A few weeks ago Malawian-born guitarist Erik Paliani was one of the performers in the auditorium at Nelson Mandela Square in Johannesburg’s Sandton to advertise Sony’s 3G technology.
On his guitar Paliani played two songs from his debut album, Chitukutuku, to considerable applause from the mostly foreign audience who had taken a break from gawking at the statue of Nelson Mandela.
Chitukutuku is a 10-track CD with a spirit that hovers at an unnamed place in Southern and Central Africa. If the album were a person, the bureaucrats would probably call him or her stateless. It’s a point Paliani is keen to emphasise in the impromptu interview we had soon after his performance.
“There is one Southern Africa that’s emerging, whether we like it or not. This album is a CD about Southern Africa and I would like it to be presented as such,” he says in his soft-spoken tones.
The deceptive centre comes naturally for a musician who was born in Malawi, whose father personally knew the late Dr Nico (Nicolas Kasanda, Democratic Republic of Congo musician and soukous pioneer) and who has also lived in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa.
About his father, whom he describes as a “collector of African music” and whose day job was being a judge in Malawi, Paliani is particularly effusive. It was in the family lounge where the young Paliani first got his musical bearings.
“School was at home,” he says. “My dad approached music from an intellectual point of view. He was my first teacher — he taught me how to read and write music. If he’d grown up in a different era he would have become a musician.”
In the 1990s, after finishing high school in Malawi, his parents dispatched him to Zimbabwe, where his grandmother lived. While studying purchasing and supply at the Harare Polytechnic, he worked as an amateur musician on the side — an important period during which he met interesting musicians, including Sam Mataure, Oliver Mtukudzi’s jazz drummer. About Mataure, Paliani says: “We do a lot of things together. He is a big brother.”
After his stint in Zimbabwe he went back to Malawi, where he formed a band in 1995. But his visits to Zimbabwe brought about his restless spirit. In the late 1990s he repeatedly visited South Africa, where he met other musicians: Musa Manzini, Themba Mkhize, late Malawian guitarist George Phiri, Jimi Indi, Louis Mhlanga and Hugh Masekela (whose last album, Phola, Paliani produced), among others.
He is philosophical about his music’s lack of a centre: “Musically it’s hard to stay in one place because there’s a lot of stuff you hear.”
His sound is a motley brew: there’s the insistent Nyawu drum beat, a sound one is not likely to find on a CD in this part of the world. Fierce, sacred, the sound of an ancient ritual, Paliani has domesticated it, fusing it with a bit of Thomas Mapfumo’s Chimurenga music, the Tuku sound — something of Dr Nico and Malawian great Wilson Makawa, whose tune Chitukutuku Paliani has refreshed.
“The CD represents where I have been: Tuku, Thomas Mapfumo and the melody of South African music.”
The title track, Chitukutuku, is a spare track in which, in soft accents, he sets down the migrant’s angst at finding himself away from home and familiar people.
The song, originally composed by Makawa, who was then working on the copper mines in northern Zambia, is plaintive and meditative without ever descending to the nauseating mawkishness typical of songs in this genre.
It’s not that he finds South Africa that strange: “When I go to Soweto I relate to the gogos and mamas in the same way I would relate to my own grandmother. It’s a little difficult to think of all these states in Southern Africa as separate.”
He has shown this connectedness in song. Take, for instance, Dr Nico, a jazzy song he penned in honour of the great guitarist. It’s not a slavish tribute and, although the Congolese sound of Dr Nico is obvious, Paliani avoids the kwasa kwasa accents one would ordinarily expect from such a project. The result is beautiful and startling.
If the politicians are taking too long to unite the region, the musicians are leading the way.