January 15, 2009
Kalimba Magic NEWS
Interview with John Roff
Spiritual ecologist, kalimba player
John Roff shows off his trophy Hugh Tracey kalimba made in the early 1960s in the photo to the right. He had some severely buzzing tines on this one caused by the tine being twisted and not making full contact with the bridge. This situation excited nasty overtones intermittently, causing a buzz sound. Christian Carver torqued the tines back to flatten them. When I visited John, I put this kalimba into the Bb Treble tuning (so the root note is also the lowest note), but we didn't touch the painted tines.
John Roff of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, is a man living his life from his convictions. He and his family are carving out their own unique existence, trusting God's Spirit to lead them through their lives. Some of the interesting things that result from this posture to the infinite include the homeschooling of John and Jo's three children in a loving environment, a deep and abiding care for the Earth and all creatures that live among its sacred ecosystems, and the experience that we can connect with the Earth, its land, its creatures, and its history through making and playing music on location on this Earth.
I first met John over e-mail in 2005 shortly after Kalimba Magic began making sparks. He wished me the best in my endeavor to popularize the kalimba and help sell the Hugh Tracey kalimbas which originate in his adopted homeland, South Africa. John was born in Kenya and, as he says: "If you were born in Africa, you are an African."
Deb and I met John, Jo, and their children Jonathan, Iona, and Judah in person when we traveled to South Africa in the summer of 2008. To say the least, we had a deeply meaningful and restful time with them, and we became friends.
John's job is to help people connect deeply with the natural world. Isn't it wonderful that someone could get paid to do that? He takes students out into conservation lands in Africa and provides opportunities for love to develop in their hearts and understanding to develop in their minds, to help them grow into adults who will become stewards of our planet. John has been playing music - percussion, guitar, wooden flutes, and kalimbas - and is integrating the use of musical instruments, especially traditional instruments, in his work as an ambassador to the ecological essence of our existence. More recently, John became an ambassador for African Musical Instruments, or AMI, the folks who make the Hugh Tracey kalimbas, and John is working at getting these instruments in the hands of a society that has, in some ways, forgotten its own past.
KM: John, what attracted you to the kalimba?
JR: I first saw a kalimba in a shop in the town of Clarens, in 1998, and bought it on a whim. This one was a Celeste Junior diatonic instrument. I used it sporadically on my guided nature walks, and folks enjoyed it.
In April 2007 I lent my kalimba to a friend who was in hospital for a while, and missing it, started making my own kalimbas from lawn rakes, an old metal squash racket frame and pieces of throwaway wood.
Then in September of that year I heard Chiwoniso Maraire playing Mbira at a world music festival, and was deeply moved by the sound. Already knowing Christian Carver at AMI, I asked him how I could get that sound. He sent me an African-tuned karimba, and I clicked with it immediately. I was so smitten I decided to visit Christian and the AMI factory in December that year. Christian was wonderfully hospitable, and introduced me to many kalimbas, marimbas and other African instruments. I bought several more kalimbas, made up one with my own tuning using AMI materials, and got hooked. It hasn't stopped.
I am drawn to the kalimba because of its portability, ease of use, ease of tuning, African-ness, and robust construction. I use them in my work because they fit in my backpack, and because they make music-making accessible to anyone, and with a pentatonic tuning are non-threatening and inviting.
In the adjacent photo, on the far right is the Hugh Tracey Karimba; center is a Hugh Tracey TM Alto which John has modified into a sort of 15-note karimba of his own tuning - note the treble tines for the upper row - and to the left is an inexpensive design using rake tines which John is experimenting with for a student kalimba.
JR continues: My thought about musics - varieties of musical instruments, music, scales, tunings -- varieties of languages - and biodiversity - and variety of people and interactions with people - is this: People are made in God's image. So we are made as creative beings. And each of us reflects something of God's character. Aspects of God's creativity are shown as people do what they were made to do. So, your kalimba playing is a little glimpse of God's creativity.
Lets say God's creativity is a multifaceted diamond. Then each of these (pointing to kalimbas) is a facet. Each of these separate creations - a scarab beetle in the Madagascar rain forest, or a lizard in the Sonoran desert - each of those are glimpses of God's creativity. So each show us more about God.
Fabrics from various native cultures around the world - languages - they are all glimpses of his rich extravagant creativity.
This is at the root of my dissatisfaction with the trend towards homogeneity - it is a dulling of the pointers to God.
So what's happening is people are not really getting to know what God is like, because they encounter this flat, two dimensional, rather boring distant kind of God. I want people's innate creativity to come up - that's part of my desire for humanity. People are made to make - that must come out. When it is stifled - when I meet an individual, I feel their pain when they are not flowing as they could flow.
When I see biodiversity being destroyed and damaged, it hurts me, because God, whom I love - part of his message to us through what he's made, is being robbed and destroyed... because this being has gone extinct, and that mountainside has turned into a quarry.
I want people to meet the amazing extravagant glorious, inexhaustibly magnificent Creator.
So the kalimba opens doors, because people can play it. You can see a person's face light up. And different instruments - you try them out, and people click with different instruments. Some people have been waiting 40 years to meet a kalimba. And you want to get that instrument into the right hands. And the same with these flutes - the bamboo flutes. A lot of people think - "Oh, you want to play the flute? You have to through grade 1, 2, 3, and 4."
I love the way things connect together - ecology and music. You're in a forest, near a mountain stream, and there are certain kinds of scales and musics that work in that time and place. This shakuhachi with its minor pentatonic scale just works with water. There are intervals in dripping water. And some of those intervals might be picked up in the pentatonic scale. So, when you can pick that up with an instrument, you can play with a place.
There is a Native American (flute) tradition I've heard where you play a place - the ups and downs of the landscape is your score.
KM: I see these hills between Unterburg and here - and they are all managed forest lands...
JR: Uuuuggh! Green Cancer! One kind of tree, over and over again.
KM: What was there before?
JR: There were these beautiful mist-belt grasslands. At that altitudinal zone, there are lots of mists. Unfortunately, those lands are very good for agriculture, they are very good for commercial forrestry. So they get planted up - there is hardly any mist-belt grassland left - it is so rich - amazing.
KM: We are each individuals, and we each have a purpose, and our task is to find that purpose. I'm thinking of the Traceys... Hugh Tracey went out and he recorded music in a time when it was there, but was disappearing. When you go out into the countryside, you don't find that music any more. But he went out and found the music and recorded it. His son, Andrew, studied the music in depth in a way that his father could not. Now, Andrew's son, Goeffrey, is becoming a traditional Zulu healer. Goeffrey is using music in rhythm and dance in his work - taking the things his father and grandfather studied, and becoming intimately connected in his own heart, through the music.
You are seeking to connect musics with locations, ecological environments. And my job is to document this and yell out to the whole world: "Look! Look at THIS!" and to play my own music. So we each have our own musics.
JR: There's a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying "What I do is me: for that I came."
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
The flat land above the escarpment is covered with trees which are grown as a tree farm. Much of the forests in South Africa are tree farms, but this drainage is committed conservation land. Hundreds of years ago, people grew corn or millet here on these terraces. Iron age humans worked iron in this valley some 1300 years ago. Now zebras, giraffes, antelope and kudu munch on vegetation. Adjacent conservation lands managed by different groups form a wildlife corridor, providing stark contrast to the monoculture of the tree farms above, a foreign habitat where almost no native animal species thrive.
KM: In addition to his ecological and spiritual work, John is a fearless re-tuner, experimenting with various tunings he has learned about from the Kalimba Magic website as well as tunings of his own design. And before John started in with his work on the kalimba, John had been working on bamboo and wood flutes for years. Thank you for sharing a piece of your life with us, John!
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