Heres my interview with singer, tendai mwanaka
How did you get started in music?
Professionally it was in 2014 when I shortchanged my sister
of her Mbira instrument and started learning how to play it. But I have always
been interested in music from when I was little. I remember I made the school
choir in grade 2, and I have been in several choirs including church choirs,
where I would lead the choirs too.
What are your inspirations or influences?
African music, songs we grew up singing, songs I sang at the
church, songs from my Shona culture, and western music in the form of RNB, pop,
Rock and opera classics. I am inspired by the beauty and uniqueness of music
and sound. Yes I love good lyrics but I think what really inspires me about
music is the music, it’s inside stories, conventions, music variety,
experimentation etc… I am a multidisciplinary artist, with literary, Visual and
musical strands of my career all off the base. So I am always interested in
finding links between these fields, and in music I have done that by combining
the literary aspects in the form of the poetic genre with music… because of my African
experience there is a certain formless and transcendence that my music has, and
the western music sometimes corals it through its insistence on stracture and
form. In my Lockdown journal, day 10: I wrote, “literature makes me burrow
inside the suffocating walls until I find a small ledge in the walls where I
can hide and avoid being crushed by the walls. Visual art left me for 3 weeks
now, may hands have no eyes to see, it’s of no use now because visual art would
crush the walls to debris, to reconstruct them. So I am left with musical art
to maintain space around me and push the walls without breaking them. We are
supposed to stay indoors! I need the walls to keep me focused, to commute with
this imprisonment.” Thus music, like in those images of the Italians standing
on their balconies in Rome and belting songs and sorrow, trying to deal with
mounting deaths of covid 19, music helps me deal with life threatening
situation. So music is my last stand, the thing that holds everything together.
What advice will you give aspiring performers?
Be open to the sounds, experiment, be patient, work harder
and keep trying even if it doesn’t make sense now
How do you set yourself apart from other bands or singers?
As I noted I am interested in the music more than the lyrics
and I work from my culture and mix it with western influences, thus my sounds
are always unique. I use Mbira and Marimba to compose the melodies of songs
such that the African melodies cannot be overshadowed by the western elements I
would add through the keyboards, there is asymmetrical laying between the two
influences to create a poetic sound. So my music could be interpreted as
literature music
Any new gigs or albums in the future
Yes I recently released my first album of music and poetry.
The music is Marimba inspired, with all sorts of keyboard including among
others, Cello, Violin, Horns, Flute, Harp, Bells, sticks etc. it’s a 9 track
album entitled Logbook Written by a Drifter, find the songs here: https://soundcloud.com/tendai-rinos-mwanaka
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