Sometimes it takes an outsider to fully appreciate a culture’s traditions. In 1972 American musician and budding ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner traveled to Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) to study the mbira, a thumb piano the Shona people had used for over a thousand years. Staying in a hotel in the western part of the country, Berliner was roused from sleep by a strangely familiar sound.
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Back then, most people in the U.S. were at least as ignorant of mbira music as that Elvis cover band. American jazz, soul, and rock had already saturated Africa, but African music, popular or traditional, was largely unheard here. Although labels like Folkways and Lyrichord in the U.S. and Le Chant du Monde in France had been recording indigenous music from around the world for several decades, their dryly packaged releases were geared toward academics, not the record-buying public.
Though not the first person to record Shona mbira music, Berliner was the first to introduce it to a large non-African audience, taking care to situate the music in its original role as an integral part of ritual ceremonies. He also wrote the 1978 book The Soul of Mbira, envisioned as a companion piece to the albums, and is currently working on a follow-up. In 1999 he organized a group of mbira master musicians’ first appearances in the U.S., including performances at the first Chicago World Music Festival. Now American audiences could enjoy these polyphonic repetitions live, as several mbiras–whose plucked metal keys resonate with a sweet marimbalike tone–created an intricate web of contrapuntal patterns atop the insistent rattle of the shaker called a hosho, while vocalists murmured, shouted, and sobbed, telling stories and summoning spirits.
The inquisitive American next persuaded an mbira master named Hakurotwi Mude, who had heard Berliner on the radio, to take him under his wing. Mude’s extended family of mbira players trained Berliner and eventually performed on the recordings issued by Nonesuch. “It was very strange to the whole group because he was the first of his kind that wanted to study mbira with us seriously,” says one of those musicians, Cosmas Magaya, who’s currently visiting Berliner in Durham.
