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Describe the atmosphere and live music at a local pub, restaurant, festival, church or temple, club night.... inspire other people to check it out!
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Musician: Risenga Makondo
Location: Brighton
Instruments: marimba / berimbau / various drums / body percussion / voice
Music: South African
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 ÌýÌýListen (04'30) to Risenga Makondo play 'Olutalo' with Ubizo from 'Ubizo', Provocateur Records, PVC1036
' I saw friends of mine who went, thinking it was 'just a job', and they came back mad.'
How I came to this music:
I grew up in the countryside in the north of South Africa near Venda. As a kid I was a shepherd for a long time so I didn't go to school. I started playing music for money when I was about fourteen. I'm forty now, but when I was a teenager, Venda was a very dangerous place for young black men who were poor and illiterate  like myself.
That was during the apartheid era and also there was war in the neighbouring countries. The South African government was using the Venda area as a recruiting ground for its war with Mozambique. I saw friends of mine who went, thinking it was 'just a job', and they came back mad.
Instead I headed to Johannesburg, and ended up living in Soweto in the early 1980s. That's when I first got into reggae. I joined a band called Dread Warriors and through singing reggae I more or less learned English. And despite the restrictions on socialising with them, it was also through reggae that I met white people  for the first time.
Later I went back to traditional African music, but not just Venda, because I was meeting people from lots of other parts of South Africa and hearing their music.
 In about 1987 I hooked up with a band called Amampondo and I played with them for about seven years. I learned a lot from travelling around the world with them and in 1988 we came to Brighton.
I took a shine to the place and by 1990 I had decided to live there and study while also teaching traditional African music and dance at Brighton University. It was my first time in any kind of formal education! I spent so much time studying classical music, that by the time I left 1995, I couldn't even improvise! I got totally worried and had to retrain myself in traditional African music.
After that I decided to do a post graduate diploma in music therapy, part time at the University of Surrey, because I was interested in working with disabled people and disadvantaged kids. I supported myself while studying by doing solo percussion performances and lots of session work for the 91Èȱ¬ as well as playing with the London School of Samba and an Irish/South African group called Elemental. I've also just finished making a new album with Alan Skidmore's Ubizo, which includes a lot of members of Amampondo.
Where I play:
I play in all sort of places  schools, community centres and public halls. I've played at Ronnie Scott's with Alan Skidmore, and of course I've been overseas lots with Amampondo. I just did a performance in Spain at the WOMAD festival in Caceres and a weeklong residency with a band at a jazz club in Barcelona.
But I also run workshops training therapists how to work in multicultural settings and use non-western music with disabled people. And I train youth workers in how to work with young people using percussion.
A favourite song:
This track called Olutalo is from Ubizo's new album. We're using an instrument from Uganda called akadinda , which is a kind of giant marimba. Up to twelve people can play it but when we play it there's about six of us.
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