South African guitar adventurer Derek Gripper talks the kora, Bach, and improvisation
Africa meets Western tradition on his nylon-strung Spanish instrument
Derek Gripper. Photo by Simon Attwell
Cap Global Roots and The Rogue Folk Club present Derek Gripper at Mel Lehan Hall (3214 West 10th Avenue) on March 19
CAPE TOWN-BASED Derek Gripper first came to the wider world’s attention with 2016’s Libraries on Fire, an adventurous and lovely recording on which he arranged nine classics of the West African kora repertoire for his own instrument, the nylon-strung Spanish guitar.
More deeply felt homage than cultural appropriation, Libraries on Fire gave full credit to Gripper’s Malian mentor, kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate. And on it Gripper accomplished the remarkable feat of not only transferring notes and tunes from the 21-string kora to the six-string guitar, but capturing the rhythmic joie de vivre of Diabate and his peers.
For those not in the know, the kora is a member of the harp family, and kora music is situated at the intersection of West African and Arab music, just as Mali itself is at the westernmost end of traditional trade routes that ultimately link up with the fabled Silk Road. It’s profoundly complex and contrapuntal music, and in adapting it for the guitar Gripper quite naturally turned to his earlier fascination with the great master of European counterpoint, Johann Sebastian Bach.
“Generally, the conversation with West African music has been a backwards and forwards conversation between Bach’s music and the kora’s music,” he explains, reached by Zoom at home in South Africa. “When I learn something from Bach I can apply it to the kora music, and when I learn something there I can apply it back. It’s been a continuous conversation between the two, and in fact when I first discovered Toumani Diabate’s music I couldn’t play the kora’s music; I didn’t understand how the music worked or anything, but I would listen to his phrasing and the way he attacked the string, the explosive way that he would phrase, and then I’d apply that back to Bach.”
It took several years before Gripper was ready to perform his kora transcriptions; he’s working from a place of profound respect rather than hasty emulation. But a look back at his extensive catalogue of 22 full-length recordings shows that his interest in transformation long predates his desire to turn his guitar into a kora. And his work isn’t just about transposing music from one instrument or culture to another. Personal transformation, often expressed in sound, is one of his key interests.
A keen student of the Alexander Technique, a form of embodied mindfulness popular with other performing artists ranging from Judi Dench to Paul McCartney, Gripper finds that being aware of how his body reacts to stimuli makes for livelier, less taxing performances—and that by varying those stimuli he can also spark creative growth.
Sometimes the written word is enough. “The most exciting writer, for me, was Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese natural farmer who write this beautiful little book called The One-Straw Revolution in the ’70s,” the guitarist says. “Just a remarkable book, and I suppose that since reading his book and having Alexander Technique lessons and reading [F. Matthias] Alexander, I’ve started to notice that there was a principle here, which I could say is a subtractive principle. It’s the principle of ‘What less can I do?’”
Gripper put that notion to work on “Cederburg”, from 2021’s Billy Goes to Durban. (That album’s title, by the way, was inspired by a found recording of Billy Graham’s 1974 revival meeting in that South African town, where the American evangelist rather bravely broke apartheid-era laws enforcing segregation.)
“I was having a lesson—or kind of a discussion—on the phone, and we were talking about waiting, which is a big theme in Alexander Technique,” he explains. “You know, the idea of saying no to a stimulus, and instead waiting for something to arise. The great, famous book about that would be Zen in the Art of Archery, where [Eugen] Herrigel has to practice for three years to hold the bow at the point of maximum tension until his hand flies open like a baby’s. We were discussing this idea, and when the conversation was over I had this idea to improvise a phrase, and instead of feeling that I had to immediately respond with another phrase, actually waiting for some time. Which meant becoming present again, noticing where I was, totally exiting the guitar-playing thing–and then playing another phrase. I did that a number of times, recording it, and at the end I had about 20 minutes of playing alternating with silence. And it was really interesting, because once I went back to that recording and just deleted the silences, I had a composition.”
A larger example of patience and stimulus reduction can be heard on last year’s Sleep Songs for My Daughter, in which Gripper decided to mimic his experience of playing his young daughter to sleep through the simple expedient of turning off all the lights in the recoding studio. “You find that little switch that takes you back,” he says. “And, again, it’s about finally being comfortable with uncertainty. And the thing about being comfortable with uncertainty is that you have to be happy with the outcome, even if it’s not what was originally intended.” Gripper’s original intention was to record an album of lullabies; what emerged was a collection of enigmatic nocturnes. Although they function well as sleep aids, they can also be heard as beautifully crafted spontaneous compositions.
Improvisation, Gripper adds, plays an ever-larger role in his concerts. “In live performance I have a few principles that I work from,” he explains. “I suppose I’m in the process of rehabilitating myself from a classical musician to whatever I’m doing now! There were things that I had to change, certain things that a classical musician would take for granted. For example, you would have a plan: ‘Here are the compositions I’m going to play.’ And then you’d have a way that you’re going to play them, and a desire to play them correctly and accurately and in the ways in which they were written. Slowly and surely, over the years I’ve changed that and got to the point where I’m comfortable to walk out on-stage and sit down without a plan at all—without a plan of what I’m going to play first, or even what tuning I’m going to be in.”
So we can’t definitively promise that Gripper’s upcoming Vancouver concert will feature any of those alluring kora transcriptions, although it’s unlikely that he would leave them out.
But will it be an adventure? That’s the plan.
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