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Describe the atmosphere and live music at a local pub, restaurant, festival, church or temple, club night.... inspire other people to check it out!
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Musician: Risenga Makondo
Location: Brighton
Instruments: marimba / berimbau / various drums / body percussion / voice
Music: South African
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 ΜύΜύListen (04'30) to Risenga Makondo play 'Olutalo' with Ubizo from 'Ubizo', Provocateur Records, PVC1036
' I saw friends of mine who went, thinking it was 'just a job', and they came back mad.'
How I came to this music:
I grew up in the countryside in the north of South Africa near Venda. As a kid I was a shepherd for a long time so I didn't go to school. I started playing music for money when I was about fourteen. I'm forty now, but when I was a teenager, Venda was a very dangerous place for young black men who were poor and illiterate Β like myself.
That was during the apartheid era and also there was war in the neighbouring countries. The South African government was using the Venda area as a recruiting ground for its war with Mozambique. I saw friends of mine who went, thinking it was 'just a job', and they came back mad.
Instead I headed to Johannesburg, and ended up living in Soweto in the early 1980s. That's when I first got into reggae. I joined a band called Dread Warriors and through singing reggae I more or less learned English. And despite the restrictions on socialising with them, it was also through reggae that I met white people Β for the first time.
Later I went back to traditional African music, but not just Venda, because I was meeting people from lots of other parts of South Africa and hearing their music.
 In about 1987 I hooked up with a band called Amampondo and I played with them for about seven years. I learned a lot from travelling around the world with them and in 1988 we came to Brighton.
I took a shine to the place and by 1990 I had decided to live there and study while also teaching traditional African music and dance at Brighton University. It was my first time in any kind of formal education! I spent so much time studying classical music, that by the time I left 1995, I couldn't even improvise! I got totally worried and had to retrain myself in traditional African music.
After that I decided to do a post graduate diploma in music therapy, part time at the University of Surrey, because I was interested in working with disabled people and disadvantaged kids. I supported myself while studying by doing solo percussion performances and lots of session work for the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ as well as playing with the London School of Samba and an Irish/South African group called Elemental. I've also just finished making a new album with Alan Skidmore's Ubizo, which includes a lot of members of Amampondo.
Where I play:
I play in all sort of places Β schools, community centres and public halls. I've played at Ronnie Scott's with Alan Skidmore, and of course I've been overseas lots with Amampondo. I just did a performance in Spain at the WOMAD festival in Caceres and a weeklong residency with a band at a jazz club in Barcelona.
But I also run workshops training therapists how to work in multicultural settings and use non-western music with disabled people. And I train youth workers in how to work with young people using percussion.
A favourite song:
This track called Olutalo is from Ubizo's new album. We're using an instrument from Uganda called akadinda , which is a kind of giant marimba. Up to twelve people can play it but when we play it there's about six of us.
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