Maria McCloy
ALAN DARGIN might just as well have been one of the stuffed koalas at the Australia tourist agent expo thing. He was sitting in the corner playing his didgeridoo while poshly dressed agents at Inanda Sun swanned about and ate lunch. Maybe they thought he was there just to create atmospheric Australian sounds. “I can’t believe that,” said Pops Mohamed. “Do they know that he’s one of the best didgeridoo players in the world?”
Dargin accompanies jazz, blues, Celtic, reggae and heavy metal bands, plays at raves and does solo concerts. He clearly loves music but also wants to prove “a didgeridoo can fit with any style of music”. He “had a ball” meeting SA musicians and was looking forward to his gigs with Mohamed and was very impressed with Tananas.
That is not how his shows usually go, he tells me. He usually gets to play and in between gets to speak to the audience about “different rhythms, breathing, where it was played, the names of didgeridoos, my own compositions, how and where I came up with them … “
From traditional Aboriginal origins, the didgeridoo emerged from the top end of the Northern Territory in Western Australia thousands of years ago . It is made of wood hollowed out by termites and is played using circular breathing. “To breathe in as you breathe out, at exactly the same time,” says Dargin.
On this trip, sponsored by the Australian high commission and Qantas, he’s also shown hornplaying kids this technique at workshops in Cape Town and Durban.
Dargin’s grandfather taught him how to play when he was five (he lived a traditional life until moving to the city at 14). The spiritual purpose of this music is still important to him. There are traditional rhythms used for ceremonies.
Dargin is also an actor (he was in Priscilla Queen of the Desert). His move to music as a career was in some respects pushed by the fact that there was not much work for black actors in Australia. It wasn’t always easy in music either “A couple of years ago it was like `Oh I know this black fellow who plays the didgeridoo.’ Now its like `I know this musician Alan Dargin who plays the didgeridoo.’ “
With a gruesome history – after the Europeans arrived – out of 600 tribes there are 100 left and only 60 dialects still spoken. Is Aboriginal culture still thriving? Apparently there was a stage when it was being lost, but according to Dargin it’s being revived. Music has a message, he says. Despite different languages and histories, the didgeridoo is similar to a West African instrument which is similar to a Japanese instrument.
“I reckon if governments were like musicians we’d be living on a better planet. Musicians don’t care if you’re rich or poor, black, white or yellow. Let’s have a jam.”
Mahomed and Dargin team up with other leading musicians for the Human Rights Concert this Friday.