizes of these instruments will end up requiring more storage space at Kalimba Magic as well as being more expensive in shipping. Please contact me if you have an interest in these instruments.
We will have another newsletter with community links and an interview in 3-4 weeks. Take care!
Mark Holdaway
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