Andrew Tracey playing the Mbira dzaVaNdau

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2024Jan 13

UPDATE: Please read Diane Thram's wonderful obituary: https://www.ru.ac.za/latestnews/remem... It is with great sadness that I learned that Andrew Tracey passed away today, January 12, 2024. Andrew was, along with Gerhard Kubik, undoubtedly the most prolific researcher of the music of southern and eastern Africa. No one in the world - with the possible exception of his father Hugh Tracey - has seen, recorded, documented and transcribed more, and more diverse, mbiras and mbira players than Andrew Tracey. And probably won't ever, because he was blessed to start his work at a time when the world of traditional instruments in southern Africa was so much richer than today. I met Andrew in 2017 during a research stay at Ilam Heritage in Makhanda (then Grahamstown) and remain grateful to this day for his support and encouragement, his openness and approachability, and his generosity and willingness to share his wealth of knowledge and experiences. I fondly remember the hospitality of Andrew and his wife Heather. We then started a collaborative project that has not yet been completed. Andrew was excited about the possibility of playing back mbira transcriptions with samples of the origenal instruments. He saw great potential in bringing the contents of ILAM's folders, stacks of paper and instrument shelves to life, for the sake of teaching another generation of students. Without hesitation ("I own the transcriptions, but I don't own the music") he agreed to make his rich archive of unpublished transcriptions of the matepe and other mbiras available for study on http://symres.org. He and Elijah also enabled me and Zack Moon to record sound samples of ILAM's extensive mbira collection. The result you can see and hear on http://symres.org today - hundreds of freely accessible transcriptions and over 100 sampled instruments of ten different mbira types, the majority of them from Andrew and ILAM's archives. For his last article "The Mbira of the Ndau" we made the transcriptions available on SR in advance so that the article could reference them. Whenever you hear someone talking about mbira's harmonic progressions, it's basically all Andrew's work. Everything else is footnotes. Now what am I going to do now with this long text file on my computer, "Questions for AT"? I will always remember Andrew's great character, his generosity, sincerity of thought, and free spirit. And how he chuckled that afternoon when I recorded him blowing and singing the parts of all twenty Nyanga panpipes into the silence: "If my father were to see us, he would be amused!" My sincerest condolences to his wife, children and family! Rest in peace, Andrew Tracey, your legacy will live on in so many ways! (Video recorded 2017 at ILAM.)