Take One
August 7th, 2010
The games have begun. We did our first recording session on Friday, August 6th. I would have burst out the champagne (they actually have champagne in MalawiJ) in celebration but I thought it much more fitting to do that once the album is completed…especially considering the logistical issues of doing a full-scale album here in Lilongwe, Malawi. This isn’t exactly Nashville.
8:20am Arrival
Kaitlin our amazing piano player and I got there early so she could practice. We ran over all of her parts and I tried my hand at “being producer,” something which I am still getting the hang of. As soon as we begin rehearsing, the difficulty of getting a clean recording hit me: There was a sprinkler ts-tsing next door, excited dogs who decided to have choir practice right after we arrived, birds migrating outside, and the roommate moving out of his room. You can plan ahead, but sometimes planning is just to make you feel better. I managed to find someone to walk the dogs, but the birds were set on being on the album.
8:45am Enter the Engineer
Our sound engineer arrives with all of his gear and we begin the task of jerryrigging a studio out of our dear friend’s piano room. Finding a piano is virtually impossible in Lilongwe. Transporting a piano is…impossible. So when we found this beautiful German Sandner piano, since we couldn’t bring the piano to the studio we brought the studio to the piano. We took off the front panels to expose the hammers and set up two mics in front on either side of Kaitlin.
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The Day That Hunger Died Of Thirst
Eletrocactus
Since February, I’ve been following a local rock band called Eletrocactus. I met them while they were working in a recording studio as they started mastering their first CD. I was attracted to the way they drew on regional imagery in their music. Almost everything they do refers to the sertão, the semi-arid hinterland, of the Brazilian Northeast. One of the members of the band explained to me that they use regional rhythms like the baião to musically evoke Ceará’s interior, and maracatu cearense for Fortaleza and urban life. Songs have names like “Calango Eletrônico” (Electronic Lizard), “Fogo do Sertão” (Fire of the Sertão), and “Seco Sertão Sangrado” (Bled Dry Sertão). The title track of their new album is called, “O Dia em que a Fome Morreu de Sede” (The Day that Hunger Died of Thirst). At times the singers’ vocal style mimics rural traditions like cantoria and embolada, and the melodic and harmonic foundations are mostly blues and rock. They’re constantly combining images of the city and the sertão, tradition and modernity, local and global.
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Mara Kumbweza Banda
“First of all, it’s Mara Kumbweza Banda. I come from the Banda clan. The family name is Kumbweza. So it is important to identify myself from which family I come from.”
Mara Kumbweza Banda
We met Mara at her office of the Pendulum Project on June 23rd and she was very keen to do a narrative. Her reputation had been built up before our meeting by two of her co-workers and I had a good feeling. My instincts were right. Mara was amazing:
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India on Shuffle
The beauty of music lies in its ability to provide feeling across borders, classes, and races, and to resonate where words fail. I remember hearing the Gypsy Kings playing live at a Merkato 55 brunch party in New York; I remember dancing to Cuban band Las Orishas at Poble Espanol in Barcelona; I remember listening to Australian rock from my tent at Glastonbury in the U.K.; I remember singing “Beautiful” along with Akon, live at the Indian Premiere League Launch in Mumbai. With such an eclectic fusion of sounds crossing the globe, I wondered about India’s spot on the playlist. While Bollywood music is certainly a global export, my time in Mumbai has introduced me to a new, innovative, and increasingly popular scene that is gaining momentum all over India and on the international stage.
Indian Ocean Performing
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Gnawa Show at the Fulbright Symposium
Every year the Moroccan American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange (aka MACECE) hosts a 3-day conference to bring together all the Fulbrighteres in the country to present their findings. After opening remarks by US Ambassador Samuel Kaplan and his wife Sylvia, we heard from professors, students, and visiting scholars, on a variety of subjects ranging from Maghrebi conceptions of citizenship, to religious rhetoric during the Spanish Civil War, to the Equity and Reconciliation Commission established to address injustices from the Years of Lead, to the new generation of hip hop artists in Casablanca. As for my own presentation: New Perceptions of Gnawa: Reassessing Tagnawit (Authenticity), I faced a dilemma of sorts. How do I go about talking up saints and rituals without angering the spirits? So, I decided to model my 15 minutes of Fulbright fame after a Lila, complete with music and dance by none other than Nacim Haddad and Zakaria Aktoui. As tradition dictates, we began with songs from Awlad Al-Bambara, and ended with Aisha Qandisha. Check it out. I’ve included a 2-minute recap of my slides (with music) and I’ve paired the performances with transliterated/translated lyrics below:
The Presentation in a nutshell:
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