Legendary Ilanga musician Keith Farquharson opens new Studio in Harare

Former Ilanga keyboard player and sound engineer Keith Farquharson announced the opening of Bridgenorth Studios, a state of the art studio in Harare last week.

Farquharson has mixed and mastered some of Zimbabwe’s best musicians’ music including Oliver Mtukudzi, Jah Prayzah, Alexio Kawara and Chiwoniso Maraire.

He was a keyboardist for Tuku before becoming his sound engineer in the late 1990s. Before that he was with Ilanga. He later discovered Chiwoniso Maraire who recorded with “A Peace of Ebony” in the early 1990s and fused mbira with hip hop, a unique blend.

He featured Chiwoniso as a solo artist on the Soundtrack for the movie “Everyone’s Child”. He then moved to South Africa were he has been involved in production, sound engineering and sharing his knowledge as an educator while working with some of the world’s best artists.

He said: “Bridgenorth Studios has taken several years of planning. My formative years as a musician, and later as a producer and sound engineer, have been heavily influenced by the Zimbabwean music industry. That has been well-documented.”

The only two surviving Ilanga members are Keith and lead singer Busi Ncube. Both are still very much involved in music and music education.

Keith has been running a campus for the Academy of Sound Engineering in Cape Town while Busi is attached to a University in Norway. Keith has travelled the world and met many Zimbabweans who go: “Is that..?” Keith is one of Zimbabwe’s most recognisable faces.

While still in High School (in the 1980s) Keith would go to Benny Miller’s studio during school holidays and play with the keyboards and other equipment.

Keith was studying in SA. He was 16. Miller was working on ‘Marching together’ and ‘Magamba Ose’ with Comrade Chinx (Dick Chingaira Makoni). Zvikomborero was the third single on One World Records and Keith played the keyboards.

“Chinx said, I want you to be in the video with me. Benny was recording Ilanga and they had just done a single called Thandiwe – Brian Paul played the keyboard. They said: ‘Keith why don’t we do some songs and you come and play keyboards? I also had my own band, playing my own songs and for a while, Andy & Don played in that group. Then Ilanga started becoming popular. We recorded Visions Foretold, our first album, at Frontline Studios. The relationship came out of the studio and moved on from there.”

About 10 years after Ilanga’s peak, Oliver Mtukudzi would hire Keith as a keyboard player and travel with him. In the old Ilanga days, Keith played keyboards and engineered the sound simultaneously.

On tour, due to the unique nature of guitars in Zimbabwean music he felt the foreign engineers were not getting the unique balance right. So he asked Tuku if he could just focus on the engineering to balance the instruments as they are on the recordings.

On one such visit one of the DJs saw Keith approaching with a smile. The DJ was playing “True Love” the classic by Ilanga. Keith then said to him; “I played keyboards on that song!”

“Going back to the Comrade Chinx days with Benny Miller, we were using keyboards and synthesisers and drum machines. The Green Arrows had already been using synthesizers too. With Chinx, the drum machine and synthesizers formed the basis of the sound.

“When Ilanga started I was playing those synthesizers more so than piano sounds etc. I like playing piano and organ, so I would synthesize them – some of the synthesizer sounds you hear in electronic dance music now. I would use any sound that worked.

“Bhundu Boys were a lot more narrow in their sound, same with Tuku. Synthesizers worked well in Andy Brown’s music so we used them a lot there too, but in Tuku’s music it was not quite right. I would express myself in the experimental sounds I worked on.

“I have noticed the brass sounds from Andy Brown and Chiwoniso. I hear that a lot in certain Zimbabwean artists. So I have influenced some of the music in that way.”

Parts of this interview can be found in this Youtube video:

“The highlights were ‘True Love’ and that just exploded for Ilanga. We started getting booked for some big shows – Harry Belafonte’s Child Survival Concert and then the Human Rights Now concert in 1988. Mtukudzi performed first and then Ilanga and then Tracy Chapman.

“Don asked me to be the spokesperson of the band. The majority of the 75,000 in the audience were South Africans. At 20 years old, I wasn’t the best person to speak about that.”

“After the concert, Sting’s manager said: ‘Would you guys like to talk about a record deal?’ There were too many disagreements in the band so we messed up that opportunity. That could have changed things for us. Not many people know about that. It was a great show though.”

“Chinx and I went around the country playing in stadiums and taverns and even in rural areas I was welcomed, and the standing joke was: ‘Here comes David Livingstone.’ Mugabe’s message of reconciliation was a good one at the time.”

“I would see Robson Banda and also Muddy Face regularly and I got a better understanding of the music. Further down the line it helped me understand how to get that sound coz it was already part of me.

“The benefits of mixing with Chinx were my exposure to Zimbabwean music, and engaging with the likes of Leonard Dembo and Thomas Mapfumo.”

“’A Peace of Ebony’ came when I was recording “Gondwanaland” (Andy Brown). After Ilanga had split up and some of us were still in Ilanga ‘B’, after Andy left, as we used to call it, ‘The B Team’.

“I was recording these 2 young guys, Herbert Schwamborn and Tony Chihota and they said: ‘Look we have got these tracks’ I came along and put the music to all the songs.”

“It was wonderful because it was a different sound. We had mbira in there. Chiwoniso sang in one of the songs where I had taken a mbira sample. I don’t even know who played it and where it came from.

“Herbert brought the lyrics for “Pretend It Never Happened” and Chiwoniso sang the lead parts. Hip-hop at that time was not as big as it is now. I did the best I could. If we went back and re-did now it with all our experience since then it would sound completely different.

“There is a naivety about that album. It was good enough to be signed to a big label in South Africa and they put a lot of money into the video. It was a little bit before it’s time. The album itself was maybe too diverse.”

“And yet so many of my generation loved the cross-over appeal. (Writer’s note: I was in form 2 at the time and I marveled at the novel indigenous sound and Chiwoniso’s soulful voice in a ‘Where were you moment.’)

“That was Chiwoniso’s introduction to the music industry. I had to ask permission from her father because she was 15 or 16. He asked me to look after her. She did all the vocals on Gondwanaland with Mwendi Chibindi and another vocalist.

“Shortly after that we did her first album “Ancient Voices.” She had already been performing with the Maraire family band but “A Peace of Ebony” put her on the radio and she just grew and grew and grew. Probably one of the finest voices to ever come out of Zimbabwe.”

“Over the years, once I had started recording, I was involved with Ilanga’s albums. I recorded Andy Brown’s albums “Gondwanaland” with “Tichangoshaina” – that gave him a lot of mileage. Radio played that song a lot. In the 1990’s I was recording many different people.”

“I was a keyboard player on Tuku music which obviously took him around the world. That started a lot of tours in America and Europe and worldwide.

“I ended up stopping playing keyboards because I would listen to how the engineers were doing the sound and say: ‘No that’s not the right way to do it.’ So I said to Tuku: ‘Let me find another keyboard player.”

Keith then moved to UK. But he kept in touch with local musicians and mixing their music:

“I recorded Chiwoniso’s music. We were best friends for many years (with Andy).” But they had misunderstandings over Andy’s increasing influence on Chiwoniso ”when he could have been of more assistance to her.”

“Mixing is when an artist goes into the studio, records their individual tracks and elements then they send it to mix engineers like me to make it sound good, like a good baker given ingredients.

“The mastering process is giving it some sparkle to make the tracks sound consistent in an album format, although singles are more common now. So we just make it sound as good as it can and get the right levels for Spotify and other streaming platforms.”

“Working with Ilanga helped shape my style as a keyboard player. Don Gumbo was very much influenced by Ray Phiri and Stimela. They were doing a lot of shows in Zimbabwe. We ended up sounding a little bit too similar at times.

“Don played left handed and was a great writer. His style was different to Andy, who was also a great writer. Andy was probably one of the greatest musicians I have ever played with, like Louis Mhlanga who can switch between genres.

“Andy was a great guitar player and songwriter for the Pop ear with pop melody while mixing that with Zimbabwean Guitar. That was also Chiwoniso’s strength as well. She wrote melodies that appealed to everybody. They both had remarkable ability.”

“We went through a couple of drummers like Munya Brown and Gibson Nyoni. When Andy left the band, Roger Mambo became the guitar player. Busi Ncube was still there. When Busi joined, on the strength of “True Love” she could do lead vocals on a bunch of songs.

“Virgilio Ignacio was a Mozambican keyboard player. He had a different style than I did. It was a very enriching time for me to play with some different styles.

“With Tuku the arrangements were quite structured. No solos or changes. With Ilanga we were all free to explore and it was encouraged. Tuku’s songs and melodies were the same way except when he added dances. The musicians in Ilanga were able to experiment.

“Ilanga played anything. Andy took Ilanga further, experimenting with Sungura, Jit, Reggae to pop. The styles were wider. Like Ray Phiri and Stimela who were similarly more experimental, the band loved to play together on stage and that’s where the magic happened.”

Farquharson is now a respected sound engineer who also teaches sound engineering. He is a a Mixing and Mastering expert. Albums recorded in Zimbabwe have often been sent to him to listen to and then balance the sound to be what we finally hear.

One such album was one of Jah Prayzah’s best albums ‘Mudhara Vachauya’ with songs like: ‘Mudhara Vachauya,’ ‘Goto,’ ‘Watora Mari’ and ‘Ndide Ndikude.’ This album lifted Jah Prayzah to new heights.

“All of the Jah Prayzah albums that I mixed, I have also mastered. However sometimes, like Tuku’s Sarawoga, I might send it for mastering in the US. Sometimes, I prefer someone else to master it when I have spent too long on the mix.

“Someone else’s ears can say: ‘You could have mixed this better.’ For most people’s ears they are not concerned with that little extra.”

“It’s all about small touches to make something return 15-20% better. As long as it’s a good song most people probably wouldn’t really notice, but it’s that little extra sparkle that counts.”

And that’s what Keith brings to the table.

“While I’ve been out of Zimbabwe for a while now, the connection has never been lost – I’ve been producing and mixing Zimbabwean artists all along.”

“I have decided that it’s the appropriate time to formalise those plans and, with the skills I have learned over the years, play a more meaningful role in uplifting our industry.”

“First and foremost – Bridgenorth is not out to threaten the current studios in the area, because we are not strictly commercial – in that we are not really ‘selling time’, one cannot just pick up the phone and book a slot. 

“I’ve done that before, and am beyond that at this stage in my life. There are periods of the year in fact when the space will be used for writing camps, sound engineering workshops for existing industry professionals and courses to assist with development of the next generation.

“That includes reaching out to music departments in our schools and to show the addictive miracle of the recording process to our up and coming students.”

“Anyone can build a one-man studio at home. Technology and the internet have provided an ease of access to music on a level we have never seen before.

“We are not here to replace that – we cannot add anything definitive to the way a lot of modern beat-focused music is being put out, be it hop-hop, R&B, dancehall etc – but we believe you need spaces like this to unleash the alchemy of larger collaborations.”

“We’re also very committed to heritage work – unearthing important aspects of the region’s artistic and cultural heritage that should be beautifully and indelibly captured. 

“One of the skills I have been fortunate enough to gain experience in, and develop along the way, is recording the mbira. We have to prioritise this very important instrument. Modern software and samplers cannot replace it.”

“Furthermore, we’re hoping to convince international touring artists to visit this great country, see the sights, record some of their material en-route, and hopefully write a track or two alongside our domestic talent.”

“Fundamentally, we want this to be a content creation engine room, for a range of projects that we will carefully curate.”

“We have at least three recording projects in the pipeline, so plenty to get on with in 2024 already.”