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These two similar parts, one delayed by an eighth note, lean against each other and create something fundamentally new Mbira music is designed to be played on two dueling mbiras The kalimba, as most of us know it, is a new adaptation of the family of African lamellophones that includes the mbira and the karimba.  As such, the kalimba doesn’t really have a tradition in Africa.  This is the very reason I am attracted to the instrument. Without a specific African tradition, we are free to create our own new and evolving kalimba styles. On the extreme opposite end of the “tradition” spectrum from the modern kalimba is the mbira

What’s a young professional musician to do when her body fails her? Klara is learning mbira and karimba, to play especially when her body doesn’t want to play violin. An introduction from Mark: High level musicians dedicate their body, their time, their soul, and years to their art. They are driven by the dreams of the greatness they have touched in their musical experiences, and they invest their very lives to this god of music. But what happens when their body fails them? When pain and debility make their work and ambitions look like one of God’s great jokes? Many musical instruments are quite physically demanding: guitar, upright bass, piano,

Conscious attention can bring many benefits to you and your music Photo by Glen Davis. Kalimba by Andrew Masters What is mindfulness?  For me, mindfulness is being as present as I can be to the moment that is unfolding.   Consider music as a sort of plow that is able to cut a furrow through the present moment.  Good music invites the listener to become entrained in that furrow as the musical plowshare cuts through the unfolding succession of present moments .  Good music, happy, sad, or otherwise, can be a great comfort as it can largely take us from whatever pathway we were wandering down, and instead directs our

Surging in popularity now, kalimbas arrived long ago and then all but vanished French painter Jean-Baptiste Debret depicted many scenes of Africans in Brazil, including these images with Kalimba! (From Decio Gioieli’s CD) Kalimbas had been common in many, widespread places, having come along with Africans when they were torn from their native lands by slavers. How and why kalimbas disappeared is a sad and complicated tale. Today, the kalimba is more popular than ever. People all over the world are creating original, unique kalimba designs. People everywhere are doing exactly what the people of Africa always did with the kalimba over the last millennium: adapting it to play their own musics. The

You can learn to create your own variations! Some of the variations I created to accompany Wa Kalulu I have written before about how much fun it is to find variations that work with traditional African kalimba music. This article elaborates on this subject, and how I went about creating my own variations, first by improvisation, and then later in composition inspired by those earlier improvisations. Even in the case of songs such as “Wa Kalulu” for which only a standard part notation exists, we can create essentially infinite variations to go along with this music. All it takes is two karimba players, one with a good grasp of the