-
Local Music From Out There CD REVIEW
[+ Show ]
If you take a look at the images of the band on Timbila’s MySpace page, the punchy strapline: “Afrod...If you take a look at the images of the band on Timbila’s MySpace page, the punchy strapline: “Afrodelic Xylophone Rock” posted on their facebook wall makes perfect sense.
Timbila’s first album, Remembering The Future throws together the wicked buzz of timbila, mbira (thumb-piano from Zimbabwe) vibrant bass and percussion, soaring guitar and captivating new vocals with unabated energy.
Named after the Chopi xylophone of Mozambique, the band successfully combines Banning Eyre’s all-over-Africa guitar playing experience with Nora Balaban’s Timbila and Mbira mastery. Together with their stunning band they have created an unpretentious sound that would be equally at home in the context of southern Africa and the East Village, New York.
What really works is that their renditions of some of the most covered traditional songs in southern African music are fresh.
Take Nilevile (I’m Drunk). The first instrument you hear is Timbila, giving the impression that it’ll be a straight xylophone number, but the ‘atch, atch’ funk of the guitar joining swiftly in says otherwise and the raucous lyrics quickly blow the lid off.
The vocals are a large part of what makes this album. Balaban and Bradshaw’s harmonies are divine, although Ed Klinger’s haunting tenor voice, beautifully exposed in the soft and trance-like Shanje (Jealousy), doesn’t feature enough elsewhere in the album.
The numerous tracks written in English largely by Balaban, display a real understanding of how the Shona and Chopi cultures build their lyrics and put meaning into their songs. The Trader, for example, amuses and inspires thought through its repetition and metaphor and conveys such experience that enables a listener from anywhere in the world to relate to it.
Further music to the ears is how yet another rendition of Karigamombe, a cornerstone in the Shona repertoire, can achieve a new sense of place and time with the sweet and dream-like (almost watery) vocals that sound as if they’re being piped in through the speakers of a cruise liner in the 1940s. Accompanied by the dazzling crispness of the mbiras and Eyre’s electric guitar, it’s a winner.
With minimal sleeve notes there isn’t much to trace the trajectories of the musicians and how they came together to create such an enjoyable piece of work but that’s what the interweb’s for.
http://www.myspace.com/timbila
http://www.facebook.com/pages/TIMBILA/330714349099
-
Moon Marimbas
[+ Show ]
In the welcome spring air of April we’re drinking delicious homemade lemonade outside the gorgeously...In the welcome spring air of April we’re drinking delicious homemade lemonade outside the gorgeously tranquil veranda to the back of Nora’s East Village apartment. A Marimba, a wooden xylophone from Zimbabwe, large enough for two people to play, sits inside as if it were a baby grand piano, surrounded by Mbiras (also from Zimbabwe) in all manner of tunings. At the foot of the Marimba rests an Mbila (pl. Timbila), the acoustically amplified wooden xylophone of the Chopi people of Mozambique. The apartment is spacious and airy but gives away a lifetime of vibrant musical involvement and Nora Balaban and Banning Eyre have kindly given me the time to discuss their band Timbila and the reaction to their first CD, Remembering The Future, (see fR.xxx for the review) which caused quite a stir among certain Shona circles when it was released earlier this year.
Banning explains: I had a very difficult experience when the CD came out and I gave it to Thomas because he really took great exception to it on many levels. Fundamentally, he objected to many things about the music starting with, on the one hand, ‘you’re corrupting it and changing it’ to, on the other hand, ‘you’re stealing from me’…you’re doing things wrong, people are pronouncing things wrong, the singing is terrible because it’s violating…it’s not correct Shona, it’s mixing things up, it’s…’ he took such profound offence to it as an assault on the tradition, he didn’t see it as building bridges (Chartwell Dutiro’s trademark approach to playing and teaching Mbira music) or being creative and it’s so funny because he’s always accusing people whose music sounds too much like his of not being original.”
Known as the Lion of Zimbabwe, Thomas Mapfumo is famous for bringing traditional Mbira songs to mainstream popularity in the 1970s by transcribing them to guitars and electric instruments in what was coined the Chimurenga style and used to great political effect during the Zimbabwean liberation war of 1966-79.
Banning fell in love with the celebrated Chimurenga songs thanks to a tape of early recordings that his former class mate Sean Barlow (founder of Afropop) sent him back in the early 1980s.
“I’d never heard of Mapfumo. I had no idea of it and hearing those Mbira melodies that were so familiar to me, from having listened to them so obsessively on those Nonesuch Explorer Records [during his studies in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, Connecticut], and hearing that on guitar was just tremendously exciting to me and I became just…totally fanatical about the whole thing and ….I would go down to Washington to this African music record store and buy everything on import.”
When Afropop launched, Banning was part of the trip to Zimbabwe where he met Mapfumo and his band The Blacks Unlimited. Learning Mbira guitar from Thomas’s saxophonist and Mbira player Chartwell Dutiro, Banning became a strong player and returned as often as possible. He also began research for his book about Mapfumo that is currently being edited.
Banning is fair when he says “I think that some of the things that Thomas said were perfectly legitimate, I don’t know whether I necessarily agree with him but he has every right to feel that way…. I have so much experience of playing with him and playing with his musicians and we use bass lines and bits of guitar lines that come out of some of his songs, you know,” but it has marked a very clear line between everything that has gone before and the direction that the band want to take in the style and composition of their new songs. “I just want to completely get away from that in anything further that we record so that at least he won’t feel personally abused by it even if he hates it you know?”
“Now, I really do just approach the music as music, I understand its religious and its political significance and the way it represented this reclamation of identity and I really respect those things but I also realise that for me it’s kind of pretentious, to act like that stuff is really what is motivating me because it’s really not and … it’s ultimately all about the music.”
Nora comments with a wide grin “he did say something that I loved…”
Banning picks up the thread, “He said ‘You must stop that woman’. As you can see I’ve failed”. He laughs but when you consider the traditions that Nora has pulled together, Mbira, Timbila (for the most part typically male dominated instruments), poetry and rock music too, one can see why Thomas might feel threatened by the fact that the frontman of Timbila is actually a white, American woman who has always known her own mind when it comes to music.
Her richness of experience in playing African music (Marimba, Congas, Mbira, Timbila) is undeniable and she respects the traditions but tradition is not what she is aiming for with this band. “It’s not the culture that I grew up in so I don’t think I could ever have the same kind of connection with it that Chartwell or any of the other Zimbabweans do so I think, on one hand I understand it as best I can and I respect it and I also like to make the music my own, do my own thing with it.”
It has always been that way. Of her 3 years spent playing Marimba (she’d accepted the job before she’d even had one Marimba lesson) with Brett Stewart’s band Mapenzi, in San Francisco she remembers, “It was really fun but the whole time I was in that band I had just come from New York and I was like into Patti Smith and Television and Talking Heads and the Ramones and that was where my heart was so I’d be playing African Marimbas and then hearing Richard Hell and Richard Lloyd and all those guys like playing all over the African Marimbas…. When I would tell the guys this idea they were like mortified and like ‘Oh Nora!’ but that was my idea right from the beginning, you know and so I developed this incredible passion for the African music while keeping that passion. I always wanted to combine it. Nobody understood it.”
She also had her first encounter at this time with what she terms as ‘Shona Scold’ (a very ‘preservative’ approach to teaching and learning with the implicit expectation that you are learning a sacred tradition that must not be tampered with). Whilst taking a couple of lessons with Erica Azim. “She made me pretty much promise her that I would never play any other kind of music on the mbira …well I just said okay because she was the only one teaching and I wanted to learn how to play....and I went home and put a pick up on the mbira and plugged it into all this distortion and all these pedals and I was rocking out and playing …and I was like no one was going to tell me what to do! She taught me probably about 6 songs and I ended up moving back to New York, plonked my stuff there and went off to Zimbabwe. I was there for a year and I went four times so I really learned to play there. I pretty much lived with the Chigambas…”
From Zimbabwe, Nora made an adventure across the border into Mozambique to find the Timbila master Venancio Mbande, whom she’d first heard play on a cassette recording 10 years earlier (she remembered thinking they sounded “like Marimbas from the moon!”).
Banning calls it destiny that, armed only with a Rough Guide, the name of the region and her friend (and Mbira legend) Cosmas Magaya, she managed to stumble into Venancio Mbande’s entire orchestra playing outside a hotel on the beach in a one-off performance for some visiting UK Government officials.
Nora spent weeks with Venancio’s family taking lessons from him and his children. The local way of learning being ‘you watch, you play’. “Yeah, they’re brilliant!” exclaims Nora. I had all the little kids teaching me like really fast and… the only reason they know how to teach a little bit is because I learned 2 words in Chopi…. “slow” and “stop” and then they learned how to break things down and teach me.”
The Chopi people made a big impact on Nora (search for Timbila on YouTube). The civil war decimated the Chopi orchestras that had developed in the mining regions and Nora plans to help Venancio set up a school in his village in order to stabilise the Timbila tradition in the region again.
“Nora was very emphatic that I needed to go and have the experience of going and hearing Venancio,” says Banning of the experience. Indeed when he made his pilgrimage to meet Venancio, Banning liked the music but he had no intention of learning to play it. “I 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 happening 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 experience as a musician.
Indeed the band has come a long way since their first meeting in Harare in 1996/97 and their subsequent acoustic gigs in New York as The Glamour Boys. From an ever changing line-up, usually featuring whichever Mbira player was in town from Zimbabwe at the time, they “got to the point where we were just a band of Americans with nobody who could say they were representing the tradition and we were absolutely completely free to just do whatever pleased us…it was kind of liberating”
Louisa, 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 coming from and so he helped us to have a plausible rock vibe.” Dirck Westervelt has the rock background but also brings his years of playing with the Blacks Unlimited to the table.
Ultimately, 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 like, Bob, it has to sound like this and then I’ll sing some nonsense and he goes, I love that, brilliant, 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 of that it’s not trying 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 something 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…”
-
In Harlem, Reverberations from Afar
[+ Show ]
In Harlem, Reverberations from Afar
Returned from a festival circuit in Morocco, the band Timbila...In Harlem, Reverberations from Afar
Returned from a festival circuit in Morocco, the band Timbila played well-worn originals and spirited new ones.
The group known as Timbila is not as foreign or unusual in theory as it proves to be in sound. Mixing and matching traditional, even ethnic instruments, as Timbila does, within a Western rock band fabric has spawned many creative sounds in indie circles of late: Joanna Newsom, Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, Beirut or even Tune-Yards have flung Balkan brass, ukuleles, accordions and harps into the ever-splintering sensibility of popular folk.
An Afropop amalgam, Timbila is of a different piece altogether. And its distinguishing features are the ones it gave voice during an evening at Farafina Café in Harlem last month. The band’s identity stems from the timbila, a Mozambican xylophone: It provides the centerpiece of the group’s arrangement onstage and is equally center to the vibrant spirit that pilots the music. Played by Nora Balaban, one of Timbila’s two singers, the so-named instrument rings heavily and with muddled intonation.
If it pitted the group with technical obstacles, they were imperceptible during the five-piece’s two sets at the small world music club. Agile and light in humor, the band’s songs rise and dip in animated tempos and frequently major keys. “The Trader” arrived early, its ebullient guitar frills a backdrop for Balaban and harmonizer Louisa Bradshaw’s vocals. Its lyrics poeticize a laundry list exchanges that, at times, reads heavy—“I sold / My breasts to wild men in Borneo”–though Balaban and Bradshaw’s cheeky delivery at Farafina made other lines like, “I sold my husband to a hand of gin,” appear more the emotional backbone.
The timbila was played in half of the band’s songs, which were usually the more invigorated takes. When not singing and playing, Balaban is a sight of absorbed physicality: swaying and walloping her wooden planks, as if to remain audible in the mix—though her instrument had its own microphone. She also played the mbira, a thumb-plucked piano on a wooden plank small enough to be handheld. In either case, Balaban’s instruments played the role a rhythm guitar might, chiming arpeggios or blocked chords with a vital mid-range. The group sang most of its songs in English, though some dipped into Shona and Chopi, languages tied to both southern African instruments and their respective traditions.
A troop of Americans, the core of Timbila meshed over ten years ago in Zimbabwe when Balaban, still studying her instruments, met guitarist Banning Eyre and the bassist Dirck Westervelt. Since then, the songs and lineup have undergone expansion and shifts. In its current form Timbila performs with accented crispness, highlighted by the band’s unexpected breaks and hits in forceful numbers like “Remembering the Future.”
But the sensation that permeated Timbila’s performance was one of sharing. It was a frequent scene: Balaban playing her mbira while sauntering over to guitarist Eyre during a jubilant solo. A player who appears to enjoy every note he plays—and hears—Eyre created interesting arcs, unfettered by the eighth-note consistency in rhythm that West African style commands. He interlaced syncopated stops and starts in satisfying doses, embodying them with zest. The enjoyment those brought to his band was transparent, and underlined the extent to which nonverbal communication and an interest in the statements of other players shaped the notes themselves.
-
In and Out of Africa Part 1: Nora Balaban
[+ Show ]
I am amazed that I only met Nora Balaban recently. I had known about her store "Tribal Soundz," the ...I am amazed that I only met Nora Balaban recently. I had known about her store "Tribal Soundz," the East Village haven for world music lovers and musicians for years (it is gone now, like the community that suppported it). Somehow our paths never crossed, and it was only when I saw her play in the group "Timbila" that it occurred to me that hers was a story worth telling. I started out by interviewing her, videotaping the band and as we spoke, she brought out photos, CDs, movies and even a 45! (The record, not the gun.) To try to put everything into one short piece was a bit beyond me, so I decided to split the info into two installments. The first segment concentrates on how she "found" the timbila, and the second will focus more on the mbira and her work with Timbila the band.
-
In and Out of Africa part 2: Banning, Nora and Timbila
[+ Show ]
About a month ago, I videotaped the band "Timbila" at their CD release party. Something happens when...About a month ago, I videotaped the band "Timbila" at their CD release party. Something happens when one observes a band through a camera, and I found myself thinking, "There's a story here." Unlike so many of the younger bands in New York City these days (whose members come together as strangers) that bloom for a while and then morph into other musical manifestations, Timbila is a band that evolved over a period of almost fifteen years. The story has deep roots in the world music community of New York, and front person Nora Balaban and guitarist Banning Eyre are a large part of it. For those who remember the funkier, more artful days of the East Village, the name Tribal Soundz, the music and instrument store that Nora ran for many years, will bring back fond memories. A few weeks ago I profiled Nora, only because I knew that the narrative was too big for just one posting. Here's the second section, in which I interviewed Banning Eyre, senior editor of Afropop Worldwide, noted author, journalist and guitarist. I wanted Banning to explain the challenges of working with both the mbira and mbila (timbila is plural of mbila) and combining elements of the African music he so loves with Nora's passion for rock
-
QUOTE FROM HASSAN HAKMOUN
[+ Show ]
If you love African music, especially the music of Zimbabwe, you will love listening to this great b...If you love African music, especially the music of Zimbabwe, you will love listening to this great band. They have created their own mixed sound of rock & roll with Southern African music. I fell in love with it !
Hassan Hakmoun
-
QUOTE FROM KARINE PLANTADIT (Dancer)
"Its totally savage cherie..."
-
QUOTE FROM ALEX FOSTER (SNL)
[+ Show ]
If you cant go to Mozambique or Zimbabwe, seeing this band is the next best thing!
Alex Foster (S...If you cant go to Mozambique or Zimbabwe, seeing this band is the next best thing!
Alex Foster (Sax, Saturday Night LIve Band)
-
QUOTE FROM TM STEVENS
[+ Show ]
Yo ... This is TM Stevens ... Shocka Zooloo!
I have been a fan of african music for-evuary. African...Yo ... This is TM Stevens ... Shocka Zooloo!
I have been a fan of african music for-evuary. African music is actually a part of all music and I dig the mix from different music & cultures. I had the pleasure and honor of playing with TIMBILA, another horizon crossed as I've always wanted to play traditional african music. TIMBILA is like a young plant growing into aa giant tree. So, look out for them ... here they come!
TM Stevens
-
QUOTE FROM Mark Stewart (Music Director, Paul Simon)
[+ Show ]
" The minimum daily adult requirement for groove & good boogie have not yet been established. But i... " The minimum daily adult requirement for groove & good boogie have not yet been established. But if & when they are, TIMBILA, would be the single serving that satisfied the requirement, and then some. TIMBILA should be the house band at the United Nations. Dance first, solutions to follow .."
-
QUOTE FROM Maure Aronson (World Music/CRASHarts, Boston)
[+ Show ]
"Timbila put together the beat of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and New York City and came up with a hard dri..."Timbila put together the beat of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and New York City and came up with a hard driving foot-stomping groove that commands immediate attention. An original sound that demands to be heard"
supersonic
