Were it not for a slight smattering of summer rain in the late afternoon, dried up by showtime, Chiwoniso and her excellent band would have had the setting they deserved: balmy air, generous evening sunlight and plenty of space for dancing. As it was, we made do with the Museum of Fine Art's auditorium, which afforded comfortable vantage points for the seated members of the audience, but left those who, at a deft and demure suggestion from Chiwoniso, took to their feet crowded into the aisles, jostling elbows and knees.
Chiwoniso is from Zimbabwe via Washington state, a mongrel heritage that blossoms in her melding of the deeply spiritual idiom of Shona mbira music with soulful melodies that approach neo-soul. Ably assisted by a crack band of equally mongrel musicians - a Cameroonian rhythm section, a Danish keyboard player, the German-Zimbabwean saxophonist Max Wild - Chi, as she is known to her fans, took the MFA crowd on a tour of southern African music via her superlative album Rebel Woman.
Chiwoniso opened the show with the record's title track, a meditation on a woman's decision to take up arms in a civil war. While Chi can be sentimental in her appeals to humanity and healing, "Rebel Woman" exhibits a tougher disposition: "There will be no compensation / It was of your free will that you stood / On the frontline / Rebel Woman / These are the rules of war." Chiwoniso's guitarist filled out the compound time signatures of Chiwoniso's limpid, elegiac mbira playing in empathic counterpoint. Suspended in reverie, I could have listened to the two of them all night, but thankfully Chiwoniso had other ideas.
Inviting the rest of the band onstage, Chi launched into "Kurima," the band generating powerballad heft, enough to compete with Chiwoniso's authoritative voice. Max Wild, wearing the veldskoens symptomatic of white Zimbabweans, is a discliple of the Steve Dyer Afrojazz school, played with vein-in-the-neck gusto. He was an ideal partner for Chi, who had soon shed her sandals and was herself bouncing around the stage. The band took in South Africanmbaqanga and the Afro-variants of jazz, pop and funk, tying it together with Wild's emphatic sax, guitar heroics and Chi's magnificently soulful voice.
There is something about so-called "world music," or the crowd it draws, that draws out that peculiar, knees- and elbows-akimbo dancing that wouldn't be caught dead at a hipster show. A crowd of appreciative teens, headphones slung around the neck, too young to know from irony, conga'd and walked like Egyptians repeatedly across the apron of the stage, returning to dance in tight, awkward, delighted circles, cheering loudly after every song.
The kids were not alone in insisting on an encore. Chi played "Matsotsi," a song about corruption, with the band, then stood alone with her mbira to play the gorgeous, plangent "Iwai Nesu," at the insistence of the plentiful Zimbabweans in the crowd.
Chiwoniso treated us to feelgood music, in the best possible sense of the word. Next time hopefully the weather will do her and her appreciative crowd justice.
