Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi
The Phoenix. Sunday, November 15, 2009.
Out on a Sunday night to check out a legend. Oliver Mtukudzi — "Tuku" as he's usually known — is one of the superstars of Zimbabwe, performing since 1977 or so when he came onto the scene in a band with the also-legendary Thomas Mapfumo. Truth be told, I didn't really know much about Tuku's music, but that lineage was more than enough to convince me, along with the word that his shows are generally considered to be "events".
Which indeed turned out to be the case. With quote-unquote World Music1 shows you never know what you're going to get. There's always an interesting mix of marketing and diaspora community-word-of-mouth at work where some shows feel more like exoticism pitched at well-heeled CBC listeners. This time, though, the crowd was dominated by members of the local Zimbabwean community, most well-turned-out like they were going to a fancy party. And out to take part — to dance and sing along, to respond loudly to Tuku's imprecations from the stage — not one of those respectful recital-type shows.
By 9:30, the house was pretty full. In lieu of a full warm-up set, we got a few numbers from Tuku's son, Sam Mtukudzi, playing some "slow jamz" on acoustic guit and accompanied by some percussion. He was definitely a nifty guitar player, but the songs didn't set me on fire. The audience was chatty at first, acknowledging him a bit more and starting to sing along when he played an arrangement of one of his father's tunes. While he was still playing, the band took the stage. And then came Oliver Mtukudzi, in a jaunty fedora and white suit, dancing back and forth, greeting the audience. As the band launched into a groove, he gave every sign of being the proud father ("I was in the States to receive an award, and I invited my son to witness this. But there's one thing — I didn't know he was going to steal the show in Toronto."). Sam would stay on to play guitar and the occasional bit of saxophone, complementing the drums-bass-percussion rhythm section.
But the band was very much in support of the man at centre stage. Filled with the restraint of mature self-assuredness, Tuku was magnetic without resorting to dramatics or pandering. A sweet singer with his husky voice and a gifted melodicist — one song had such a massive sing-along hook that it must be right up there in the list of all-time hits of Zimbabwe. And there were plenty like that, songs that everyone around me knew and were singing along to. The dominant quality of Tuku's guitar work is a relaxed gentleness, and many songs stretched out to eight or ten minutes, simmering at a slow boil of smoothly picked guitar.2 And when the band stayed in the pocket like that, there were some pretty fantastic moments. Some of the slower tunes slid into the realm of mushy schmaltz, and behind the language barrier it's harder to make a connection to them. But it's always interesting to be in the presence of a crowd who knows the song intimately, joining in with great emotion, and this helped to keep me interested during those stretches.
But the moments that were excellent and groovy outnumbered the bathetic ballads. Over the course of a long set (twenty minutes for Sam Mtukudzi at the outset and an hour-forty for Tuku before a single song encore) the crowd circulated a fair bit, people pushing up front to dance for a song or two and then retreating. Exhausting, but quite worth it.
Listen to a track from this set here.
1 A term I'm trying to get past. The music I usually listen to isn't from the world? Is it still "world music" when it's made by folks who live in my city? Plus, it tends to lump all sorts of utterly unrelated genres together, binding them only by the fact that they come from outside the circle of Western culture. Let us be more specific with our labels, or less — and just call it "music".
2 From what I can fell, Tuku falls into that category of singers who uses a gentle voice and upbeat rhythms to talk about things much darker than his tone would indicate. Such would be the case with "Todii", as pretty and catchy a song as you could ask for, which happens to be about Africa's AIDS crisis.
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