May 15, 2011 Vol. 6, Num. 4

Kalimba Magic NEWS In This Issue Message from Mark: My Job Before Kalimba Magic What's the Buzz at Kalimba Magic Kalimba Magic Travel Log Spring 2011 Kalimba in Addiction Recovery Sound Journaling with the Sansula Kalimba in Music Therapy: a Collection of Resources Joy of Music Presentation & Jam, Mesa, AZ, June 24 Children's Workshop at MIM in Phoenix, AZ, July 23 Mbira Cycle: Synchronicity at Folk Fest & Contest Kalimba Community News

Mbira Cycle: Synchronicity at the Folk Fest & Contest
My Leap of Faith Pays Off Big!

I've been playing the Hugh Tracey alto kalimba by ear, making up my own music, since I started playing in 1986. This was no problem until 2005 when I started Kalimba Magic - people wanted to hear traditional African music on the Hugh Tracey kalimba, but I didn't know any.

I had dabbled in African music on the Kalimba here and there. But what I call the Mbira Cycle is the Rosetta Stone - the cycle of chords which, when you can internalize its form, will hold the key to essentially all traditional Shona mbira music, which in turn is perhaps the most beautiful and complex of all traditional African musics.

I started to learn about the Mbira Cycle in November 2010 from a Masters Thesis on Andrew Tracey, who studied this over 40 years ago. I realized right away how important that was for me to learn and then to share with the world. So, almost every day I tried to improvise songs that were consistent with the Mbira Cycle, and I started to write a series of Tips of the Day to explain to the world what I was learning.

I could understand it intelectually in about 4 different ways. But making my body produce music that is true to this framework proved difficult. Days, weeks, months, I worked and worked, and gradually I began to swim in the waters of the Mbira Cycle. Every time I came to dive into the pool of the Mbira Cycle, it was deeper and more wonderful - a whole world waiting to be explored. It felt like a combination of the old and the new - these were my own improvisations, but based on the principles of ancient music that was first created 800-1000 years ago. Learning this music has been a truly rewarding journey in and of itself, but little did I know where else this music would lead me!

Last weekend (April 30/May 1, 2011) was the Tucson Folk Festival, my favorite musical event of the year. Andrew Dahl-Bredine (a very different Andrew from Andrew Tracey the ethnomusicologist), an acquaintance of mine from New Mexico, won the song writing contest early Saturday afternoon.

Andrew had been the 11th candidate in a field of 10, but when one of the songwriters couldn't make it, Andrew was tapped. And he WON! I was there to hear him because I was playing the children's show on the same stage and right after the song writer contest. And he heard me too. Andrew heard me playing traditional African music on my karimba (aka mbira nyunga nyunga) in my rendition of The Lion on the Path, a story Hugh Tracey had collected in the 1940s. We both really enjoyed each other's music, but after my performance I had to run off and do another set.

Now, at the Tucson Folk Festival, the winner of the song writing contest gets a 30 minute music slot on the main stage at 6:00 pm on Saturday - a very good slot, and over a thousand people will see you at that time, and your music will be heard on KXCI 91.3 FM as well. By then, my day of performances with four different groups was over, and I was relaxing with my wife Deb on the grass next to the main stage, looking forward to hearing Andrew's music. At 5:50 pm, Andrew came up to me and asked if I could play kalimba with him. Kalimba with him! He said one song was a traditional Shona piece. I ran and got all my kalimbas from my car, and was back in 5 minutes!

With just a few minutes before Andrew would take the stage, he showed me the traditional Shona piece - a friend had transcribed it from mbira to guitar, and it was in the key of G - same as my Hugh Tracey Alto Kalimba - the very kalimba I had been playing so much lately to learn the Mbira Cycle. At first the progression sounded so familiar, but I couldn't get a foothold - THEN I saw it all perfectly clearly. You can start at any place among the chords of the Mbira Cycle and, in fact, I had learned of three such starting points from the work of Andrew Tracey. Andrew Dahl-Bredine's piece just started in a different spot than I had ever started before.

So I started again, this time with my newly calibrated starting point. And IT TOTALLY WORKED! It was like the first rado astronomers at MIT who tried to line up the radio waves taken with radio antennas on opposite ends of the country - seemingly blindly searching, and then BOOM, they struck INTERFERENCE FRINGES and started the scientific cottage industry of Very Long Baseline Interferometry! (Yes, I'm still an honorary nerd.)

Listen to the performance with Andrew Dahl-Bredine and Mark Holdaway.

I had gone off for six months, working each day, little by little, to learn.... THIS! The exact thing that Andrew was playing. And it meant more than that. Neither Andrew nor I are experts at traditional Shona music - but I would say we are becoming experts, from two very different directions. I had one sign post pointing me the way to go, Andrew had another. And we had both worked hard to learn what the sign posts had said. And when our two pieces of music fit perfectly together, it proved at that moment that both signposts were true to the Shona tradition, and that we had both been true to the sign posts. I smiled, and felt bathed in a powerful light of understanding and transcendence over continents and millenia, and just then I heard a big rush of applause from the main stage, causing me to sort of lose my breath!

It was the previous band leaving the stage. "Your ON, Andrew!" someone said. Well, we had had exactly enough rehearsal time - enough time to make the world shake, for me at least!

And so with 2 minutes of rehearsal, I joined Andrew on the main stage at 6:00 pm not only on the traditional Shona song, but also on another African beat children's song he had written.

I had been sure my peak experience this folk festival was going to be when I played two songs on kalimba with Beth Fichet-Wood and husband Steve Wood - a talented songwriting and performance team that had won the song writing contest two years ago. But this experience with Andrew - totally unexpected - was my peak.

If I had set out six months ago to try to perform the Mbira Cycle on the main stage of the Tucson Folk Festival at 6:00 pm on Saturday, I never could have made it happen. But that's how hard I had worked for six months. And without knowing what he was reaching down into the water of the collective unconscious to scoop up onto the stage, Andrew grabbed me and made my unspoken and even unknown dream come true, right before the eyes of 1000 friends, acquantances, and strangers.

Of course, this is what has happened with only 2 minutes of working together. What can we accomplish if we are able to work together for hours, days, weeks, and months? Every dream that comes true brings new seeds for us to plant and nurture.

THIS is my story of what happened when I learned the structure of the Mbira Cycle in my bones! I didn't really know what I was learning it for, but it paid off BIG. We can't know, but I am betting that if you learn the wisdom of this ancient way, and learn to internalize it in your bones, learn to play songs that are true to the structure of this 1000-year old music, something wonderful is going to happen to you, too!

Oh yeah, the Mbira Cycle Contest

That said, let me remind you that we are doing a contest to see who can write the coolest music based on the Mbira Cycle - the deadline has just been extended to June 1, 2011. We have two entries already, so this will be the final delay, we'll actually have some WINNERS in June!