Keeping the Embers Alive: Musicians of Zimbabwe (review)

In Keeping the Embers Alive: Musicians of Zimbabwe, Myrna Capp, an assistant professor of piano performance and pedagogy at Seattle Pacific University, presents a collection of thirteen interviews she has conducted with an array of Zimbabwean cultural performers including musicians, dancers, and poets. Among the interview ees are well-known world beat music stars Oliver Mtukudzi and Stella Chiweshe, mbira-ist Ephat Mujuru, and Chiwoniso Maraire, the daughter of famed mbiraist Dumisani Maraire (himself now deceased). At the University of Washington in the 1980s Capp studied mbira performance with Dumisani Maraire. During a period from 1986 through 1994 she traveled and lectured in sub-Saharan Africa, driven by "a desire to find a way to help preserve this traditional African music" (p. 5). Capp later continued to study mbira with Sam Mujuru in Harare, Zimbabwe (though a representative conversation with Sam Mujuru, strangely, is not included in her selection of interviews in this volume).

These interviews yield insights into the personal biographies of several varied Zimbabwean artists, as well as their performance practices and individual styles. In constructing her interview questions, Capp returns frequently to concepts of both tradition and improvisation in Zimbabwean performance (including a fascination she exhibits with the narrative improvisation technique of oral poet Paul Nyathi). Capp perhaps could have explained more fully her choices for including these particular thirteen interviewees, while excluding others, and she might have alluded to any existing connections between these people or factors that distinguish them from one another, for example on stylistic, social, or political grounds. With overt political, economic, and social tensions especially prevalent in Zimbabwe throughout the time period represented in the book, as well as more recently, Capp notably avoids questioning the interviewees about potential musical embodiments of such tensions. This may be due to her acknowledgement of the possible sensitivity of such questions, though she offers no comment of her own about the apolitical nature of her questioning (nor any hint of her own recognition of such prevalent political and social tensions). Such a gap may be taken as doubly significant if the powerful impact of musical expression both in Zimbabwe's colonial and postcolonial past, as well as in its spiritual practices, is taken into consideration.

Capp states in her introduction that the "starting point for talking about Zimbab wean music and musicians is the mbira, a lamellophone which is a percussive instrument consisting of a small wooden board or box onto which a number of metal keys have been attached, with metal objects or shells added to produce buzzing" (p. 5). She rarely takes the opportunity, though, to delve into the varied and rich cultural and historical significance manifest in this instrument and in performance upon it (see, for example, Paul F. Berliner, The Soul of Mbira [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981] or Thomas Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000]). Nor does she comment upon, for example, the aesthetic or other significance of the noted buzzing sounds produced by the mbira. The interview questions themselves tend to privilege Capp's own interests over an explicit sensitivity to actualities of everyday Zimbabwean lived experience. Yet, as an admittedly preservationist project, the book does capture in print the specifically directed stories of important Zimbabwean performers.

Black and white photographs of each interviewee, taken by Kristin Capp, appear at the beginning and throughout each chapter. Numerous other black and white photographs of unspecified people and places appear, sometimes a bit disconcertingly, throughout the text. The reader might wonder who these nameless people are, why their images are placed where they are, and what connection these people might have to the interviewer or interview ees. The book also contains numerous drawings that often appear to have no clear connections to the text that appears adjacent to them. The additional photographs and drawings are included apparently to...