Kalimba Story (live)

The message is the rhythm

The Seventies Soul Dharma, as expressed in the music of Earth, Wind & Fire, is the subject of this and the last few weeks’ posts at Now’s the Time. The Seventies Soul Dharma is partly a matter of the lyrics — you’re a shining star no matter who you are. And it’s partly down to the capacity of the music at once elegant and earthy — the one-chord groove of the verses in “Shining Star”, alternating with the harmony and horns on the choruses — to complement the lyrics as a dharma delivery system, to make the lyrics resonate more powerfully in your consciousness (keep your head to the sky).

But even more mysteriously, the music is not just a vehicle for underscoring verbal lessons, it is an instance of the Seventies Soul Dharma on its own.

Last week, we listened to two fire-related numbers from Earth, Wind & Fire’s first album, and we focused particularly on the lyrics. This week the pendulum will swing decidedly away from lyrics to illustrate that the music itself is dharma.

May 23, 1975, at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island: Earth, Wind & Fire performed a medley of “Sing a Message to You” and “Kalimba Song”; a portion of the “Message” part would appear on their mostly-live double album Gratitude (1975); the full seven-minute medley was unreleased until it was included on the box set compilation The Eternal Dance (1992).

The first thing that strikes me whenever I listen to this is just how incredibly tight EWF sounds live. By the mid-seventies, particularly under the tutelage of producer/arranger/composer Charles Stepney, their studio albums were immaculately crafted, and Maurice White would take that attention to craft to Donald Fagen-like levels of obsessiveness on the group’s late-seventies records like Faces (1980). But all that studio wizardry was not meant, as might have been the case for some ensembles, to compensate for a lackluster live sound. On the evidence of the 1975 Nassau performance of “Kalimba Story”, the band was both extraordinarily rehearsed and capable of driving intensity.

The performance starts and ends with the group chanting almost as much as they are singing, “Sing a message, sing a message to you, sing a message to you”. They are invoking the Master’s Voice positioning of “Keep Your Head to the Sky”. The curious thing is that the message so insistently heralded is not a verbal lesson this time; this time the dharma is instrumental.

The first part of the instrumental dharma in this record is, just like the title says, the story of the kalimba, the “African thumb piano” played by White and prominently featured throughout the cut. This is White’s “spectrum music” in action, the syncretism of musical traditions and elements from around the world.

The studio version of “Kalimba Story”, on the album Open Our Eyes (1974) is sinuous and comparatively mellower; consequently, the lyric is more easily heard. It’s essentially a love song by White and sung to his kalimba. Kalimba, he sings, I saw you in a shop, I bought you, I’m glad I did.

And that’s more or less a true story. White discovered the instrument at the Afro-Arts Theater on Chicago’s South Side, during his tenure in the Ramsey Lewis Trio.

The theater was a hub of “new thought” and a new kind of consciousness, which was being born in centers like that all over America. It was not a militant black power thing, but a place of black awareness, teaching us to fall in love with our culture, giving us an understanding of our rightful place on the planet and of ourselves. It was more than dashikis and Afros. It was spiritual, not religious. […]

One day I saw Phil Cohran, who was a kind of the director of the center, playing what he called a frankiphone. It was actually a kalimba, a little wooden box carved hollow, with a sound hole in it like a guitar, and metal strips attached to it that are plucked with the thumbs (it’s sometimes called an African thumb piano). I instantly fell head over heels in love with the sound of the kalimba. Its percussive and melodic tone just spoke to me. Its primitive yet futuristic sound gave different textures to all the rhythms that I heard.

Lewis went on to buy one at Drums Unlimited in Chicago, and his kalimba solos become a highlight of the trio’s live performances, presaging the 1975 EWF recording. The first recording of White playing the kalimba is “Uhuru”, by the Lewis trio in 1969. It’s in the funky, understated vibe of the studio version of “Kalimba Story”, in contrast to the effusive live version.

White went on to feature the kalimba on the last track of EWF’s début album, the similarly low key “Bad Tune”.

Unlike the simple story in the lyrics, which recede into the background of the live performance in any case, the kalimba story this song encodes is the long history of the lamellophone family of instruments itself. This family of instruments, according to the encyclopedic Musiques de toutes les Afriques, by Gérald Arnaud and Henri Lecomte (2006)…

…que l’on connaît plus généralement dans le monde francophone sous le nom de sanza, chez les anglophones sous celui de mbira, et qui a bien des appellations vernaculaires, likembe, gidigbo, koné, keta, mambila, tom, kalimba, dùngò, kathandi…, ou, dans la diaspora, rumba box à la Jamaïque ou marimbula à Cuba, la liste pourrait continuer longtemps…

which we know more generally in the French-speaking world under the name of sanza, among English speakers under that of mbira, and which has many vernacular names, likembe, gidigbo, koné, keta, mambila, tom, kalimba, dùngò, kathandi …, or, in the diaspora, rumba box in Jamaica or marimbula in Cuba, the list could go on for a long time…

Arnaud and Lecomte cite some of the many uses to which lamellophones are pressed into service in the varied African societies where the instrument is found, celebrations and ceremonies. Among these is the bira ceremony in Zimbabwe, “au cours desquelles les Shona entrent en contact avec les défunts grâce à un médium, au cours de cérémonies de possession, souvent à des fins curatives [during which the Shona come into contact with the dead through a medium, during possession ceremonies, often for curative purposes].”

“Uhuru” and “Bad Tune” have an almost contemplative air. As such, these numbers evoke the “music for thinking” genre of the Central African Republic, a noteworthy example of African lamellophone music. These 1977 recordings of chants à penser feature Joseph Sanza and Étienne Ngbozo on the large and small mbira, respectively:

What White called the kalimba’s “primitive yet futuristic” sound evokes the bira, the funerals and rain ceremonies that the lamellophone has animated over centuries in Africa, a sound history that is “spiritual, not religious.”

At the far end of some continuum on which the chants à penser are at the other end we find the exuberant Congotronics of Congo-Kinshasa, as performed by the ensemble Konono No. 1. The group features a range of lamellophones known as likembe, aggressively electrified, more assertively insisting on the primitive/futuristic character of the sound. This 2006 recording from their first internationally released album recalls Maurice White’s fevered 1975 live “Kalimba Story”.

And the exuberance of Konono No. 1 is closely related to the second non-verbal lesson of the 1975 concert recording: namely, the possibilities of collective action exemplified by the joyous interplay between White’s kalimba and Al McKay’s rhythm guitar.

McKay’s big guitar sound is every bit as much a distinctive characteristic of Earth, Wind & Fire as White and Philip Bailey’s voices, as much if not more so than the Phenix Horns. Listen to him in the opening minutes of “Shining Star” or “That’s the Way of the World”; hear his bright chords at the opening of the live 1975 version of “Sun Goddess” (which EWF had earlier recorded with Ramsey Lewis). “He was probably the most percussive guitar player I had ever heard,” White writes. “Al was born in New Orleans and spent his first years living above a bar, his bedroom right above the stage. He ingested a lot of that New Orleans Dixieland swing.”

But nowhere is McKay’s mighty rhythm mightier than on the live “Kalimba Story” There are about three or four minutes, beginning at about the 2:40 mark, of almost impossibly groovy (I am struggling to find the word) rhythmic and textural interaction by the White/McKay tandem. Here, more than just about anyplace in the discography of Earth, Wind & Fire, the music achieves the sonic equivalent of enlightenment, opening our eyes, awakening us. This is the message. This is the instrumental dharma.