Helen Herimbi
When Carlo Mombelli plays the bass, he makes it sing. Literally. The instrument sounds like it has a voice of its own. As heard at the launch of Mombelli’s 12th album under his own name, I Press My Spine to the Ground, this bass harmonises, screeches, belches and sings at the artist’s will.
“I’m a bass player but I’m trying to paint with colours and want to have a palette of sounds to express stories and emotions,” he told me a couple of weeks after the launch.
He uses the actual bass, manipulated bass and sonic design through a looping station to make the stage his canvas. For this 55-year old, who knew for sure he didn’t want to be a chef like his father but a musician when his mother took him to see the Swan Lake ballet at just eight years old, looping isn’t a new thing.
He moved to a forest in KwaZulu-Natal with his mom and stepdad after his parents got divorced. It was there that he really started paying attention to his surroundings.
“I was very affected by the sounds of nature – the crickets, the birds,” he explained, “I started being very focused on composition coming out of nature. When I went to Pretoria Boys’ High, they had music as a subject and that’s when I first started learning about music on the piano. But during break time, I’d go into the beautiful forest there and listen to the wind, crickets, birds, everything.”
“You know when you listen, you find there’s looping in nature,” he started whistling like a bird and echoing that sound. “There are things always coming back. So I started way back then to think about how I could incorporate looping into my music. Looping is a fairly recent thing but I already started in the 1970s with delay pedals and experimenting with looping.”
At the launch, he has a pedal near his feet and even samples the voice of broadcaster Brenda Sisane, who reads two poems on the new album as she was too shy to join the band on stage. For the recording of I Press My Spine to the Ground, Mombelli assembled a band that includes Kyle Shepherd (piano), Mbuso Khoza (voice) and Kesivan Naidoo (drums).
But since Naidoo had to leave to study at the Berklee College of Music, the band now plays live events with Tumi Mogorosi on the drums. “I’ve been to many of Tumi’s concerts and I love the way he plays,” Mombelli told me.
“Kesivan plays very differently to Tumi. It doesn’t help to replace someone with someone who sounds similar to them. It has to be someone who’s got a completely different voice that will give the music a different energy.”
Mombelli loves art and his newest CD cover features a painting by Norman Catherine – the same artist whose work has graced many a Mombelli cover. The bassist is influenced by Pablo Picasso’s work and life.
How the artist always moved around echoes how Mombelli’s albums are a constant evolution. Picasso’s Dove – which is a universal symbol of peace – is also the title of a beautiful song on Mombelli’s album. Here, Khoza’s voice is heavenly as he sings for peace and unity among South Africans.
The opening song, The Bells of Gitschenen, is improvised by the band but also includes church and cow bells that Mombelli recorded while he was in the Swiss Alps working on his previous album, Stories.
I asked him how he knows when something is going to be of use in the future.
“Music comes in as sketches,” he smiled. “I have drawers and drawers of those, like how an artist has a sketchbook. Sometimes, there are a few parts of it but it’s not ready to be completed so it gets put away. And then, 10 years later, there’s another part I write of the composition.
“I have a composition called 87-99 because the sketch was produced in 1987 and I completed the composition in 1999. It’s one of my albums. I never think about the South African Music Awards; it’s just a natural approach.”
Mombelli shows no signs of slowing down when it comes to composing. He is also passionate about teaching – he is a senior music lecturer at Wits University. The self-taught artist who also holds a doctorate says: “I never studied to become a teacher in the formal way. [But] if I’m a good enough teacher to teach me, then surely I can teach others. And teach them to find their own voices.”
Carlo Mombelli’s I Press My Spine to the Ground is available in stores.