Although learning things by ear in this manner is not particularly exceptional in the grand scheme of things, I rarely have the opportunity in the jazz world to learn tunes  in this manner.  He proceeded starting from the guitar part and singing us each a line until we learned it.  Obviously this works especially well with short vamp-y tunes, but something about his inherent musicality really came through and it was a really gratifying experience.

I have been struggling in the Kora Band of late to figure out how to go about learning and arranging traditional tunes without over-arranging them and making huge, lengthy, and hard-to-read parts.  This was a great experience that made me wish I had as much rehearsal time with the kora band as I do with the Bantus!  Then we could learn everything by ear.  Oh well, hello I-5!

Anyhow, I just thought to post a little note about that as it was somewhat illuminating.  Now, back to making new charts for the Kora Band’s fall tour!  More on that forthcoming…

Loveness’ music is squarely in the great tradition of Zimbabwean electric pop, pioneered by such artists as Thomas Mapfumo (with whom most of the members of our band have spent some time touring) Oliver Mtukuzi, and Jonah Sithole (check out this link for a fantastic cassette of his group courtesy of WorldService) with lots of other regional and even South African influences as well.  It’s great fun and is one of the first non-jazz projects I have been involved in for quite a while, which is a huge breath of fresh air for me!  It’s easy to get caught up in the frighteningly insular jazz world, and this band provides a great opportunity to play dance music, something I don’t do nearly enough (though the Bridgetown Sextet has been really fun on that front as well, in a different vein).  It’s also been a great lesson in the importance of very specific methods of working through relatively simple chord progressions, especially since myself, the guitar, and the marimba are all inhabiting the same sonic space, more or less.  I’ve learned quite a bit about some elements of the mbira tradition (though there’s much much more to learn there), and of course it’s been great being in a group with no written music!  Unlike some of my other bands, where one of the most difficult steps towards putting on a great show is to memorize all the music, there are no charts to begin with in this band (although I confess to writing down a few of the trumpet lines for myself) so we’re set to go in that regard, although the classically trained part of me can’t help but wonder which method is more efficient in the end.  And, finally, Zimbabwean pop was really my first introduction to African music (I spent countless hours on trains in France listening to Mapfumo during my time studying there in 2004 and 2006) so it’s a sort of “full circle” thing to be playing in such a band.

It’s been an interesting few years since I finished up jazz school at PSU, and I’ve found myself (in typical fashion) making occasionally impulsive decisions about what direction to go in musically and which kind of projects to start and to focus on, and I feel that only recently am I gaining a bit more of an objective perspective on being a musician and on what I want to do.  Being in this band has taught me a lot about the importance of playing the music I love, regardless of whatever preconceptions may have been instilled in me from being in jazz school, or being on the jazz scene, or just being a jazz nerd!  It’s a bit surprising to me how easy such external ideas can become internalized in some sense, but I’m really glad to have opportunities such as this come up to remind myself about the best parts of being a musician for me: having fun, making people happy, and connecting to the audience through groove!

Here are a few tracks we recorded in December – there’s a couple more at our site too (click to listen:)

Loveness Wesa and the Bantus – Mbire
Loveness Wesa and the Bantus – Sevenza
Loveness Wesa and the Bantus – Njelimana

Well, after all that I would be amiss not to mention our upcoming show this Saturday night in Portland.  We’re putting on a concert to help raise funds to bring Loveness’ mother to Portland from Zimbabwe.  It’s a worthy cause – life in Zimbabwe is hard and is not getting any easier with Mugabe’s government continuing to cause great hardship for the population.  We’ll be playing from 7:30-9:30 at the Ainsworth United Church of Christ – it should be a great time.  Full details as well as some new recordings we made in December are all at our site http://www.bantusband.com

Photo credit: Maureen Oliver.  More photos of the band are at her blog here.