It’s not easy to get your hands on a twenty-one-key embaire xylophone from Uganda; to acquire hers, Nichole Smaglick sacrificed a chicken. Through this act, she demonstrated her reverence for both the instrument and the Busoga tribe, giving thanks to and blessing its xylophone-playing ancestors.
“When playing the embaire with the group in Uganda, I can enter an altered state of being,” Smaglick says. “It’s not a trance, but more like being consumed by something. In the first moments of playing, I am creating. Then it slips from my hands into the interlocking engine of all six players. ‘I’ turns to ‘us.’ Then this engine we created seems to come alive.”
In 1997, after a couple of years of traveling to African countries, Smaglick founded Another Land, a tour company that organizes safaris and homestays with villagers from several tribes, during which travelers take part in dancing, beer brewing, and other daily activities. The first time she returned to Minneapolis from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, her living quarters seemed positively overstuffed compared to those of the people she’d been visiting. She promptly purged about three quarters of her possessions, primarily clothes and knick-knacks. Now she keeps only what keeps her going. “It is a skill to learn how to live with less,” she says.
Granted, the embaire practically fills a room by itself, but technically it counts as just one object. Smaglick’s African instruments include an amadinda xylophone, thumb pianos, a zeze harp, and an “endangered” ennanga harp. She double-majored in African studies and piano performance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but in 1997, Africa took precedence when the pianist sold her Steinway for a ticket to Uganda to conduct research for Another Land. “I went for six years without a piano,” she says. “The piano is like my lungs. Now I can breathe again.” (She’s since replaced it with one signed by Henry Steinway himself.)
Despite the Steinway and a few other Western furnishings, African objects dominate Smaglick’s Nokomis-area house in Minneapolis, where she resides about eight months of the year. Her collection gives deeper meaning to “conversation piece.” A Chagga spear hangs over the entryway, and in the bedroom is a replica of a love seat owned by the last sultan of Zanzibar. The Barabaig of Tanzania gave her several gourds, both decorative and practical, to celebrate her marriage to musician Steve Schley (from the local bluegrass outfit Free Range Pickin’). A beaded leather cloak was another gift, the kind normally given by a mother to her daughter. And a tribeswoman gave her a bracelet in friendship with the request, “Tell my story.”
With that in mind, Smaglick founded a business with Barabaig women, the Amias Project (amias is “beautiful” in Barabaig), selling their shawls, jewelry, handbags, and scarves. She plans to open a retail space later this year in Northeast Minneapolis’ Northrup King Building; in the meantime, she’s looking to round up Twin Cities musicians to whom she can offer lessons on the embaire, an ensemble instrument. “I need some people to play with!” she says.—Jenny Woods
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