Transcript

TEDxJohannesburg - David Kramer - The Sound of Silence Invisible musicians of the Karoo

[Music] good afternoon ladies and gentlemen I just want to tell you about a most amazing and wonderful Journey that I've been on in the last 10 years um it was a journey that I set off um about 2000 to to to try and discover uh whether there was still any music s who played uh the old roots of Ron's music and um I in there two there two things in terms of roots of Ron music and that is I mean just firstly when you think Africans music I'm not talking about the popular kind of Africans music uh that you might associate with me and and other members of the kind of commercial establishment but um a very old music that goes back um hundreds of years in this country um so um one of them is U you get two kinds of of of of musics one being the uh the dance music that accompanies um the old forms of dancing and one of the oldest South African forms of dance is real dance or kapara um and then the other are the old lickies which have Africans words now I just want to show you a clip of some real dancing from the 1940s which was shot uh on a farm near lburg [Music] that's real dance or and um it's um as you can see the 1940s but uh it was first um described in the 1700s and um yeah we have uh the koi dance um where the the way that the one of the first explorers uh described it uh was was very much the kind of footwork that the real dancers are still doing today um explorers like um this man franois lavala um in 1780 has a very very accurate description of real dancing now that music that you heard there is uh is what's known as de real and um and it's the almost the still the most popular tune that goes with this kind of dancing and what you were listening to there was a what's called a bck f or a violin made from a tin can so this one is was made by one of the people I met on my searching and travels up in the Mand in the kamis berer he's name was yapi Y and he made this violin in 2001 as you can see from an oil can but please have a close look at the neck and the the way that the head is carved because it's almost exactly the same as one that was made by a Bushman prisoner in in the 1870s his name was kabu and he made a Rami violin in 1871 from a wooden box rather than a oil can cuz they weren't around yet and um and so when you put them together wa this is what what he looked like that was him he was a prisoner taken to the Breakwater Lodge and they they where you enjoy the Waterfront today the lovely Waterfront in Cape Town was made by these men at the in the Breakwater prison they were prisoners they were of course the problem uh what happened to them is that they were almost completely decimated by the expansion of the um Farmers the settlers and and the fight over water and um and sheep um LED these people because they were starving to steal and then of course get arrested and sent to the prison now I'm going to play you a single stringed um Bushman instrument from the Kalahari called a Sean kururu uh that's what they look like together the two of them so you can see how close even though um 130 years has passed the violence are almost the same and I would imagine that the music is almost the same so we're talking about an old music here this is older than the blues ladies and gentlemen so for us you know the one of the the ideas behind my search was to try and expose to South Africa that we have our own Roots folk music uh and not it's not just Americans that have something like that um so this is the SE kururu it sounds [Music] like now people think that these BL violins are a copy of the of the European violin I don't think so I think these violence are an attempt to copy the sound so if you listen to a three string B for you all listen to how similar it [Music] sounds okay so I was influenced uh in when I went to university in England by an American Family a father and a son called John LX and Alan LX who set off in the 193 to record Roots American folk music uh a lot of them in the prisons and they recorded an enormous number of songs uh and through that process people like Woody Guthrie and um and Lead better became uh well known because of the work that they did and so I was very inspired and I thought that was something I'd like to do when I got back to South Africa this was in the early 1970s of course I got back and I did nothing about it and many years passed until um about 10 years ago I was invited to become a presenter on a television program that went to meet guitar players of South Africa it's where I I first met Johannes gy who's going to play a little song for us soon but um so I went with a man called Yan horn and we traveled about 10,000 kmet through this country looking for people cuz you or musicians essentially because you just don't hear about them you don't see them because this music has never been recorded it's never been commercialized and people have been marginalized because of the racism of this country so we set off down roads like this thousands and thousands of kilometers of road like this and um and you'd come to Little places like like stof CW because you'd heard that just maybe there was some somebody down that road who still could play one of these old instruments or might remember some of the old songs and you would meet someone like fed Andrews um that's where he lives don't think it's very ecologically sound but um needs some green ecology there I think and then um this is Fredick and some of his friends and um they will play you ask them if they will play some music [Music] other people I met uh on in the last 10 years and what um quite quite a number of them and I've had the the opportunity of inviting them to perform alongside me um on stages throughout South Africa and um and in a project called kugar blues and some of the best musicians uh were someone like uh [Music] toas and uh he plays a very percussive style often plays his guitar with just one hand and that's uh seems to be quite a sort of South African thing that we find up in Botswana as well as in the great garu um and then I met the mowers family oh no sorry that's um y [Music] y and then the moas family from um the Great garu in who lived in Victoria [Music] West what's interesting about the moers is that c plays a guitar uh which is strung in a very particular way that the second and third strings are played as one string and her guitar is tuned completely differently to her husband's guitar he uses a tuning which is called dartel and uh and they manag to uh to combine in a way that was absolutely amazing um then there's [Music] and um and sitting next to me is is hus and uh and then there was um you might have read in the newspapers unfortunately she was murdered last year uh in a stupid Farm argument uh her name was Helena nelt and her brother kis LOF who uh created the most beautiful and plaintive Karu songs I've ever heard [Music] [Music] now I was telling you about the tunings what's this is what's really interesting about um the musicians that I found who play the guitars and the guitars um are all tuned differently depending on who you speak to and where you you might turn up so each guitar player who um who has taught himself to play this is this is what happens is that there is a people like hanus tell me that when they were young they were they they were born on farms and they didn't get any schooling and they were sent out to look after the goats and the Sheep and so while sitting there out in the felt they would make themselves a ram Kiki a little guitar and they would start to teach themselves how to play even if there was an instrument in the home the the parents or the uncle or wouldn't allow the children to touch the instrument so you had to learn by watching maybe what the older person did and then going off and sitting and seeing if you could work out some kind of sound that would that would be good to the ear and that's why I think the individual uh musicians started to tune their guitars in different ways and so you find that they they are almost open tunings like I know from America but but they're not open tunings because you have to still press cord shapes now we in the western world use just a conventional tuning which is which is called f seer in afans but the kind of tunings that I came across were names like um navik dartel uh L F uh L the flat and you'll hear that one soon and uh and things like B chce uh SAA and and and all of these different tunings and I could go on and on about that as to why these things are different but so I'm going to play you and then each person sometimes he plays you one song which is in a particular tuning and then you ask him to play another song and he starts to tune the guitar all over again to a different tuning so he can play that song uh as is happening [Music] here no not a [Music] yeah that's Adam Cook playing the N Stop and he is the most amazing guitar player and and unfortunately one of the few people I haven't been able to have on stage with me but who hanis could see isia on stage and he's going to play us a song so what what I just the first thing I want him to play for you this is a conventional tuning that he has and he'll play conventional chords um but he's going to demonstrate the the right hand the right hand finger picking Style which um all over South Africa is called optel optel and kape now it optel is the part that his thumb his his thumb does works the bass strings and that's called optel and his other his his first and second finger will pluck the first and the first second and third strings and that's the pinching part the knape so optal is to pick up the base I he picks up the Bas strings and he pinches the top strings okay SP for and [Music] okay now okay okay now he's going to retune the guitar because now this the thing about hanis and I couldn't believe this when I first saw it when I first met hanis hanis as a child as a teenager decided sitting there on his own on a copy in the Karo to play alone like that was was just not on and he wanted to create a sound that would sound like two two people playing together and so he thought about it and he thought about it a lot how could he come up with a way that sounded like what we call a for sper and a sliner and that so someone who plays in the front and someone who accompanies him and um so hanis developed a technique which I have never seen anywhere else in the world and so I thought it was absolutely unique and we a small video clip was put on on the YouTube by an American and and it became an overnight success he became a cult Hero on on the internet and we got an invitation to go to America about 3 years ago to attend a slide guitar Workshop in Seattle so that hus Could Teach the Americans how to do this magic thing that he does so this is this is teaspoon slide guitar and he's going to play a song of his called Mahala a n okay and let good see