Sheryl Deane
ACOUSTIC guitarist Derek Gripper began arranging kora music for classical guitar and recorded his arrangements featuring these compositions on an album titled One Night on Earth.
The production caught the attention of classical guitar icon, maestro John Williams, who loved what he heard and contacted Gripper from his London home, requesting a musical collaboration.
“I got an email while living in Cape Point. I was driving near the nature reserve trying to find signal to download emails and this email popped up with the Subject: “Would you like to play with John Williams at Shakespear'es Globe?”, Gripper laughs as he recounts this unexpected encounter.
The collaboration led to Gripper performing on the same stage as Williams at the Globe Theatre to a sold out audience in 2014. The show was a huge success and catapulted the already well-known Gripper onto the world stage of acoustic guitar music, playing all over Europe and the US.
This year saw a second collaboration in London with Williams and Gripper, with five new duets written in Cape Town by Gripper and guitarist Rheza Khota, who wrote the parts that Williams would play in the concert in London.
“John and I practised together for a few wonderful days at his home in London the week before the show, he is a perfectionist and in between he had a million fascinating stories to tell – which one would expect after a career spanning more than 50 years,’’ Gripper smiles.
They will perform together for a third time next year for London’s Songlines Encounters Festival in June.
Gripper has recently returned from his fifth international visit this year, from playing in festivals in Tanzania and Zimbabwe, to visits to Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and the UK.
Highlights include composing works for a 12-piece guitar orchestra featured at the Copenhagen Classical Guitar Festival and, of course, the collaboration with Williams which was a sold out, candle-lit performance in the period theatre on the West bank in London.
It must be inspiring to work with African instrumental music and arrange it in different combinations for classical ensembles like a string quartet or guitar orchestra. Gripper says that his collaboration with string arranger Galina Juritz in Cape Town led to a successful premiere of the work Miniyamba for string quartet, this July in Turkey, when it was premiered by the acclaimed Kronos Quartet.
He explains that his aim is to make the point that great African composers exist outside of the accepted classical canon.
“What a musician like world renowned kora virtuoso from Mali Toumani Diabate does when he takes a Malian song such as Jarabi and arranges it in a new way, is no different from Bach taking a Spanish dance like the ciaccona and creating the famous d minor Ciaconna for solo violin.
“The fact that Bach wrote his music down on paper, and Toumani recorded his in the studio, makes no difference, what we have here is two incredible composers re-imagining the music that they hear around them. I think we need to remember that writing is one form of record keeping among many, not a mark of intellectual or cultural superiority.”
Gripper’s latest album, Libraries on Fire has recently been released. The name of the album relates to the fact, that when the composer dies, the compositions often die with him.
This is the fate of the African aural tradition unless it is passed on through generations by a family member, and not lost like a “library on fire”.
Gripper plays a guitar by Bavarian luthier Hermann Hauser III. He has this to say about the guitar: “My guitar was made in 2003 in Reisbach, Bavaria, by Hermann Hauser III, the grandson of Hermann Hauser who made one of the most famous classical guitars in history: the 1930’s ‘Segovia Model’ played for thirty years by the maestro Segovia (a guitar which Segovia, with his usual penchant for all things grandiose, called ‘The Guitar of the Epoch’). The voice of a guitar is mostly the result of the wood that makes the top or table (the part with the sound hole).
“The type of wood used to make the back and sides will then further colour and define the sound, but it is the quality and characteristics of the top that really dictate how the instrument is going to sound.
“Before I played a Hauser guitar I was not entirely sure that the sound of the guitar really inspired me. Then I visited Hermann Hauser III’s workshop for one week and played more guitars than I care to remember.
“The one that I loved the most was this one that I still play. It is still a young guitar, I’m looking forward to hearing it in fifty years time. Then we’ll start to hear something really really special.”
Gripper will perform tomorrow in the Art of Guitar concert series at The Alphen Hall (the council buildings) opposite Constantia Village shopping centre.
He will play music by wide range of kora composers as well as works by JS Bach and Williams.
A selection of Gripper’s albums will be on sale at the concert and can be heard on his website.
l Tickets: R150. Book: at the door, Computicket. For Hauser guitar information: www.derekgripper .com/guitar-10-2013