Hukwe Zawose
Michael Brook
Assembly
Real World, 2001
Hukwe Zawose is a verteran innovator in Tanzanian traditional music. Over the decades, he has tinkered with the Wagogo thumb piano (ilimbe) and traditional fiddle (zeze) to arrive at what he considers ideal dimensions, and he's recorded many beautifully hypnotic albums, rich in magical overtones, hypnotic polyphony, and deep, gong-like melodies from his large, iron-pronged ilimbe. Traditional music in Tanzania faces unusual challenges because the country is home to so many ethnic groups, none of which forms anything close to a majority. Shona mbira music in Zimbabwe, Mande griot music in West Africa, or even pygmee vocal music in central Africa all begin with large insider consituencies on which to base a quest for an international audience. Not so the small Wagogo of Tanzania. So it is impressive that Hukwe Zawose has recorded as much as he has, and been recognized so widely. Zawose's two relatively recent albums recorded at Real World studios, both featuring his son and favored student, Charles Zawose, are brilliant documents to the work of a great traditional artist. They also can be seen as summing up a body of work and preparing the way for something new. That something new comes here, when the Zawoses return to Real World to create music with Canadian producer and guitarist Michael Brook.
Brook produced Youssou N'Dour's breakthrough 1990 album Set, as well as highly successful crossover albums for the the late, great Pakistani qawwal Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But this project is unlike anything else in either artist's past repertoire. Brook and Zawose shared no language in common, and Zawose could not possibly have forseen where this project was headed, since Brook began with very simple backing tracks to be shaped, spliced, and garnished with guitars, percussion, a kick-ass brass section, and guest vocals from Zap Mama's Marie Daulne only after the Zawoses were back home in Tanzania. Given the risks involved in this phased creative approach, the record came out brilliantly. You could even say that it is the record Hukwe Zawose needed to make.
Th opener, "Kuna Kunguni (The Bedbugs Bite)" sets the stakes high with deep space power vocals from the Zawoses and big brass section bravado, contributed by a single player, Lee Thorberg, playing all the parts. Those horns reappear elsewhere, always to great effect, notably on "Awuno Mganga Ndeje (Cry of the Bush Bird)" where they go from interleaving forest polyphony worthy of the pygmees, to pumping out a fast line that could have come straight out of the latest merengue hit. This track also features excellent, spiney guitar playing from Brook. Speaking of pygmees, Daulne--who apparently grew up hearing her mother play Zawose's early records at home--contributes her own up-town, deep forest touches on two tracks, the light pygmee-pop tune "Chilumi Kigumu (Tricky Voices)" and "Chilumi Cha Kwetu (Voices from Home)" which adds a dash of funk to the heavy, dirge rock feel that seems an obligatory element of all Real World projects, a kind of hommage to Peter Gabriel, perhaps.
This is some moments of filling time, and some pretty generic beats, but overall, Assemby is a rich listening experience that blends the ancient feeling of the forest with the impatient sensibility of today's club music pretty comfortably. With R&B, rock, trance pop and clubby bass and drums in the mix, this record is a complete departure from Zawose's other work, and yet the presence of that work is felt throughout. What more could one ask from such a wide ranging collaboration?
Contributed by: Banning Eyre for www.afropop.org
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