Joseph Weinberg is a South African mbira player and performing musician based in Berlin. He leads a group of Nyunga Nyunga students with his Zimbabwean friend Lineker Empunzi. Joe told me about an hour-long slot on a non-commercial radio show (Radio Kiosk, FM 88.4) where his group had been invited to play and talk about…

Last week we had the pleasure of welcoming journalist Peter Tanyanyiwa from Harare’s newspaper The Herald for an interview at Sekuru Chawasarira’s place. Read his article online here. In case there are difficulties, I’ve inserted a snapshot below. Some of our statements apparently got mixed up a bit during editing, nevertheless we’re happy about the…

Today our long-missed project partner Othnell “Mangoma” Moyo arrived, returning from his US tour yesterday. Of course he couldn’t be stopped from playing matepe with Sekuru. Later on, we started recording Mangoma interviewing Sekuru about his personal and musical biography.

The day started with Samora noticing a strange noises from one block afar, shortly before the power went off. He said he once heard the same sounds when something in a transformer station blew up, and expected us to stay without electricity for a couple of days. Part of our equipment is a little solar…

Today Sekuru finished the matepe. After all keys were in place and tuned, Sekuru took them out one by one to file in the “scars” – decorative grooves on the upper side which also helps to keep the keys in place below the bar. He polished each key with the file and cuts off the…

We spent the later afternoon in the yard, chatting, listening to Sekuru’s 19-key karimba, drinking beer, myself trying to tune the two Zonke-tuning matepes which I had commissioned a few months ago to my liking, under Sekuru’s guidance. We quickly realised that filming a master craftsman building an instrument only goes that far – he…

This Sunday was our day off. We had some nice chats in the afternoon and Sekuru brought up a point he had already mentioned before: “One matepe is enough to call the spirits, with the nhare [mbira dzavadzimu] you need two instruments (or an exceptionally good player that can take the role of two).” I…

Recording outdoors is not easy. Every morning we set up our equipment, and take it down in the evening. At daytime there’s usually no electricity – which turned out to be a blessing, otherwise you hear noise and music from all over. There’s a whole range of familiar street noises from the other side of…

Enjoy…

We started the days with an overview of all tools and materials Chawasarira uses for matepe making, as well as possible replacements of workarounds if some of these tools are missing (like they did for mbira makers of former generations). Sekuru forges the left thumb keys in the order of which they are played in…