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She had toured since she was 9, first as a dancer with the Zambia National Dance Troupe and later as a performer with Julizya and Amayenge, two of the best known troupes in her country. But these sounds - this mishmash of rock, jazz and fusion - and these numbers - 4/4 and 6/8 - were foreign to her.
"I was expecting African music, and then suddenly my band that I joined had a totally different sound," Kashimbi said. "And I thought, 'How am I going to make up a song right in the middle?' And sometimes I sat there and watched them, and they would ask me, 'Why are you not singing?'"
That was the beginning of the grand experiment, and the slow but steady learning curve, of Maya Soleil, the guest dance band for this year's Alaska Folk Festival. With a Zambian, a Zimbabwean, a Ghanan, a Jamaican, a Filipino and two players from the United States, the group has grown from a modest and relatively awkward infancy into an audio-visual, world-beat collage of song, dance, wild percussion and interlocking rhythm.
"The group's music blends African lyric, rhythms and instruments with modern synthesizers, guitars and drums to create hot dance beats and jazzy sounds," wrote About.com in a review of the band's first compact disc, "Dance of the New Sun." The group's second CD is a demo of newer material.
Maya Soleil's festival itinerary begins at 7 p.m. Friday, April 16, in Centennial Hall with their "traditions" performance - an acoustic collection of the high-life and palm-wine music of Ghana and Nigeria, the Kalindula and social dance music of Zambia and the mbira tunes of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. At 10:30 p.m. Saturday, they return to the main stage for an "electric fusion" set - basically the traditional instruments with flute, saxophone, keyboards, bass and drum.
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"When a person in the band comes up with an idea, or how they might want to take that idea, it's kind of like an open book," said T.J. Morris, vocalist, percussionist and group co-founder. "Some of the songs that we play we purposely want to keep as traditional as possible. Then there are songs that were purposely written for dance. We do want people to get up and move."
On stage, Kashimbi and Zimbabwe native Lora Chiorah-Dye do most of the moving - traditional dance from their respective tribes in the southcentral African nations. Zambia and Zimbabwe share a border separated by the Zambezi River.
"You can tell what's Zambian and what's Zimbabwean, but we share some things," Chiorah-Dye said. "The borders are fluid, and we sort of exchange. We live within each other. When you change tribes, you change the style of what you're doing."
Maya Soleil rose out of Shakata, a Seattle-area group specializing in Afro-pop. Maya Soleil guitarist and percussionist Mohammed Shaibu, a native of Ghana, formed that band - called "Let's Have Fun" in his native language - in the mid-1990s.
Maya Soleil co-founder Rob Pastorok played keyboards in Shakata for six years. Morris sat in as a substitute drummer one night, then joined as well.
Kashimbi, a member of the Lenje tribe, grew up in Zambia's Lusaka province on the northern border of Zimbabwe and the western province of Mozambique. She married and moved to Whidbey Island, in Puget Sound, seven years ago. She missed playing music, but fortune struck one day as she listened to an African music program on the radio. The disc jockey gave the station's number. She called with a request and asked if he knew of any African bands in the Seattle area. The disc jockey gave her the number for Shakata.
Kashimbi played in Shakata for a year and a half. Meanwhile, Pastorok was thinking of starting a group that combined African rhythms with jazz and funk. He and Morris wrote instrumentals over a few years and eventually asked Kashimbi to come in and sing.
"That propelled the music and the gigs to a whole new level," Pastorok said.
"They told me when I was supposed to sing, and I was always late," Kashimbi said. "I was getting very frustrated, because I couldn't really get it. But what do you know, we put them together and we found that maybe we had something we could play. It was really good, but it was very, very difficult at first."
"We play in a traditional Western style with measures and counting and arithmetic," Morris said. "She grew up on oral music doing something completely different. When she came in, we took a new identity. Trying to develop more into what she grew up with and she was familiar with, it helped us to develop the songs that we have right now."
Bob Antolin, a saxophone and jazz improvisation teacher from the Philippines, received an e-mail from Pastorok in the summer of 1999 urging him to check out the band. He met Pastorok and Morris at their studio, sat in on a gig in Whidbey Island about a week later and was suddenly part of the band. He plays saxophones, flutes and the WX7 wind synth controller - a contraption he built himself.
"My background is in jazz, and I've studied ethnomusicology," Antolin said. "I was familiar with world music, and the music of indigenous people, but what struck me about the band was the rhythm. A week later they had a gig on Whidbey Island, and so I went and played with them. From then, we had a relationship."
Jamaican native Lennox Holness joined at bass in 1999, shortly after moving to Seattle from New York.
"I've lived in Jamaica, London, Spain and New York, and I grew up on rock and roll, punk, jazz, all of that," Holness said. "Westerners, we always say, 'OK, is this 6/8 or 4/4? Let's count it out.' I don't think about the count. It's all music to me, and we try to approach it like that."
Chiorah-Dye moved to Port Townsend from Zimbabwe in 1970 to follow a boyfriend who was studying at the University of Washington. She co-founded the Gwinyai Dance Ensemble - an mbira, vocal and dance group - in 1973, and later played in the Langston Hughes (renamed Sukutai) Marimba Ensemble. Pastorok and Kashimbi knew Chiorah-Dye from her work with the ensemble, and she was the final full-time member to join the group.
"I'd always thought, 'Boy, it would be nice to have her working with the group,' but she was always really busy," Pastorok said. "Then one day Moye said Lora would like to work with us. I think I got on the phone two minutes later."
Chiorah-Dye often plays the nyunga nyunga - one variation of the mbira, the traditional instrument of the Zezuru tribes of the Shona people. The Shona name was adopted in the late 19th century to unite 9 million people and five languages in Zimbabwe and parts of Mozambique. Mbiras have 22 to 28 wooden keys staggered on layers of iron and a soundboard. The instrument is often played inside a large fried gourd, picked for its resonance. Visit www.mbira.org for more information.
"Since I was playing marimbas, it was easy to join in and just learn what Moye was doing," Chiorah-Dye said. "I don't think our languages are that different from each other. The sounds are not foreign. It's not like what she did to learn the Western music."
   
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