The Sunday News
THEY are a six-piece ensemble and they won the outstanding music video award at this year’s National Arts Merit Awards for the video of their song Changamire, the first single from the eight-track album they are working on with the same name.
The musical video is no doubt top class although the group – GudoGuru remains little known in other parts of the country.
Those that have had the chance of seeing the video will attest that the project was never a rushed one like some of the videos that we see on our small screens that scream out that the artistes would be in a hurry to get the celebrity tag.
The group’s video resembles that which was done by Clive Malunga some years ago from his song Nesango which was a masterpiece, quite original and showed a lot of artistic creativity where time and resources were committed with abandon.
And in an attempt to market themselves nationally and move away from the confines of the capital and beyond the weekly Wednesday night residency at Chelseas in Harare, the group is currently looking for partners and support to help it initiate the tour.
The name GudoGuru is a shortened version of Shona idiom Gudo guru peta muswe vaduku vakutye which literally means even if you are the elder, you should always humble yourself and respect the young ones so that they respect you in return.
This Shona proverb according to Munyaradzi Nota one of the group leaders encapsulates the spirit in which this hitherto relatively unknown collective delivers its stirring, mind-morphing message.
GudoGuru’s album Changamire reveals the enchanting coming together of various individual elements, born from a glorious past living in today’s urban realities.
The artwork, so enshrined in its mysticism laden with symbiology, is the first experience inviting you on a jaunt into a unique realm. This is immediately confirmed in the haunting echoes of the Chiwoniso Maraire sample that introduces the album’s opening and title track, Changamire.
Mbiras sit effortlessly alongside acoustic and electric guitars creating a soulful soundscape that is punctuated by the rhythmic elements of traditional hosho (accompanying shakers) and ngoma.
In an interview with the Sunday Leisure one of the band leaders Munyaradzi Nota aka Tanganyika said the traditional (mostly Dinhe and Jiti) rhythms are arranged into a seamless juxtapose with contemporary drum patterns that would feel at home beside any of today’s hip-hop productions. This gives life to the often reversed kinship between our rich musical heritage and the descendant forms evolved by our cousins across the oceans, making it easy to see that it is actually hip-hop that has its DNA origins firmly in mbira.
Speaking powerfully over this soundscape are Begottensun (Kudakwashe Musasiwa) and Tanganyika continuing in a tradition that harkens the age-old oral customs of poetic praises and chants.
Don’t get it twisted. These two are no newbie’s, nor do they come without reputation.
Kudakwashe Musasiwa (who won a Producer of the Year gong at 2012’s Zim Hip Hop Awards,) was a founder member of the ’90s Christian Rap group Hardcore that made quite some waves in what was then (and somewhat still is) a growing hip-hop sub-culture. Their album Gangstaz in the Right Gang saw them tour the gospel circuit as far afield as Malawi and Zambia, during the era of groups such as Kataclysm, Tricks and Games, ClickClan, Blackfoot Tribe, Mau Mau, Gifted Few, Native Young Crew, Outrage, The Razvi and other such. After relocating to England, BSun as he is otherwise known, continued his musical journey through the release of his 2004 album RiseUp, an independent work that managed to galvanise dispersed Zimbabwean youths through its effective online release. This, plus his work with Karizma as well as the Blaz online music forum, was pioneering in empowering diaspora young Zimbabweans wanting to record and release their music independently.
Munyaradzi Nota, somewhat of an enigma, is well known behind the scenes within artistes and producer circles. Beyond an early appearance on the second edition of the country’s Starbrite talent show, his musical and recording journey has seen him work on a number of mostly unreleased projects with everyone from Prince Qwela (formally of Peace of Ebony) Prince Tendai, Kelly Rusike, Isaac Chirwa and many others in various capacities. He was also a member of the “underground” group The Razvi.
Nota found himself at the roots of the country’s “Urban Grooves” phenomena most typified in his song Sands of Time, recorded with Delani Makhalima and released as part of Shamiso studios seminal release The Future, a release which ushered in stars like Willom Tight, Alexio Kawara and Sanii Makhalima to name a few.
During the fabled 2000s, Nota relocated to the UK, en route to New York, where his pursuit of recording opportunities took him deep into the inner corridors of the recording industry. That is how the pair came together as DKR (Divided Kingdom Republic) a group that any in the know concerning hip-hop from Africa and Zimbabwe, will undoubtedly have heard something of.
They released three albums under the name DKR before they renamed the group GudoGuru.
The group’s catalogue began with their iconic 2005 debut, Rhythm and Prose, where with former member Kudzi Mambara (Faceless) they emerged among the powerful voices of a new generation of exposed and increasingly conscious young Africans. Standout tracks on this effort included Tears, a song they recorded after being granted permission by Sade to sample her year 2000 song King of Sorrow. The release saw the group become staples in an emerging “African Hip-hop” scene, particularly in the UK, where they played at several festivals bolstered by what was then their pioneering use of a live band.
If Rhythm and Prose could be described as classic, the follow up Kudakwashe/Munyaradzi, a self-named double CD released in 2008, upped the ante taking their sound to super god status.
This release marked their first foray into working with the enchanting indigenous mbira sound. The result was a musical and conceptual range hard to encapsulate, given that each disc in the set takes audience on a somewhat autobiographical journey into the mind of each of the two protagonists. Though this release was not widely distributed in Zimbabwe, through its powerful blend of mbira and beats and through the powerful oratory of a worldly but Afro-centred perspective, DKR solidified a growing audience, and in effect began tracing the outlines of a genre of their own.
Changamire arrives as a confluence of all the above, delivered entirely in vernacular.
And by shunning the synthesised and precise electronic sounds common in most of contemporary releases, Tanganyika, who handles production on this album, manages to deliver a recording, which after sitting comfortably alongside the rooted musicality of a Chiwoniso album, would find space just as well beside the urban sensibility of a Kanye West recording.
“The deliberate choice to stick to a set palette of instruments ensures that once you are immersed in the world of the GudoGuru music, you wander through and are never lost,” said Tanganyika.
The two wordsmiths employ very distinct but complementary tones that lend a cross-generational ambience to the resultant social commentary.
Add to this the dizzying array of spiritually linked featured vocalists (namely Ba Shupi on Bembera, Willis Wattafi on Chaminuka and Shingi Mangoma most notably on Vana Vako) one begins to see the outlines of a project that in actuality has created its own genre.
It is an almost impossible ask attempting to summarise the importance of this recording to the cultural landscape of Zimbabwe, in as far as it demonstrates what is possible if only we all were to remember and fearlessly speak in our own voice.
This is mbira music today, yet it takes no stretch of the imagination to picture this material being played and sung in exactly the same way, some 200 years ago in some village here on this African plateau. Then as now, it would feel totally at home.
A first review of the album by Larry Kwirirayi of Three Men On a Boat had this to say of the work, “As a hip-hop album it is important for its music, even if the subject matter is not something you are comfortable with. Everything sits in the quality of the production. It dares to be totemic.”
