Her Berkeley nonprofit has recorded thousands of songs and sent more than $1. 6 million to Zimbabwean musicians and instrument makers. by Andrew Gilbert Erica Azim holds a mbira in a deze, a hollowed-out gourd, in her Central Berkeley home on Friday, Aug. 8.
Her Berkeley nonprofit has sold thousands of mbiras built in Zimbabwe by Shona artisans.
Credit: Daniel Ekonde/Berkeleyside “Can you explain how you fall in love? ” asks Erica Azim. “In a certain way it’s an impossible question. ” Yet it’s a conundrum the Berkeley native has contemplated for half a century, every time she’s asked about her abiding passion for mbira, which is both the traditional music of the Shona people of Zimbabwe and the thumb piano-like instrument that’s the primary medium for their celebrations and ceremonies.
Mbira master Vitalis “Samaita” Botsa will play duets with Erica Azim at the Freight at 7 p. m. on Sunday, Aug. 17.
Azim’s commitment to supporting musicians, healers and instrument-makers in the southern African nation has turned Berkeley into an unlikely center of cultural preservation.
Over the past four decades Azim has built the nonprofit she founded and runs, MBIRA, into one of the world’s foremost archives of the incantatory Shona art form, spreading awareness through recordings, in-person workshops, performances, online lessons, and the sale of thousands of mbiras built in Zimbabwe by Shona artisans.
A recently deployed streaming service provides access to more than 450 hours of mbira performed by a wide spectrum of masters from around Zimbabwe.
The vast catalog includes recordings and videos, mostly made by Azim herself on trips through rural Zimbabwe, providing a welcoming portal for anyone intrigued by mbira, which is often used in summoning ancestral spirits to healing rituals.
All sales proceeds are funneled back to artists, providing a lifeline in a region beset by persistent drought and corruption-driven economic decline. “As of a year ago, we’ve sold thousands of mbiras and sent more than $1. 6 million to more than 300 instrument makers and musicians,” Azim said.
Azim has studied and performed with top Shona practitioners Azim records Musekiwa Mujuru, Cletos Manjengwa and Fungai Mujuru as they perform in Mujuru village in 1996.
Credit: Tracy Willett Because traditional songs, scales and mbira tunings often vary village to village, there’s tremendous variation in mbira.
Azim has studied and performed with many of the art form’s most revered practitioners, including Ambuya Beauler Dyoko, Fradreck and Fungai Mujuru, Irene Chigamba, Vakaranga Venharetare, Patience Chaitezvi, Renold and Caution Shonhai, and Leonard Chiyanike, most of whom she’s also presented in concerts in the U.
Her own approach is both deeply traditional and broadly cosmopolitan, encompassing many of the different mbira influences she’s absorbed. “She’s as knowledgeable as anybody in the U.
S, a true scholar, and I think her passion is to preserve the culture and help the people who can extend the culture and teach it to their people,” said Berkeley composer Todd Boekelheide, who produced Azim’s 1992 album Mbira Dreams and has long served on MBIRA’s board of director.
Boekelheide explained his abiding love of mbira as flowing from “its inherent power. ” “The music is spiritual,” he said, “and draws you in with apparent simplicity.
It’s played with only three digits on two hands, but sounds like a symphony, like 10 people are playing because of how the notes interact.
Over the eons folk music sheds anything that isn’t an authentic expression of something that’s deeply, powerfully true. ” A pair of mbiras.
Credit: Daniel Ekonde/Berkeleyside Part of the struggle in preserving traditional mbira music is that it’s endangered at home, and not just by the devastated economy.
Like in many societies, the allure of Western pop music and electric instruments captures the attention of many young people.
And there’s little support for traditional arts within the government.
On her last trip back to Zimbabwe five years ago, Oakland-based dancer Julia Tsitsi Chigamba noticed that young people are increasingly blending traditional mbira with hip hop, jazz and music from church, while nonprofit organizations provide some access to instruments and instruction.
The Zimbabwe-born artistic director and choreographer of Chinyakare Ensemble, an East Bay-based Shona dance company that performs often at Ashkenaz, was a girl growing up in a highly musical family when she first met Azim, who came by her village to record her father (mbira master Tute Chigamba).
Since moving to the Bay Area in 1999, those recordings help her feel connected with her family back home. “She’s doing amazing work,” Chigamba said. “When we see those CDs, it reminds me what I was doing then.
She still does a lot of work with my father.
When she sends payments to people it’s distributed from my father’s house, and it’s beautiful to see that.
She is the mother, and I knew her before I came here. ” Azim first heard mbira as a teenager auditing a class at Cal Azim was a precociously gifted student growing up in Berkeley in the late 1960s when she first heard mbira while auditing an ethnomusicology class at Cal.
Graduating in 1970 at the age of 15, she enrolled at the University of Washington to pursue her fascination with mbira, studying with Dumisani Maraire, who played a more urban rather than traditional style on the instrument.
She studied at UW for two years, discovering the roots style via 45 rpm records, but eventually moved back to Berkeley to save up money for an African journey, “learning Shona from flash cards I made myself from a book out of Cal library,” she recalled.
At 20, she made her first trip to the country then known as Rhodesia, a white-supremacist state with an active rebellion by the Black population.
Denied a permit to travel to the countryside, she ended up connecting with some of the musicians she’d been listening to on 45s when she found a sidewalk bar and music store with an unusually large collection of mbira records.
Azim plays the mbira.
Credit: Daniel Ekonde/Berkeleyside “The culture was you didn’t buy a record until you’d heard it and the two guys working at the bar were happy to play them for me,” she said. “I had a handbag I had embroidered myself and I pulled out my mbira.
You have to understand, the Rhodesian government was teaching that everything in traditional Shona culture was evil heathen barbarism.
To have a white girl have an mbira in her girly handbag was beyond anything, like a Martian appearing. ” The manager of the bar offered to introduce her to the mbira players from some of the records, and she was on her way.
Recording these artists didn’t come until years later, because Azim’s steel-trap memory allowed her to master pieces she was being taught. “It’s an oral tradition,” she said. “I made a list after a while because I didn’t want to forget to practice any of them. ” Azim’s Berkeley workshops were rare chance to learn mbira By 1992 she’d settled into her house in central Berkeley and started offering mbira camps that attracted people from around the country.
Performing at La Peña Cultural Center and selling her cassettes at Down Home Music, Shambala on Telegraph Avenue, and Esalen in Big Sur helped spread her reputation.
At the same time, Shona culture started to get much better known after Robert Mugabe’s successful guerilla campaign transformed the country into Zimbabwe in 1980.
With UW’s ethnomusicology program the Puget Sound area became a Zimbabwean music hotbed, activity that centers on the Zimbabwe Music Festival, or ZimFest, which launched in 1991.
Azim playing the mbira in her home.
Credit: Daniel Ekonde/Berkeleyside In the early years the performances and classes centered on the marimba, with Azim practically the only person teaching mbira.
Her week-long workshops in Berkeley spun off into similar residencies on the East Coast, and in 1997 she started bringing out Shona masters to teach and perform.
She founded the nonprofit MBIRA in 1998, and as her teaching gathered momentum, she found it necessary to start working with artisans in Zimbabwe so her students could have instruments to play.
Under Mugabe’s leadership, the country’s economy experienced one crisis after another, with bouts of hyperinflation.
Azim made it possible for artists to continue making mbiras. “No one there can afford to pay for a mbira,” she said. “People expect relatives to make it for them for free.
Master mbira makers have continued to perfect their craft because I created an international market for the music and the instrument.
I set out to learn and share it and took on a life of its own. ” Azim will play a duet with mbira great Vitalis Botsa at the Freight on Aug. 17 It’s a life that continues to grow and reverberate.
One of Azim’s students was Māhealani Uchiyama, the award-winning dancer, musician, composer, choreographer, and teacher who runs the Māhea Uchiyama Center for International Dance in Berkeley.
While best known as the creator and director of the Kāpili Polynesian Dance and Music Workshops, a few years ago she started the African American Mbira Project to spread awareness of Shona culture in local Black communities.
In recent months Azim has been giving free mbira recitals at Berkeley public libraries, and on Aug. 17 MBIRA presents Vitalis “Samaita” Botsa at the Freight playing duets with Azim.
It’s a rare opportunity to catch this master from Murewa, a rural township about 50 miles northeast of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.
One of mbira’s greatest living improvisers, Samaita generates sumptuous interlocking melodic lines with his gourd-amplified instrument.
It’s music he performs at traditional ceremonies and teaches to children at the village school. (He’s also teaching several intensive workshops in Berkeley Aug. 15-26).
Azim met him in the late aughts during an impromptu recording session in his village and didn’t realize at first the extent of his mastery because he was playing duets with someone not as skilled.
But she’s studied with him on every trip to Zimbabwe since 2010, learning how to interact effectively and provide buoyant accompaniment.
Samaita was last in the U.
S. in 2015 at a point when he had lost two primary students, “and he had no one to play with,” Azim said. “I often have no one to play with, so we had a great time.
Any time I wasn’t busy, we were playing duo. ” Related posts: Mnangagwa ally Tungwarara launches yet another scheme: 50,000 housing stands for war veterans Chinese miner rehabilitates BCC roads Why were Zimbabweans left behind 45 years after independence, in the first place?
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