Story Telling with the Kalimba

 

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Mark Holdaway, Master Kalimba Player:

How I Use the Kalimba in Telling Stories

One of the great things about the kalimba is that it can work well for story tellers no matter how much or how little you know about playing the kalimba. For example, let's say you just picked up the kalimba for the first time last week. You could easily learn three different sound effects that you can make with the kalimba and integrate them into your stories. For example, you could learn an ascending riff to represent going up stairs, climbing a tree, going up the mountain, etc., and a descending riff to represent going down. You can also learn a flashy glissando that could be used as a magic wand. Of course, if you can learn how to do three cool sound effects in three minutes, once you let your creative mind loose on the kalimba, you should be able to come up with dozens of cool little tricks to add to various parts of your stories. Walking? Taking a single step? Falling down? Running? Skipping? They can all be emulated gracefully in many ways on different types of kalimbas. If you are using the kalimba to represent an animal, a person, or thing, use the short tines to represent little things, and the longer tines to represent larger things. Like tip-toe walking as opposed to taking giant steps. And be sure to think about how to move your body while you play (keep reading for more on that).

But I am primarily a kalimba player, and a song master at that. So most of my story telling work starts with one or more songs, and then I build the story around the song. For example, my story The Christmas Music Box is built around a magical music box that somehow plays the favorite Christmas Carol of the person who is holding it. Little Johan, the boy who is given this magical music box on Christmas morning, is quite bright: when he realizes what is going on, he suggests his family pay a visit to the Rabbi who lives next door to find out just what the music box will play for him! Organizing the story this way gives me a wonderful opportunity to showcase my Christmas Carols on kalimba.

Another common approach is to use a single song that gets repeated throughout the story as the context grows. This is a more reasonable place to start, as you only have to learn one song. The song needs to be more or less repeatable, so you can pull it out of your hat without even thinking about it, and so when it comes around again each time, it sounds similar enough so that the listeners immediately recognize it each time you play it.

If you repeat a song throughout a story, the story's context will be a bit different each time you play that song. Hopefully the changing context will cast a different light on the meaning of the song each time you play it. A very simple but obvious way to change the meaning of the song to reflect the story's changing context is to sing along with the song and change the words slightly each time to reflect the context.

Here is my story/song The Big Vibration. The song "The Big Vibration" is repeated several times, each time with more animals listening, dancing or singing. I start out with just the melody, add the words the third time, and modify the words (i.e., from "everybody wants a little bit more" to "everybody got a little bit more").

This can work with either a song that everyone knows (which always helps to get people singing along) or a song that you have invented.

I love and respect the kalimba so much that I expect only good things from it. (I am almost surprised when I make the occassional bad noises with my kalimbas.) But in my mind, the kalimba is associated with goodness and high mindedness and joy and miracles and dancing and happiness. When I create a new story or story-song integrated with the kalimba, I start from the point of what good characteristic the kalimba will display, and I then imagine the role the kalimba will play in the story. In my kalimba stories, the kalimba plays a very central role in the story. The better you play kalimba, the more central a role your kalimba should play in your story! People are always thrilled and amazed just to hear the sound of the kalimba and to see the kalimba, but when you perform really good tunes on the kalimba, they are that much more impressed.

There is one other way I use the kalimba in story telling. I sometimes improvise a matrix of kalimba music underneath the words of my stories. This might be based on a two to four measure pattern that repeats with minor variations. The repetitive pattern can lull the audience, hypnotize them, soften them up for your words. The pattern can set the mood. If there are different moods or different settings for the story, you could experiment with using different backing riffs to set the mood differently in different parts of the story.

Listen to an example of a simple backing riff. And I also have a more complex example of a simple backing riff. The Pentatonic Book has lots of interesting patterns that would make great backing riffs for stories.

The kalimba sounds might not correspond directly to the story as in the first examples of using the kalimba as a producer of sound effects. And there is a much more organic feel to this use of the kalimba than the story that uses specific kalimba songs. I find that the music and the story sort of breathe together and find little ways to support each other. Most of those seem to be little happy accidents that just happen, but if you catch them happening, you can remember that magic and be on the lookout for it to happen again. If you are improvising on kalimba, you may want to make the story a bit looser too! But, most of all, pay attention to your audience—listen and watch what they are doing, for they may provide some of the input for the direction of your improvisations. And that is where the real magic starts.

One last piece of advice. Even though the kalimba is played with the smallest of bodily motions, the thumbs sliding softly on the tines, I recommend that you practice dancing and other large body movements while you play kalimba. I find that the way I move my body influences the way I play kalimba, and vice versa. It is important to find a natural way to move that works with a natural way to play kalimba, and if you are really good, your body motion and kalimba playing will work with the story. Rather than graft any old story onto the kalimba and your natural body motion, it may make sense to start with the body and kalimba music, and then find or create a story that works with the body and kalimba foundation to ensure a good all around fit.

Before he made kalimbas, he told stories.

A Story About Hugh Tracey

From Wendy Zohar: I'm always looking for more information on Hugh Tracey, whom I have long admired and whose ethnomusicological work I treasure. I first listened to Hugh Tracey's recordings in the 50's as a child, on a London Label series of African Music. His African Folk Tales were enchanting, as were his African Songs, River Chants, Drum Beats, and African guitar recordings. All priceless! My parents were world music lovers before the term existed, and we, their children, were the beneficiaries. To this day we recite (in a fractured way I'm sure) with delight the folk tales, with all the fanciful characters and their names, such as "...and he took out his knife, and cut off his ears, saying Gwa! Gwa! and he said to him, 'I tell you, to tell your people, that I am Napandangari, the Great Baboon, from the Goon of Refu-refu, by the Valley of Chun-chun, and don't YOU come again!'"

These African stories and kinds of music are so deep a part of me that you can imagine my excitement to get onto your website and read everything that was there! What a great story. I wish I'd been able to go to Africa in time to meet papa Hugh. I had no idea about the commercialization of the kalimba/finger piano, but only heard its sounds and saw pictures of it on these old recordings and in the liner notes.

Many years ago I was in London doing some research, I believe it was at the British Museum sound archives, and saw that a copy of Hugh Tracey's field recordings are all registered there, many more recordings than the ones we had heard as kids. The problem for me was getting access to it at the time, and I didn't have enough time to see it through. I would have wanted to make a copy for myself naturally, but it couldn't be done. Ah.

The Lion on the Path, 1967.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Hugh Tracey did radio broadcasts in South Africa in which black Africans performed traditional African music and he told stories he had collected around Africa. In 1967 Dr. Tracey published the story book The Lion on the Path, which included many of these stories.

I am happy to say that Kalimba Magic will soon have The Lion on the Path storybooks as well as recordings of Hugh Tracey's radio story broadcasts on CD. Tthey are in boxes in South Africa getting ready to ship, and I should have them in a week or two. These stories are priceless, and provide an interesting historical-cultural prespective. If you are looking for some interesting African stories to add to YOUR collection, you will be able to find them right here very soon.

By the way, you can listen to my own version of the story, The Lion on the Path.

Kalimba Ideas from a Community of Story Tellers

STU MENDELSON
Stu has been telling stories for 15 years in the Boston area. Visit his website.

In answer to your call for stories from storytellers, I posted your message on our storytelling listserve (LANES- THE LEAGUE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF NEW ENGLAND STORYTELLING) - so you should be getting some responses.

As for me, I use a number of different Kalimbas when I tell stories to set the mood, to make the place/setting a sacred space for me and the listeners, and to add color to different parts of stories. I find them the easiest instruments to use for that (I play a number of different ones) because I can play and tell at the same time without being distracted.

 

MARNI GILLARD
Marni is a delightful and enthusiastic spirit.
Visit her website.

I saw a storyteller use the Kalimba as a way to show Anansi climbing up and down the web to see the Sky God. I really liked it. I'm not one for using instruments. I love seeing others do it but I am a very internal storyteller and it's everything I can do to juggle my own internal imaging and the energy of the audience, but thanks for asking for this. It was a sweet memory. I can hear that kalimba sound each time Anansi climbed up and down or made a web and it was a delight! —Marni Gillard

 

MARY JO MAICHACK
Visit her website.

I've been a full-time professional teller/musician for 20 years, and I perform two tales using the kalimba.

One is on my recording, "Books Are Celebrations," and the story is "How Anansi Got the Sky God's Stories." You can hear a clip from this story on the "Books Are Celebrations" page on CD Baby (choose Track 8). This CD won a 1999 NAPPA Gold award.

I also incorporate kalimba into a dress-up story with masks and costumes in which a bully elephant is lured into friendship by showing off his/her beautiful thumbs by playing the thumb piano. The tale is called "Rabbit & Elephant."

 

 

ESHU BUMPUS
Eshu tells African and African-American folk stories, but he teams up with Motoko for multi-cultural stories. Visit Eshu's website.

I primarily use the Kalimba to create a perfect atmosphere and mood for receiving the stories. I haven't gotten to the level of proficiency to consistently play while I tell, but on less formal occasions like in some library gigs I'll play a little during a story. When my partner, Motoko and I tell together, I have her play while I'm telling. I even sometimes invite middle school kids to come and play behind a story with no rehearsal or practice. I just assure them that if they use the pentatonic kalimba, they can play confidently because there is no disonance. I had percussionist Tony Vacca playing kalimba and mbira on my CD (Lion in Love) during the Wise Men and the Tiger story. I've attached an audio clip telling at a library in CT. I was making up the story as I went along, using the children's names as characters. I'll see if I can get a picture or two taken at my next couple of gigs. Meanwhile, people can order CD's from here.

MIKE MEYERS
Mike builds kalimbas with colorful names to use in his stories with kids.

I've been building "limbas" and using them with stories for years. I've taught kids how to make a relative of kalimbas called the plinka plunka. I call them imbas because they have fewer keys.

A few of the instruments I use in story telling are named Bugimba, the Rabbit boing box, ductimba (a gourd instrument that looks like an ellephant with duct tape ears), and frog boing box. I tell The Big Mouthed Frog, How Rabbit Fooled Whale and Elephant, and Bugimba. I used the imbas as sound effects. I use a Kenyan kalimba for ethereal effects when I tell Robert Munch's paperbag princess. My first 3 cigar boing boxes are called Papabox, Mommabox and Baby Box are used when I tell The Three Boxes and Goldibox. When I go into a school or library I take enough shakers to give to everyone.

Participation comes naturally to kids, especially when they make their own instrument. I'm currently working on 6 one string diddley bows, each diddley relates to the strings of a guitar - so it will take 6 people to try to make them sound like one. I do have some instruments listed at Storytellerarts.etsy.com

Other Story Tellers Who Use the Kalimba include Samite and Opalanga Pugh.

Best of luck finding your own way to use the kalimba in your own story telling! When you discover something cool, let me know, because I'll be doing another article on using the kalimba in story telling in six months or so.