#karimba

The Secret Origins of the Mbira, I

"It was just then that a miracle happened – a miracle in the form of a song that came floating through the night air like a ghost of pure mercy and deliverance. This song had a magical spell about it. It stunned the fiendish Night Howlers. There was a musical instrument in the singer’s hands which in future years became known as the karimba or kalimba. This unearthly music sent a haunting melody through the night and wove a mighty spell around the squatting Night Howlers. It paralysed them – destroyed them."

Do you know SaReGaMa's story? He received a Hugh Tracey Karimba as a gift, but it was out of tune, so he started inventing his own tunings. Every few weeks, he would change the notes on the karimba, until it played the kind of music he wanted to play just then. He would play the karimba in its new tuning for a few days and become comfortable with it. Then, he would record and videotape an improvisation on that new karimba tuning.

That is how we got SaReGaMa Lotus, Air, and Freygish tunings.

A karimba improvisational strategy, part 1 - an overview of a 13-part series of tips for the African-tuned karimba

Most karimba music gets two or more different musical lines going at once. Keeping these two different musical lines going is a bit like juggling. Sometimes each thumb takes on a separate musical line, and sometimes the thumbs take on both themes, with one or two musical lines bouncing back and forth between the two thumbs.

In this series of tips, I show you a very simple way of thinking about the karimba that will give you access to some basic improvisational skills. For this purpose, we are going to approach playing the karimba with an artificial limitation. To the right hand we are going to assign the role of harmonic and rhythmic support. To the left hand we are going to assign the role of melodic flash.

Ultimately, you will play something on the right side that is steady but slowly changing, while you play fancy things on the left side. You can either figure out the left side melody in advance (composition) or on the fly (improvisation). If you have difficulty with improvising, I give you some suggestions for what to do.

Learn this technique and write your own songs!

The tablature features four different variations of a classic "two-phrase" song form. The first measure is one phrase, and seems to form a question, which is answered in the next measure by the second phrase. Notice that both the first and second measures start out the same way. This two-phrase structure is maintained through all variations.

Each variation is a handy bite-sized, two-measure segment of music, bounded by repeat signs. That is, you play the first two measures and repeat several times. When you are ready, go on to the next two-measure variation and repeat that. When you get to the last variation, instead of just ending, you may want to go backward through the variations to the beginning.

The purple stars refer to notes that have been added to or modified from the previous variation to make the music new and different. As such, we are building a song from the ground up.

Do you want to play traditional African music? The African-tuned karimba has a wide and deep repertoire of music from across the vast Zambezi Valley, and is thought to be closely related to the original mbira tuning from 1300 years ago.

This is not my most musical playing, but I did get into a pretty deep trance-like state due to the rhythmic shaking.