At no time like the present has music seemed more essential: music to connect, to heal … and to escape the news.<\/p>\n
As the world grapples with two huge wars, plus countless other conflicts and the ever-increasing threat of climate catastrophe, it is increasingly difficult to find refuge \u2013 even nature, so beautiful, so present, is challenged.<\/p>\n
This time last year, my husband and I were in Cape Town to visit his sister-in-law, who was bedridden, stricken by an aggressive cancer that would claim her life within days of our return to Australia. A morning spent with South African guitarist Derek Gripper was my refuge from the grief, the heaviness of that time… lost in wonder as Gripper played his guitar at his kitchen table, his foot tapping on the floor. First, immortal, timeless Bach, then Luis de Narvaez from Renaissance Spain, then a West African-inspired composition, all played with a master\u2019s ease.<\/p>\n
Fast-forward to January-February 2024, and Gripper\u2019s impending tour of Australia could not come soon enough.<\/p>\n
Given this is the Christmas edition of Life & Leisure, I ask Gripper \u2013 who is currently touring with West African kora player Ballak\u00e9 Sissoko in Tanzania, then Geneva and the eastern United States \u2013 what he would most like to receive as a gift this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the only thing one could ask for right now would be that humans no longer have the capacity to express their emotions with industrial-strength weapons,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
I concur \u2013 although I confess my wish list also includes his latest work-in-progress, arrangements for guitar of Bach\u2019s cello suites. Recordings from some of these are already available on streaming services, complemented by a black-and-white photograph taken by Gripper on his 1947 Leica IIIc camera.<\/p>\n
The album is called Lost Time because, as Gripper told me when I visited his home again in September, \u201cHow do we know how JSB really intended the cello suites to be played?\u201d He pointed out that no score exists of this sublime music in Bach\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n
His interpretation is Bach as you\u2019ve never heard it before: beautifully phrased yet free of strictly annotated time. Likewise, West African music \u2013 a lot of which Gripper has single-handedly transcribed over a period of more than 10 years from the 21-string kora (or harp lute) to the six-string classical guitar.<\/p>\n
\u201cWest African music, the music of Mali, doesn\u2019t follow the Western concept of mechanical time. It follows the rhythms of life, of the body, of the wind in the trees, of the desert,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n
On his numerous visits to West Africa, writes Gripper in an article on his website, \u201ca visit to a Bamako courtyard during a kora lesson dispels this [notion of regulated time] in an instant\u201d.<\/p>\n
Listening to Gripper play, time ceases. The music, and the moment, is everything, played so freely, played from the heart rather than from memory or from a score. Last year\u2019s kitchen recital was such a moving, generous, impromptu offering, tears of joy trickled down my cheek. This was music played fearlessly, and without restraint, as a flamenco guitarist might play on the streets of Madrid. As West Africans musicians do, in that courtyard in Bamako, Mali.<\/p>\n
Gripper is different to any classically trained guitarists I know or listen to. No metronome, for sure. No mention of the standard repertoire, although he did study music at the University of Cape Town. The strings on his guitar seem hastily strung, loose ends poking out of the guitar\u2019s headstock rather than neatly clipped; the French polish on his special-edition (i.e. highly collectable) Hauser guitar top has worn away, the fretboard dull, hammered with constant use, with playing without concern for the odd buzz or whether his left thumb should or shouldn\u2019t creep over the fingerboard \u2013 just some of the technical preoccupations of many classical guitarists.<\/p>\n
I envy this freedom, this joyful connection to music that impossibly, he has wrought from an unlikely instrument and transposed for just six strings. Why did he do it? \u201cThis was the music I wanted to play.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet make no mistake, his technique is phenomenal \u2013 it\u2019s not for nothing that the Australian-born, world-renowned guitarist John Williams invited Gripper to play with him some years ago; or that he and kora masters Ballak\u00e9 Sissoko and Toumani Diabat\u00e9 improvise together on stage when their schedules permit.<\/p>\n
Has playing West African music changed how he sees the world? \u201cThere is space in the structure of this music for waiting,\u201d he replies. \u201cWaiting for the next phrase, the next idea.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a while, there was a tension between the space presented by the music of Mali\u2019s griots [travelling musicians who maintain oral history in West Africa] and Bach\u2019s linear narrative style \u2013 but more and more I find the spaces are in Bach too, just in different places.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe often think our modern world leaves no spaces, but I think they are there … waiting to be inhabited.\u201d<\/p>\n
So what can we expect on his Australia tour? The unexpected, it seems.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith concerts, I have a simple philosophy \u2013 I don\u2019t argue with myself. There is no program, and no set idea of the pieces,\u201d Gripper says. \u201cIdeas present themselves [on stage] and it is my job not to censor myself. Most of the doing, therefore, is a space free from the constant checks we [usually] make to be sure our actions are moral, social, appropriate.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn music, there is no need for these checks, so we get to be truly ourselves and even a little bit free.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gripper has recently turned to black-and-white photography, on his old film Leica, developing and printing the results himself. \u201cI\u2019m not quite sure why I\u2019m doing this,\u201d he remarks of this pursuit, as we pour over a selection of prints on his music-room floor. \u201cBut I love it too, even though it takes hours and hours of my time.\u201d<\/p>\n
I suspect that slow, manual photography and jiggling prints in the bathroom sink are akin to playing music from that place in his soul that remains in West Africa: that place where there is community, connection, and people sharing stories, music and lives that are difficult beyond our imagining, but rich with life\u2019s natural rhythms.<\/p>\n
Music of the heart. Timeless music, free of time.<\/p>\n
J.S. Bach \u2013 who in 1705 went AWOL for four months from his job as a church organist and walked the 402-kilometre round trip from Arnstadt to L\u00fcbeck to learn from Dietrich Buxtehude, the organist he admired most \u2013 would surely have approved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
South African guitarist Derek Gripper will be touring Australia in the new year. Expect the toe-tapping rhythms of Mali (and maybe some Bach).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":37450,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,31],"tags":[7,14,32],"class_list":{"0":"post-37453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"category-music","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"yoast_head":"\n