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Interview
barney griffiths - 4 September 2016 2.00 h

On a musical journey

Anita Zengeza Every Friday afternoon on El Punt Avui Televisió, Barney chats with an English-speaking expat. For this month's interview he had a chat with Anita Zengeza, a musician from Zimbabwe.
- barney griffiths
You were born in Botswana but you grew up in Zim­babwe.
Yes, my fa­ther was work­ing in Botswana and I lived there until I was five, then we moved to Zim­babwe. It was a great place to grow up in: a lot of space, houses with big gar­dens, a more re­laxed pace of life, which is quite dif­fer­ent to how it works here in Eu­rope.
How many lan­guages do you speak?
My fa­ther speaks Shona, the of­fi­cial lan­guage in Zim­babwe, and my mother is Chi­nese, and so when I was young I learnt a bit of the two lan­guages but not as much as I should have. At home we spoke Eng­lish, which is one of the of­fi­cial lan­guages there, as Zim­babwe used to be a British colony until 1980. I speak a bit if Cata­lan and Span­ish and Ital­ian, where I lived for two years be­fore com­ing to Barcelona, and I've been here for five years. I am study­ing a de­gree in mod­ern music and jazz.
At what age did you de­cide to be a mu­si­cian?
I've stud­ied music all my life, since I was eight, when I started piano classes. Then I con­tin­ued with gui­tar and then at 18 I knew this is what I wanted to do all my life.
Did your par­ents have any­thing to say about that?
They were sup­port­ive, and I am re­ally grate­ful for that. They are quite mod­ern, they can see times are chang­ing, and peo­ple are mak­ing pro­fes­sions out of things that pre­vi­ously it might have been harder to do.
So now you have your own band and you got your­self a record label.
Yes, that is very ex­cit­ing be­cause I can see this is re­ally work­ing now and these peo­ple are awe­some. But it takes time, of course, after a few years, the last year or two have been the ones you can ac­tu­ally say: this is work­ing. It wasn't easy to find the right mu­si­cians. I went to see lots of con­certs and fi­nally I found a drum­mer, a bass player and the gui­tarist, who I also met in the mu­si­cal scene and is my part­ner as well. We need open-minded, ver­sa­tile mu­si­cians, as our music is a fu­sion of very dif­fer­ent styles, with in­flu­ences from African and Latin music.
How many peo­ple are in the band now?
That's been chang­ing over the year. There are six of us, but the core is the four of us: the drum­mer, bass player, my­self and the gui­tarist. And we also have two very spe­cial mu­si­cians with us, a key­board player and per­scus­sion­ist, and they will join us es­pe­cially for the con­certs we will be doing now. They are all Cata­lan, and all dis­cov­er­ing the African rhythms.
What do you call your music?
I usu­ally call it Afro fu­sion. I find it dif­fi­cult to de­fine, so I usu­ally pre­fer not to. But if I have to, I call it fu­sion, be­cause it fuses many dif­fer­ent styles, and Afro be­cause there is a lot of African rhythms. But they are not like tra­di­tional African rhythms, they are more like mod­ern Afro rhythms I would say, and there are more, other in­flu­ences from Brazil­ian music, Latin music, the Caribbean...
Jazz?
Yes, there's also a lit­tle bit of jazz be­cause I've been study­ing jazz here. But ac­tu­ally, be­fore I came to Barcelona, I didn't know much about it, but now there is a lit­tle bit of mod­ern jazz in our songs.
And what about up­com­ing con­cert dates?
So far we've been play­ing in cen­tral places in Barcelona, such as Marula or Harlem Jazz Club, Jam­boreee. We have some quite ex­cit­ing gigs com­ing up. My next one is in Zim­babwe, in two weeks time.
Are you tak­ing your band?
I'm not tak­ing the whole band, just the gui­tarist. We are going as a duo, and we are going to link up and col­lab­o­rate with some other mu­si­cians in Zim­babwe. But my plan is to take the whole band next time, so I am just going to see how it goes eco­nom­i­cally, and hope­fully we'll man­age to do that. And back in Barcelona we have quite a few over the sum­mer, the Sant Cugat festa major and oth­ers.
Your new album is called Nat­ural Jour­ney. Why this title?
Well, for many rea­sons, I re­ally like the word “jour­ney”, be­cause it's such a ver­sa­tile word; it can be like a phys­i­cal jour­ney, it can talk about your per­sonal jour­ney or about your mu­si­cal jour­ney, and for me those were the three im­por­tant con­cepts that I felt in the CD. Also the themes on this album are quite dif­fer­ent from the ones from the first one, which were quite sad and nos­tal­gic, be­cause it was after I had left home, but this CD is more up­beat. It's de­fin­i­tively hap­pier and more pos­i­tive. The songs are in­spired by im­por­tant mo­ments in my life and ex­pe­ri­ence.

Anita Zengeza's web is: www.​ani​taze​ngez​a.​com

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