Have Berimbau, Will Travel

Guy Mendilow brings a globetrotting collection of folk music for an afternoon show at Ten Thousand Villages.

By: Daniel Shearer

Guy Mendilow brings a globetrotting collection of folk music for an afternoon show at Ten Thousand Villages.

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   The berimbau, a bow-shaped instrument with a round gourd attached to the base, is one of the oldest instruments on earth.
   Although accounts differ on its origins — some say the berimbau comes from Africa, others from South America — Guy Mendilow first encountered the instrument during a trip to Salvador, a city of 3 million in northeastern Brazil.
   Traveling with his partner Shari Mendler, the pair visited Brazil without a plan, "basically to test ourselves," says the 25-year-old Boston-based singer-songwriter, "and see how well we could adjust and survive in a place that was completely foreign.
   "This was something I had done in Mexico before," he says, "going deliberately without a plan. To find out, can I learn this language? Can I find a place to live? Can I adjust to daily life here? It’s an amazingly empowering situation."
   Mr. Mendilow hoped to meet local musicians and expand his formidable repertoire of musical styles. Working when he could, teaching, performing and otherwise living on a shoestring budget, Mr. Mendilow and Ms. Mendler returned to the United States after four months.
   "We wound up learning Portuguese," he says, "finding a place to live, and making connections. And I began working with different musicians. That’s how I teamed up with an instrument maker who taught me how to make these berimbaus in the old way."
   A cross between a drone instrument and a drum, the berimbau worked well with Mr. Mendilow’s deep and resonant singing style. Holding the berimbau upright, he strikes it with a stick, changing the pitch by moving a stone up and down the string with his other hand.
   Mr. Mendilow will share songs he’s written for the berimbau, and a number of tunes with more conventional guitar accompaniment, during a solo performance on the commons at the Princeton Shopping Center Oct. 24, followed by an afternoon show at John & Peter’s in New Hope, Pa., Oct. 25.
   "The berimbau is a crazy instrument," he says, "because it’s a completely found instrument. You use whatever materials you have. Usually the wire comes from the inside of a car tire, and the tools that you use to make it are a broken bottle, so that you can scrape the bark off the wood with the glass, and a rock to hammer in a few nails, or a hammer if you have it. And you use shoe polish to give it a varnish.
   "When you play it, you push the whole thing in and out of your stomach to create overtones. What you get, especially when you mike it, is this incredible, almost hypnotic, trance-like droning rhythm. It’s a very dark color."
   Mr. Mendilow describes his music as "world folk," much of it influenced by his extensive travels.
   Born in Haifa, Israel, and raised in Jerusalem a short walk from the fabled walls of the old city, Mr. Mendilow’s family moved to California when he was 8 years old, eventually relocating to Lawrence. His father, Jonathan Mendilow, is a professor of political science at Rider University; his mother, Shlomit, teaches at the Jewish Community Center of Lawrence.
   After moving to New Jersey, Mr. Mendilow attended Lawrence Intermediary School for one year, then saw the American Boychoir at a school assembly, and at the urging of friends and family members auditioned for the organization, which maintains a boarding school in Princeton for boys in fifth through eighth grade.
   "It was very strange to be sitting there and listening to this amazing choir on stage and feel like that’s what I wanted to do," he says. "I didn’t even know I could sing."
   At the audition, the young singer didn’t know the words to the song he was asked to sing, "America the Beautiful," so he hummed the tune. The school accepted him, and he attended between 1988 and 1991, performing with the group at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and working with famed conductors Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta.
   Another highlight of his time with American Boychoir was a song exchange with the South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which was touring the United States after its collaboration with Paul Simon for his Graceland album.
   "Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith came to the Boychoir and did a workshop," Mr. Mendilow says, "and the best part of that workshop was that we did a song swap with them. We taught them one of our tunes, and they taught us two of their tunes. One of them was ‘Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes,’ an awesome tune. That was the first time I had heard it. And they taught us ‘Rain,’ and so we sang that with them."
   After leaving the Boychoir, Mr. Mendilow turned down a scholarship from a private school in New Hampshire so he could stay with his family. He attended Lawrence High School and started playing in rock bands and attending open-mike nights in Princeton at the Arts Council and Small World Café. He also organized a monthly coffeehouse open mike and poetry reading at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton.
   As an environmental studies major at Oberlin College in Ohio, he combined his interests in political activism with music, forming an organization called Music Not Bombs, which planned benefit concerts for Habitat for Humanity and other groups. He eventually moved to Boston, drawn by the area’s vibrant acoustic music scene.
   Mr. Mendilow sings with a longing and passion that is difficult to characterize. Even the title track on his debut CD, Soar Away Home, released independently in 2001, suggests a restless yearning, but his repertoire hints at old wisdom.
   His politics are there but don’t always scream at listeners. Mr. Mendilow’s deep and haunting spoken-word adaptation of the Biblical story of Ishmael and Isaac — which examines the ancient roots of the conflict in the Middle East by telling the story of two outcast brothers — transitions to a song for peace adapted from a Sufi melody.
   The album’s most politically charged song, an uncredited tune about agri-business, is hidden as a bonus track following several seconds of silence at the end of the CD. Written as a tongue-in-cheek stab at laws that give tax breaks to large corporations at the expense of education and healthcare, the impromptu bluegrass jam is a tribute to protest music: "Agri-business is gonna give us everything we put in and more/ To hell with planet earth, it’s just a lump of dirt/ and it’s Monsanto and Roundup we adore."
   But can one person really shape the world?
   "I think so," Mr. Mendilow says. "Maybe that’s too idealistic of me to say, but I think so."
   Mr. Mendilow seems to spend a fair amount of time meditating on such thoughts, so it’s not entirely surprising that he incorporates overtone singing in his music — similar to a style developed by Mongolian shamans. He didn’t learn his technique from a guru, though. Mr. Mendilow taught himself to sing two, sometimes three different notes at once, while riding in a car during his senior year of college. The result is a low, guttural sound from the diaphragm, with flute-like pitches several octaves above it. As he learned after his trip to Brazil, the berimbau is perfect for accompanying overtone singing.
   "Overtone singing feels like you have this very, very solid column of air," he says, "and your entire head just vibrates with the overtone that you’re producing. And what’s interesting about it is you feel the overtones before you hear them. When you get the frequency right, you just really feel it."
Guy Mendilow will perform an outdoor concert sponsored by Ten Thousand Villages, on the commons at the Princeton Shopping Center, 301 N. Harrison St., Princeton, Oct. 24, 6 p.m. Bring lawn chairs and blankets. For information, call (609) 683-4464; and at John & Peter’s, 96 S. Main St., New Hope, Pa., Oct. 25, 3 p.m. For information, call (215) 862-5981. On the Web: www.guymendilow.com