Tiny singing

In The Tent in the evenings of Mbira camp, I play the first two easy songs on the Mbira and then put it down and sing along for the rest. I don't know the parts so I copy people and make it up. One time I was singing along on a self-created part, thinking, god, why do I often feel so tense when I'm singing?

Maybe it's because what I'm singing doesn't feel right, I think. So I listen for what might feel more right. I imagine a far simpler line. So so simple, a modest repetitive part of just two notes to fit in the whole. I start singing it. It feels right. I relax. And ever, ever so slightly, so does the whole room, it seems.

A lot of what I'm singing I hear a fraction of a moment before I sing it. It's as if there's another singer I'm copying. I just listen. And when I hear it I follow it.

It's funny that I'm always a little fraction behind the timing of the first voice. Though if the first voice is a good leader, maybe it comes in a fraction early to leave the audible voice right on beat.

Sometimes I'm following the voice note by note, rhythm by rhythm, but often I'm following more of a general sense of the kind of sound to be making now, whether a presence or absence of sound, a slow low and fat sound or a sound like a butterfly.

“When I get the feeling in my tummy,” Chartwell said, “I just sing.”

“I can feel tense and insecure about singing in a jam”, I once told a stoned dreadlocked Israeli during a jam session on a moonlit Indian rooftop. “Well,” he replied, “you have a beautiful voice and you contribute great stuff. So just do it when you feel it and don't do it when you don't.”

I liked that advice.

“Briony?” My writing is disturbed by a voice in the night. It's Chartwell. I'm surprised. I lean out and unzip the front of my tent. He's standing a few feet away in the moonlight. “I brought your Mbira.” He'd been playing it with everyone in the main tent. “I didn't want you to go to sleep without it. It's got a bit of Vaseline on it, I'm sorry about that. What are you doing in your tent not sleeping?” He chuckles.

“I'm on my way to going to sleep! Thank you so much.” I take the Mbira and he bids me farewell and walks his slow swaying walk back to The Tent.

He's amazingly humble and generous. And also something of a great man. Often the two go together I've noticed. There's a documentary crew here this evening, they're making a film about him. He wrote and performed the music for Breakfast with Mugabe, a play that started on a six week run at Soho theatre and was moved to one of the biggies in the West End where it stayed for 42 weeks. He played Mbira day and night, Matinee and evening show, until his fingers were blistered and raw and he kept going. He's taught at Soas and been interviewed on the BBC World Service, according to Sebastian the Mbira maker who was making an Mbira for the man before he met him, turned on the radio in his workshop in Germany and there was Chartwell talking away.

And he has gathered us to him. There's something like 35 of us on this camp. We're all sorts. Rich, poor, young, old, fat, thin, men, women, hippies and regular folk. We've got an Oxford University student and a care worker. We've got two pop stars – well, professional singers with signed bands – some first timers who play no other instrument, and a handfull of people who have made Mbira their lives, and who hold the core thrust of the sound in the tent. And we all take a week off work, pay £180, pack up our tents and sleeping bags and gather to him, to the Mbira and to each other sure but more than that, to Chartwell.

I lie and listen to the music from the main tent. This music is not about the soloist or musical gymnastics, showing off. It seems to be about tiny, repetitive sounds that fit cohesively into the overall sound, with the occasional spontaneous moments of ad libbing up and over the sound when the feeling takes you.

It's like a metaphor for behaviour in a community, I guess. Mostly small humble, generous and considerate acts that fit cohesively into the community, with the occasional moments of wildness, free self expression, when the feeling takes you.

Denise once said that in the Baka tribes of Cameroon, which the band she's in - Baka Beyond - have collaborated with for years and years, when singing together you can error in two ways. You can error by not contributing enough sound, and you can error by stealing the limelight all for yourself with endless Diva moments. The thing to do is to sing loud enough for the person opposite to hear you, and quiet enough so that you can hear them.

I like this way. The way of Baka, the way of Shona.

Now it's 2.40am and I can hear Chartwell in the main tent yodelling a soft tired yodel over the musicians. It's beautiful. He must be feeling it in his tummy.