It is a windy day in Johannesburg, South Africa. Thick dark clouds assemble in the sky; the wind is as swift as rush hour. As we meet, Oliver Mtukudzi carries a brown bag, full of his life, on his shoulder. He carries the bag everywhere, just as he wears his trademark poor boy cap. Dressed in a black jacket and grey pants, he stands high up on the stairs to welcome us. He is in South Africa to promote his 65th album, Eheka! Nhai Yahwe, which features South African jazz legend Hugh Masekela. It’s a remarkable career stretching back some 41 years with songs that have enlivened parties all over the world with hits like Neria, Todii and Wasakara.
“I never decided to be in the music industry. It was in me. My mother said ‘you are a good singer but you will never surpass your birth cry. Your birth cry was so beautiful’. So I believe that’s when I started singing, from my first breath,” says Mtukudzi.
Born in 1952 in Highfield, a suburb in Harare, Zimbabwe, on September 22 at 3AM; music runs in his blood. Both his parents were musicians. They met at a choir competition and the competition never ended. They competed at home and the children were the judges.
“If we needed a favor from dad, then dad won and if we needed a favor from mum, mum won.”
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It wasn’t long before he followed.
“I made a three-string guitar for myself from a tin around 1969 or early 1970s with the help of a [relative]. I was always playing it. My father didn’t like it and he broke the guitar,” he recalls.
It wasn’t going to stop him. He made up songs as a child and sang everywhere.
“One day, I decided to perform for my parents standing on the table and they enjoyed it so much I didn’t get smacked for standing on the table. I remember my mother noticed I had been standing on the table, two or three days later. That’s how good it was,” he chuckles.
Mtukudzi followed his passion. In the 1970s, he joined Wagon Wheels, a band which included yet another Zimbabwean star, Thomas Mapfumo, the man who wrote Nyoka Musango and is known as the king of Chimurenga music.
“I love what I do. If I was doing a career, I would be worried about how much money I can make. I am yet to decide on a career to take on. This is not a career for me. I am just doing me. This is about understanding the purpose of a song, to bring life and hope to the people and to heal broken hearts. If you do it right, there is more in appreciation than getting paid.”
His skill is appreciated from Angola to Zimbabwe. He has won many awards; among them, the National Arts Merit Awards, Zimbabwe Music Awards, KORA Awards and South African Music Awards.
“All my songs are my favorites. If it’s not one of my favorites, I will just throw it away. You won’t get to hear it. It won’t make it to my album. Awards are an appreciation. They shouldn’t put any pressure on me, otherwise I will lose the purpose of the song,” he says.
The deep voice of Mtukudzi has brought music to the next generation. Taught by their father, his children Selmor and Sam Mtukudzi became music stars in their own right.
“One day, in March 2010, I was in Johannesburg and my son, Sam, was supposed to pick me up in Harare at the airport.”
Mtukudzi sent Sam a message telling him he was no longer coming. Unfortunately, the text didn’t go through. Sam drove to the airport to pick him up. And tragedy struck.
“I got a call that evening and they said he had been in an accident on his way home from the airport. They were taking him to the hospital and I was to come as soon as possible. They wouldn’t give me the details,” says Mtukudzi.
When he arrived at the airport all his close friends and family were there.
“I realized something was really wrong. They were all crying and I knew my son had passed on. I couldn’t believe it. My last words with him, we joked and now he was gone. I am still learning to live with it.”
This is a big loss for Mtukudzi. Sam performed and toured with his father.
“He was always on my left side when he was on stage with me. That alone, when I’m on stage, it makes me remember he is not there. Every time I am on stage, I feel the emptiness but it is also therapeutic because I feel him the most when I’m on stage.”
After Sam’s death, it was hard to sing again. In 2012, after two long years of grief, Mtukudzi released Sarawoga – in his mother tongue, it means “left alone”.
“Some of the songs in the album were meant to be in collaboration with my son so this was some kind of therapy for me. I didn’t want to throw away the work we had sweated on. I had to finish it off,” he says.
One of the songs in the album is Shamiso, named after Mtukudzi’s daughter.
“Sam was more of a friend than a son. One of the songs we were working on was Shamiso. She was getting married and we were going to sing the song at her wedding.”
It hasn’t been an easy journey. According to Mtukudzi, for as long as there are people, there is something to talk about and if there is something to talk about, then there is something to sing about.
“My music comes from the people, the environment and some of it from personal experiences. Things come up when I’m driving and I park on the side and write it down, you don’t budget time for a song. This is a tough industry. There are a lot of obstacles but you have to be strong. There is no shortcut, you just have to go all the way and remain true to yourself,” he says.
As Mtukudzi learns to live with the loss of his son, he is trying to break barriers. He is adapting a famous 1961 Zimbabwean book, Pfumo Reropa, spear of blood in chiShona, by Patrick Chakaipa.
“I’m not going to retire. I can’t run away from myself. I noticed that some of our literature is being thrown away. It is being ignored probably because there are no visuals to them, so I felt I should take one of the popular books at home and script it into motion picture to encourage our youngsters to be more interested in African literature.”
Through the loss and the pain, Mtukudzi is trying to build something of substance for Africa out of the ruins. Surely, that is a tribute to the loss of a loved son.

“Every Time I’m  On Stage, I Feel The  Emptiness”

His parents could not understand it. How could you pay the bills by playing a guitar? Also, the idea of loose morals associated with musicians didn’t sit well with young Francis Chris Phiri’s parents. This drove young Phiri, known as Lawi, abbreviated from Nzululwazi – custodian of wisdom in the Ngoni language – to work hard on his dream to become a jazz musician, even though he was banned from visiting friends who played musical instruments by his parents, but encouraged to go to church.
“At first church wasn’t fun but when I realized there were musical instruments there, and there was a chance I could practice with the youth group, church became a hideout and a training ground for me,” he says
The church choir helped develop Lawi; he is now an award-winning artist after being named the Best Acoustic Jazz Artist at the Malawian Music Awards and receiving a nomination at the All Africa Music Awards for Best Male Artist in Southern Africa.
Lawi is among the up-and-coming young jazz artists in Southern Africa and getting recognition across the continent.
“Music is a universal language, this makes it quite easy to communicate with lovers of music anywhere,” says Lawi.
“The African continent is big and for your work to be well received by many is a great achievement.  We have many musicians from Africa, and of African origin, with exceptional talent, skills and experience who work very hard to bring about great African music.”
Lawi remembers his first time in a recording studio; he wished he could relive it every day. That’s the day he fell in love with production. He then started saving for his first computer and tiny speakers to teach himself how to produce.
He recalls having a lot of friends interested in music. They created a network where they shared ideas and the music produced from different recording spaces. They called it sessions.
Lawi says he did not take his music to radio stations, but some of them were playing his songs although he does not know how they got the music.
“I thought that the work was not all that great but people enjoyed it. I can say it has been a long journey of hard work and a constant need to perfect my skills,” he says.
The Malawian artist began work on his first album in 2009 and released it in 2013. He worked from home since he had the liberty to experiment as much as he could, plus he could not afford professional studios that charged by the hour. Despite his struggles, Malawi loved the 17-song album.
One of Lawi’s hit songs is The Whistling Song, which had regular airplay and received a lot of feedback on social media. Lawi loves vocal harmonies that accompany the guitar; leading to some comparing him to Youssou N’Dour and Richard Bona.
“I believe it is fair to say my sound is evolving, just as jazz is. Very few musicians play jazz as one would know it from New Orleans in the 1920s, or even in the style of great musicians as recent as Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock,” he says.
Lawi has an extensive portfolio and has performed among great South African artists like Jimmy Dludlu and Ray Phiri. He never thought he would share the stage with these experienced jazz musicians, whom he looked up to as a youngster; this was a dream come true for him. Maybe it’s the first dream of many.

Music Notes Then Bank Notes

Perched on a stool with a spotlight sculpting her fine face with light and shadow, Nneka strums her guitar and melancholically sings lyrics with both religious and political undertones.
“Your phrases are highly majestic, I am amazed by your great linguistics, yet your words are placed together, to sell dubious manifestoes,” says Nneka.
The audience sits in silence as the stars shine in the dark sky spanning above the auditorium in the Ghanaian capital of Accra.
Tonight, Nneka casts a fragile form—her signature sprawling afro is pulled back, her diminutive figure is shrouded in layers of grey, and she is awkwardly reticent throughout the performance. But if Nneka’s music has a central theme it is that appearances can often be deceptive. The German-Nigerian singer’s delicate beauty and soft voice belie the anger, the confusion and sense of injustice threaded throughout the lyrics of her songs.
For the past two years Nneka has been touring Europe, East Africa and her motherland to promote her third album Soul is Heavy, which was released last year . Written and recorded over three years in her home city of Lagos, the album is both thematically and stylistically eclectic with reggae, hip-hop, soul and afrobeat influences. Her songs address corruption, neo-colonialism and oppression, as well as more introspective matters of the heart and soul.
Nneka has made her way from being a little-known singer-songwriter to an internationally acclaimed artist who has toured with the likes of American singer Lenny Kravitz and New York rapper Nas. But gaining recognition in her homeland was difficult, at least until her big break in 2010 when she performed her hit single “Heartbeat” on the David Letterman Show and later appeared on CNN.
“Before Letterman, before CNN nobody wanted to hear my stuff in Nigeria. It was quite difficult for people to relate to my music because the topics are quite heavy: I talk about corruption, I talk about hypocrisy and things that I deal with on a daily basis that we Africans and Nigerians deal with on a daily basis. Many people are very scared of facing those issues they would rather you entertain them,” she tells me during an interview at a restaurant in Accra.
Nneka says the popularity she gained in Nigeria, due to her overseas success, was an example of the “colonial mentality”, which is still pervasive throughout Africa.
“It’s an inferiority complex that we are not very aware of. We are really not proud of ourselves.”
But the singer says that while Nigerians are often drawn to the shiny and superficial; “political” music is becoming increasingly popular in Nigeria, as shown during the Occupy Nigeria protest movement last year, which was sparked by the removal of fuel subsidies and inspired by the Arab Spring.
“There are lots of musicians and artists who are becoming more conscious about their surroundings and courageous in speaking out their minds, when it comes to speaking out about our state and our condition and the system,” says Nneka.
While the singer describes her homeland as divided and corrupt, she says the Occupy Movement, at which she performed, gave her hope that things in Nigeria can change.
“A demonstration like that hasn’t been done in my lifetime. It was a peaceful demonstration—people of different tribes gathered, Christians and Muslims were praying together. Seeing so many people in one place having the courage to speak their minds helped connect us amongst ourselves.”
The artist was inspired by the pain and injustices she saw in Warri in the Niger Delta, a city where economic division and ethnic conflict are rife.
“When you grow up in that area, you either become a militant or maybe a musician. There is so much grief and tribal war and so much conflict,” she says.
But Nneka says Nigerians continue to hold on to the hope that their country can change and that some kind of revolution will take place in the future.
“We need proper leadership, selfless politicians who are not in power looking to profit, we need government to be more concerned about the youth and we need more rich people that are concerned about the poor.”
On what inspires her creatively, Nneka is endearingly bumbling and inarticulate. She cites spiritual figures such as Gandhi, Jesus and Saint John the Baptist and iconic African leaders like Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, as figures who have informed her ideas and lyrics. Like these great men, Nneka sees herself as a spokesperson of the poor and the oppressed.
“Seeing the many people who are sick in the Delta due to the pollution, and the deaths… being from that area alone has made me into who I am. I feel it is my responsibility to be the voice for those who don’t have the courage,” says Nneka.

Tag: Guitar

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