Suki Africa: Sukiyaki All Stars meets Africa

This Saturday, this flavourful collaboration arrives at The Mannenberg in Harare, proudly featuring Zimbabwe’s own mbira star, Chiwoniso Maraire, with Peter Solo (Togo), Erik Aliana and Chouchou Bass (Cameroon), Chang Jae-Hyo (Korea), and Sakaki Mango and N’Dana (Japan).
The idea of creating a cross-cultural Afro-Asian collaboration was born during the Japanese music festival “Sukiyaki Meets the World”. Eight musicians started to imagine a performance where each musical colour takes its role and keeps its spirit, but shares its codes, meanings and creative backgrounds, in fantastic harmony.
To imagine Chang Jae Hyo, Korea’s famed exponent of traditional percussion and “shamanist” singing technique with soft gongs and trance-like rhythms, exchanging melodies and patterns with the soaring voice and 1 000-year old mbira tradition of Zimbabwe’s Chiwoniso Maraire is, as Chiwoniso describes it “transcendental”. Add the enchanting West African voice and folk guitar of Togo’s Peter Solo with Japan’s world acclaimed, multi-award winning instrumentalist Sakaki Mango (expert in Congolese lamellaphones, limba, electric likembe, Zimbabwean mbira and electronica), and one begins to sense the magic in store. It is almost mind-boggling to imagine in this mix the brilliant master of Cameroonian poly-rhythms, Aliana, and Japan’s virtuoso “world music” band N’Dana.
Suki Africa is on a four-nation African tour — Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tanzania and Swaziland — supported by the Japan Foundation with a Zimbabwe partnership of the Alliance Francaise, Pamberi Trust and Delta Corporation bringing the show to Harare, while African Synergy Trust co-ordinates the Johannesburg and Swaziland legs of the tour.
African Synergy creative director, Paul Brickhill, remarks: “After five years and 150 tours by African Synergy, this is the only Asian-African musical collaboration that we have toured or even heard about, which explores the roots of musical traditions so deeply. It is an exciting and pioneering production, a first of its kind.”