Thursday 16 July 2009
Tiny singing
In The Tent in the evenings of Mbira camp, I play the first two easy songs on the Mbira and then put it down and sing along for the rest. I don't know the parts so I copy people and make it up. One time I was singing along on a self-created part, thinking, god, why do I often feel so tense when I'm singing?
Maybe it's because what I'm singing doesn't feel right, I think. So I listen for what might feel more right. I imagine a far simpler line. So so simple, a modest repetitive part of just two notes to fit in the whole. I start singing it. It feels right. I relax. And ever, ever so slightly, so does the whole room, it seems.
A lot of what I'm singing I hear a fraction of a moment before I sing it. It's as if there's another singer I'm copying. I just listen. And when I hear it I follow it.
It's funny that I'm always a little fraction behind the timing of the first voice. Though if the first voice is a good leader, maybe it comes in a fraction early to leave the audible voice right on beat.
Sometimes I'm following the voice note by note, rhythm by rhythm, but often I'm following more of a general sense of the kind of sound to be making now, whether a presence or absence of sound, a slow low and fat sound or a sound like a butterfly.
“When I get the feeling in my tummy,” Chartwell said, “I just sing.”
“I can feel tense and insecure about singing in a jam”, I once told a stoned dreadlocked Israeli during a jam session on a moonlit Indian rooftop. “Well,” he replied, “you have a beautiful voice and you contribute great stuff. So just do it when you feel it and don't do it when you don't.”
I liked that advice.
“Briony?” My writing is disturbed by a voice in the night. It's Chartwell. I'm surprised. I lean out and unzip the front of my tent. He's standing a few feet away in the moonlight. “I brought your Mbira.” He'd been playing it with everyone in the main tent. “I didn't want you to go to sleep without it. It's got a bit of Vaseline on it, I'm sorry about that. What are you doing in your tent not sleeping?” He chuckles.
“I'm on my way to going to sleep! Thank you so much.” I take the Mbira and he bids me farewell and walks his slow swaying walk back to The Tent.
He's amazingly humble and generous. And also something of a great man. Often the two go together I've noticed. There's a documentary crew here this evening, they're making a film about him. He wrote and performed the music for Breakfast with Mugabe, a play that started on a six week run at Soho theatre and was moved to one of the biggies in the West End where it stayed for 42 weeks. He played Mbira day and night, Matinee and evening show, until his fingers were blistered and raw and he kept going. He's taught at Soas and been interviewed on the BBC World Service, according to Sebastian the Mbira maker who was making an Mbira for the man before he met him, turned on the radio in his workshop in Germany and there was Chartwell talking away.
And he has gathered us to him. There's something like 35 of us on this camp. We're all sorts. Rich, poor, young, old, fat, thin, men, women, hippies and regular folk. We've got an Oxford University student and a care worker. We've got two pop stars – well, professional singers with signed bands – some first timers who play no other instrument, and a handfull of people who have made Mbira their lives, and who hold the core thrust of the sound in the tent. And we all take a week off work, pay £180, pack up our tents and sleeping bags and gather to him, to the Mbira and to each other sure but more than that, to Chartwell.
I lie and listen to the music from the main tent. This music is not about the soloist or musical gymnastics, showing off. It seems to be about tiny, repetitive sounds that fit cohesively into the overall sound, with the occasional spontaneous moments of ad libbing up and over the sound when the feeling takes you.
It's like a metaphor for behaviour in a community, I guess. Mostly small humble, generous and considerate acts that fit cohesively into the community, with the occasional moments of wildness, free self expression, when the feeling takes you.
Denise once said that in the Baka tribes of Cameroon, which the band she's in - Baka Beyond - have collaborated with for years and years, when singing together you can error in two ways. You can error by not contributing enough sound, and you can error by stealing the limelight all for yourself with endless Diva moments. The thing to do is to sing loud enough for the person opposite to hear you, and quiet enough so that you can hear them.
I like this way. The way of Baka, the way of Shona.
Now it's 2.40am and I can hear Chartwell in the main tent yodelling a soft tired yodel over the musicians. It's beautiful. He must be feeling it in his tummy.
Friday 10 July 2009
Wednesday 8 July 2009
Why I sing
I sing for my pleasure and joy, and for the pleasure and joy of the community. That is all.
I figured it out in the car to the airport with Todd.
Why sing?
Twice in the last six months I've had conversations with Guru type people. They've asked me why I sing. 'I don't know,' I've replied. 'I'm just compelled to sing.' They've looked deep into my eyes and told me to find an answer to that question. “It will be a vulnerable journey,” said yesterday's man.
He was Richard 'Quantum Light Breath' Bock.
I'm searching for the source and community around my singing practice of singing long long notes up and down the scale and paying close and subtle attention to the nature of the breath and the source of the vibrations in the body. I was taught it 8 years ago by a woman named Kim who'd learnt it in Varanassi, India. I finally went there in February and I found some great things, but not the source and community of this practice.
I asked Richard if he knew of anything or anyone.
“No,” he said simply. His singing teacher in India had been asked to sing nothing but Sa (a single note) for a year. The teacher was an old man. They'd met him at a concert where he'd been in the audience. A 90 year old renound local singer, he'd been asked to come to the stage and sing. So he did, and he sang a single note, the Sa.
Within moments, Richard recalled, he and his partner wept.
They were speared by the experience. How can it be that a single note can touch their hearts so directly and instantly, melting the casing away? The voice wasn't perfect, he recalled, but it was human and deeply honest and raw.
Kim, my source of this practice, had been told to sing Sa for three months. Mercifully, we'd only sung Sa for half an hour in her workshops and then sung the other notes for about five minutes each. This was in 2001 and I've kept up the practice on and off ever since.
And now this is what people say about my voice. Not perfect. Not well trained. But honest, and raw, and touching. “I could listen to you sing endlessly”, said a woman at dance camp after hearing a song around the fire one night.
As I'd been singing Sa for about 8 years by the time I got to India, my two singing teachers there got me straight onto the vocal acrobatics. So I never found the people who sit together and simply sing Sa for, maybe, an hour.
I feel like I'm sniffing around the edges of a mystery.
This is a beautiful, profound practice. It has awesome effects on the voice. It is beautiful to do, particularly in a group; a profoundly calming practice. I've called it my singing meditation, though in truth when I'm alone I rarely concentrate sufficiently to get a meditative quality to it. But that happens very easily in a group, I find.
And if you buy into the Eastern ideas, it's very good for your 'energy' too. Prushant Iyengar, son of BKS Iyengar, big daddy of Iyengar yoga, says that the whole biscuit is to keep the 'chakras' well and healthy. There are seven chakras going from the base of the spine to just above the top of the head, they say. In my singing practice, you breathe into each chakra area in turn and then let the sound resonate from that area of your body. After you've done all seven in seven long breaths, you take a few breaths where you're trying to balance the resonance from all parts of your body, or each 'chakra'. Then you move on to the next note and start again.
From my point of view it's less about the chakras and more about using the full resonant capacity of your body. Usually our voices are tightly tied up in our noses, throats, shoulders and upper chest. Move the source down and up from there and the beauty and comfort of the sound and experience increases. Simple.
In the practice you focus on relaxing and letting the sound come out of your body, rather than forcing any sound onto it, so you're developing and strengthening your body's own true sound.
“Your voice is the sound of your soul,” said Tim Buckley. That might be why people find the raw honesty of the sounds that come from this practice so beautiful.
So, the idea is that Chakras are part of the energy body and deal with your psycho-spiritual wellbeing. Each chakra has a different department, like one is fear, and another is communication/expression, and so on. Exercising them energetically, like by singing in and from them, keeps them healthy.
I don't know about all this stuff. Some people take it very seriously.
All I know is that I find the practice yummy and great for the voice and leaves me feeling really good.
So it's quite strange that there's not an architecture around it the way there's an architecture around other things that are yummy and great for you and leave you feeling really good, like yoga.
I will keep searching. There must be people who share the practice.
The Nada yogis do something similar, with the difference that they focus on different chakras for different notes.
I've been wondering if that's what I should do too. I put the question to Richard. “It seems to me,” he said, “that you need all the types of resonance in each note. You need the base chakras in the high notes, otherwise they're too flighty, and vice versa.” Ha! I felt vilified. Great. I agree. I'll continue with what I'm doing.
So. I started writing this morning because I was thinking about their question of why I sing.
It's been niggling at me all year.
OK here goes.
I sing because I can't help it. I am a singer. I was singing as a small child. When I am an old woman I will be singing, and I will have the voice of someone who has been singing her whole life. While everything in my life changes, including what I am singing, this never does: I am a singer.
I love to sing in groups. I love the sound of a group of voices. It makes me feel at home wherever I am.
So, singing is a kind of an act of primal aliveness. I hear the sound of my being. It is true. I am real. I am alive. It's affirming. There's something very core about it.
Singing is the sound of that 50-50 relationship with life you've got, where you do 50% and life does 50%, give or take. I sing. I am sung. I am given a voice. I take care of it and sing with it. Sometimes life takes me back and sings me. It's great when that happens. Rare.
I don't want to do this on the computer. I want to figure it out in conversation and squiggles in my note book.
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