mbira and drumming

When I'd finished college and was living at home with my dad in Boulder, my friend asked me to attend a course with her at CU in ethnomusicology. She had this enormous crush on the guy who was a guest lecturer.

He was a white San Franciscan. When he was about thirteen, a neighbor of his, who was from Zimbabwe, told his mother that their respective ancestors had been talking to each other and that he was destined to go to Zimbabwe and become a master drummer. Zimbabwe had been suffering from a very long draught and the neighbor explained that everywhere he would play his drums, it would rain when he played.

Strangely (and I don't know how his mother decided this), it was determined that he would go to Zimbabwe and do what his ancestors foretold. Sure enough, everywhere he played, it rained.

When he came to the University of Colorado that summer, he was in his late twenties and had married a dancer from the village where he spent his teens and young adulthood.

I should Google him and check up on him.

Anyway, he introduced us to drumming and to the mbira, a thumb piano. I loved the mbira. The tonalities and the African scale from that region are so incredibly upbeat and happy-sounding--quite incongruent to the actual state of affairs there.