In my bullet journal I’ve been writing down quotes to inspire me in my attempt to age gracefully. My favorite so far comes from George L. Knapp, written in 1908: “We do not so much quit playing because we grow old, as grow old because we quit playing.”
Yeah, that’s the saying that might show up on a cutesy wooden sign in some Etsy shop, but I keep thinking about it every Monday night when our Zimbabwean African marimba band, Shamwari, practices. Knapp’s quote comes from his article, “Ancient Origin of Modern Sport,” another kind of play.
For me, play means music, an enterprise I started probably in church choir and then took up — and quickly dropped — with piano lessons at age 10. When you’re an energetic kid growing up in the endless summer of Florida, play means play and it’s hard to sit still and practice. I never had an organized sport, but boy did I have a lot of disorganized play.
A few years after my wife and I moved to Homer, we fell into the local Zimbabwean music scene. Michele Stenger and Mike Gracz had learned marimba from their teacher, Michael Breez, when they lived in Seattle, and when they came to Homer they started a marimba band, Mud Bay Marimbas. Others joined them, and then Breez and his wife Osha came to Homer to teach classes, and in the summer of 2002 my wife Jenny and our friends Sue, Jim and Julia took a workshop with Michael and Osha at the Homer Council on the Arts. Shazam, we got hooked.
It hasn’t escaped me that playing marimba is like playing the piano, except you hit tuned wooden keys with mallets instead of tapping keys that drop little hammers on strings. Percussion is percussion. Marimba involves big hand, arm and upper body movements (really big movements on the bass) and a bit of bouncing around. Heck, sometimes when you’re stretching to reach those big notes on the bass, you dance. The beat and the music and the joy flows through you.
Yep: marimba means playing in the youthful exuberance sense of the word.
It took a while for our group to become a band and find a name. “Shamwari” means “friends” in the Shona language of Zimbabwe. We started out as a motley collection of musicians, taking lessons from Jenny Carroll, one of the members of Jujuba, then the hottest marimba band in Alaska. We picked up more songs from the Breezs and other visiting teachers. We bought or built instruments. Members came and went as meanwhile new bands formed and changed in Homer and Alaska. Some of our Shamwari bandmates, alas, have passed on, though I still feel the spirit of Stephanie Lieb Migdal and Doug Epps.
Learning piano meant sitting down in a stuffy studio with a stern teacher and staring at sheet music. We learn marimba the old way, with a teacher showing us the parts and then repeating them — “I play, you play.” We play without sheet music and by memory. That means not just knowing your own parts, but how they fit with the arrangement, when to drop in and drop out, when to switch and, oh yeah, keeping a steady beat.
When I play marimba, my mind sparks something like the way it does when I’m about two-thirds through a complicated story or novel, juggling all the plot lines and characters and trying to remember if I have bumped off the villain. The more we practice and play, the more we listen, the tighter it all comes together. I don’t know if playing complicated music regularly will stave off dementia, but it can’t hurt.
Over the years Shamwari has developed enough of a repertoire and skill that we don’t embarrass ourselves when we play in public. In summer we like to perform. We’ve taken road trips to farmers markets in Soldotna, Anchorage, Girdwood and Palmer. We’ve played at weddings and funerals. We cut a CD, made band stickers and have printed T-shirts. Sometimes almost no one shows up and then there was that time at Salmonfest when we rocked the house.
And we’ve grown old. This happens. Our youngest member is in her 50s and our oldest is in his 80s. We’re all graying but we look fabulous. Our bones have become creakier and a few of us have had hip and knee replacements. I got a pacemaker (it doesn’t have a metronome). But we persevere, and in our perseverance we keep from growing old.
I love my bandmates, especially my wife Jenny. We’ve seen each other through grief and happiness and I don’t think I would have survived the COVID-19 pandemic if we hadn’t kept playing. My friends keep me alive, challenge me and inspire me.
This Saturday, June 7, we play at 1 p.m. at the Homer Farmers Market and then the next day at the Boathouse on the Homer Spit. On July 2 we perform at the Porcupine Theatre, the first venue we played for a multi-band concert back in 2003. Bring your dancing shoes and join us in the grand enterprise of play.
Michael Armstrong worked at the Homer News for 23 years before retiring in 2022. Reach him at wordfolk@gmail.com or follow him on Bluesky at maarmstrong.bsky.social. Follow his band, Shamwari Music Ensemble of Homer, on Facebook.
