Well, for starters, walking on burning hot coals. Or the feeling in your stomach the morning after Mix Bowl. I know it’s hard to believe, but last night was even better than both of those – I got to watch my African Instruments teacher, Dizu, put on the most amazing concert I’ve seen. And I even got to play on one song.
I’ve spoken of my African Instruments class before. It meets once a week for 45 minutes, and I play crazy instruments (so far we’ve only played the djembe and a beautiful Ugandan xylophone called the akadinda) with 5 other Americans and Dizu. I get a full Pomona credit for it, and there’s no outside of class work. Then there’s African Music Ensemble, in which we play what we learn in African Instruments in a larger group setting (15 – 20 people, including South Africans) – that, too, meets for 45 minutes a week, is taught by Dizu, and is worth a full Pomona credit. That’s half my semester’s credit for playing instruments for an hour and a half every week. With Dizu. I can’t even describe Dizu – he transcends the word chill. He’s also perhaps the most amazing musician I’ve ever seen – he will play any instrument you put in front of him and will amaze you with how cool it sounds. Dizu’s first band (I forget the name) is Nelson Mandela’s favorite band. Enough cred?
Last night, he was the centerpiece of this show. His new band, along with help from students from the UCT music school, put on an amazing concert. Our whole African Music Ensemble class played on one song (which you can see below), but the highlight was definitely hearing Dizu playing all these different instruments. He played something that looked like a skinny shofar and sounded like the most pure flute in the world. He played a mouth harp – creating vibrations of the strings with a bow and blowing into the top of it to produce different sounds. He played at least five different types of drums, all of them sounding totally different. He played something that looked like a cardboard box and sounded like waves rolling in along the coast. The best thing you could possibly do would be to youtube him (I haven’t watched his youtube videos because of the bandwidth issue here, but I bet they’re amazing). Just type in Dizu Plaatjie and see what you find. Your mind will be blown.
On a side note, this weekend CIEE is paying for us to straight ball: taking us to two soccer games tonight down at Greenpoint Stadium (the World Cup stadium), tomorrow to Mzoli’s (the craziest block party in the world, as I wrote about in an earlier entry), and Sunday to Robben Island. I was supposed to write a paper this weekend…oops, it’ll have to wait until next week.
Enjoy the video!
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