by Berimbau » Sun Jan 29, 2006 2:52 pm
Dear David & Zeno,
I would love to hear from Bart, but can you contact him, Zeno? He now has a new unlisted number (too many people bothering him for old articles?) and I have lost his e-mail address along with so much else.............. Now I had a staggeringly HUGE library stemming from both my original research on four continents, 20 years of Rutgers/ Princeton interlibrary loans, and many kind contributions from the previous generation of scholars who shared their original unpublished ms, photos, and field notes, but who are no longer with us. Now where exactly does one find a good KiKongo dictionary and grammar these days? You just learn to let go of these things or it will drive you crazy! I do count my blessings! My brother-in-law is working on my house in Waveland, and he recently found 40 of my cds WAY out in the woods. I was bemoaning my lost Kituxi disc (he is an Angolan hungu player - a precusor to the Brasilian berimbau de barriga) on some defunct Luanda hotel label, and now it is back in my cd player! Miracles abound in Mississippi, as I'm certain any good Baptist preacher would tell you.
Fortunately, my memory is still somewhat intact. Now David their are actually two seperate lamellaphones which share organological traits with the "Marimbula de guira" depicted in Ortiz. One comes from Western Nigeria (uba aka) and the other (forgotten name?) from the Zaire/Angolan border lands. However, the uba aka has a split keyboard UNLIKE Ortiz's example. Now how I wish I had a picture of the Central African instrument to post for you!
As far as I know there are NO examples of giant lamellaphones from Central Africa, perhaps this is because the region didn't seem to have hosted the large amount of African RETURNEES that are found in West African countries. Since the advent of the slave trade and subsequent European colonialism, African musical instruments have at times migrated LONG distances from their original homes. Some case actually pre-date this, and remain for the time, anomolous, such as the log xylophones Kubik recorded in West Africa and East Africa.
Now despite Tracey's old African Music Journal article "A case for the name Mbira," and my own attempts to employ it, followed closely by a sharp blow to my head from Dr. Kubik, please use the neutral term lamellaphone. Mbira is one of hundreds of SPECIFIC terms for these instruments that localize it temporally, geographically, and organologically. Chisanji, karimba, adidigbo, likimbe, etc. It would be tantamount to calling every lute an "Oud," which millions of guitarists, and some oudists, would surely object to. Confusing too. How many of us congueros get called tom-tom beaters, bongo players (not that there's anything wrong with that), etc.
Well I'm heartened that there are still some jug players in Cuba. I think that Pops Davis and Hammie Nixon were the last of a long line of African-American players here in the South, and the Kweskin Jug Band's master player Fritz Richmond also passed this past year. As they say when a griot passes, a library is burning down.
Saludos,
Berimbau
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