One man, one guitar, and the music of Africa head Down Under

His interpretation is Bach as you’ve never heard it before: beautifully phrased yet free of strictly annotated time. Likewise, West African music – a lot of which Gripper has single-handedly transcribed over a period of more than 10 years from the 21-string kora (or harp lute) to the six-string classical guitar.

“West African music, the music of Mali, doesn’t follow the Western concept of mechanical time. It follows the rhythms of life, of the body, of the wind in the trees, of the desert,” he explains.

On his numerous visits to West Africa, writes Gripper in an article on his website, “a visit to a Bamako courtyard during a kora lesson dispels this [notion of regulated time] in an instant”.

Listening to Gripper play, time ceases. The music, and the moment, is everything, played so freely, played from the heart rather than from memory or from a score. Last year’s kitchen recital was such a moving, generous, impromptu offering, tears of joy trickled down my cheek. This was music played fearlessly, and without restraint, as a flamenco guitarist might play on the streets of Madrid. As West Africans musicians do, in that courtyard in Bamako, Mali.

Gripper is different to any classically trained guitarists I know or listen to. No metronome, for sure. No mention of the standard repertoire, although he did study music at the University of Cape Town. The strings on his guitar seem hastily strung, loose ends poking out of the guitar’s headstock rather than neatly clipped; the French polish on his special-edition (i.e. highly collectable) Hauser guitar top has worn away, the fretboard dull, hammered with constant use, with playing without concern for the odd buzz or whether his left thumb should or shouldn’t creep over the fingerboard – just some of the technical preoccupations of many classical guitarists.

I envy this freedom, this joyful connection to music that impossibly, he has wrought from an unlikely instrument and transposed for just six strings. Why did he do it? “This was the music I wanted to play.”

Yet make no mistake, his technique is phenomenal – it’s not for nothing that the Australian-born, world-renowned guitarist John Williams invited Gripper to play with him some years ago; or that he and kora masters Ballaké Sissoko and Toumani Diabaté improvise together on stage when their schedules permit.

Has playing West African music changed how he sees the world? “There is space in the structure of this music for waiting,” he replies. “Waiting for the next phrase, the next idea.

“For a while, there was a tension between the space presented by the music of Mali’s griots [travelling musicians who maintain oral history in West Africa] and Bach’s linear narrative style – but more and more I find the spaces are in Bach too, just in different places.

“We often think our modern world leaves no spaces, but I think they are there … waiting to be inhabited.”

So what can we expect on his Australia tour? The unexpected, it seems.

“With concerts, I have a simple philosophy – I don’t argue with myself. There is no program, and no set idea of the pieces,” Gripper says. “Ideas present themselves [on stage] and it is my job not to censor myself. Most of the doing, therefore, is a space free from the constant checks we [usually] make to be sure our actions are moral, social, appropriate.

“In music, there is no need for these checks, so we get to be truly ourselves and even a little bit free.”

Gripper has recently turned to black-and-white photography, on his old film Leica, developing and printing the results himself. “I’m not quite sure why I’m doing this,” he remarks of this pursuit, as we pour over a selection of prints on his music-room floor. “But I love it too, even though it takes hours and hours of my time.”

I suspect that slow, manual photography and jiggling prints in the bathroom sink are akin to playing music from that place in his soul that remains in West Africa: that place where there is community, connection, and people sharing stories, music and lives that are difficult beyond our imagining, but rich with life’s natural rhythms.

Music of the heart. Timeless music, free of time.

J.S. Bach – who in 1705 went AWOL for four months from his job as a church organist and walked the 402-kilometre round trip from Arnstadt to Lübeck to learn from Dietrich Buxtehude, the organist he admired most – would surely have approved.