Paulo, Viscent, and Garetta were street musicians, drummers to be exact. We met by chance when we stopped to listen outside a friend's store in Arusha, Tanzania. Nobody spoke anybody else's language, but we had a good time. Pretty soon, we were recording in a mud hut. We bought the boys some bicycles so they could get there.
Mud hut accoustics, if the walls are thick enough, are great. Traffic and chicken noise doesn't come through. You can't hear the cows, unless they come in. But mud huts are hot and we did our fair share of sweating.
We recorded and experimented and sweated for close to a year. It took a lot of dry runs to figure out how to meld tribal drum played by true tribal drummers with modern recording gear. There's a lot of extra noise that we had to rope.
We scratched our heads to come up with songs for modern listeners. They guys knew without me telling them that tribal drum songs aren't for everyone, especially in their raw sound. In the village, most songs go on for long stretches, sometimes 30 or 40 minutes, with the same beat while listeners gets hypnotized and drunk or more.
The homemade instruments rattled and buzzed. We shimmed them up with sticks and grass. Some of the sounds still stayed out of the reach of our recorders.
Towards the end of the year, Paulo started looking tired. He played though. He played his heart out and panted and leaned against the hot walls of the hut between songs. We figured he was working too hard at night. But that wasn't it. He faded as went through the weeks.
One day I got a call that he was in the hospital. He never woke up before he went to the other side. They said he had malaria and typhoid and a host of other things. But that wasn't it. He had the big African disease that gets so many people. |
