Respected multi-instrumentalists M’bala and Papi coloured the night silence with harmony at Heather’s Garden Restaurant in New Kingston on Thursday.

The sound was shamanic with vocals chanted and instruments mimicking nature including rain, wind and chirping birds. The performance was part of the Unplugged Acoustic Experience series.

Mbala chanted choruses of pollution in a piece on deforestation with verses dubbed in metaphor.

“There is a new sound in the rainforest/ louder than birds and rivers…

a new animal in the rainforest/ a concrete beast and where it walks nothing grows again,” M’bala stated whilst playing a slow minor progression on guitar.

Papi accompanied him by blowing trills and scalar ascensions on his flute which shifted into modes and then eventually into atonal chromatics during segments about destruction. M’bala prefaced the piece stating that green parks including Fern Gully in Jamaica are at risk. M’bala, who graduated art school in the 70s, is a lesser known progenitor of the dub poetry movement. He is a long-standing Poetry Society of Jamaica board member whose most recent work is included in So Much Things to Say–100 Calabash Poets by Akashic Books, 2010. He has also won many silver and bronze medals at the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s Literary Competition. And despite sporadic tours he has represented Jamaica in writers exchange programmes.

Interestingly M’bala doesn’t play music he creates it having constructed scores of drums, pot cymbals, bamboo flutes, wooden xylophones, rain reeds and even berimbaus (the bow-shaped instrument of Brazil). He often plays many instruments at once, utilising his arms and legs in a rhythmic display of skill.

“I will not be your hero/ I will not be your villain/ I will not be your slave/ I will not be your slave driver,” he chanted whilst playing the talking-drum, in which he places the body of the drum in a headlock and squeezes its bendable sides thus shifting the pitch allowing it to ‘talk’.

To complement, Papi blew staccato notes on his sax like music slowly lifted from a straw. Papi is M’bala contemporary but has dreadlocks the length of a vow taken long before Kartel, Banton or Tosh. Papi who has played with local jazz and reggae masters tries to blow phrases that escape the horizontal bars of notation. He searches for notes within notes bending the flute or sax during the blues and flattening during chromatic runs.

The set included some 10 songs, which ended with Jazzing in the War zone, a song about the internationalisation of war.

“From Afghanistan to Jamdown/ from Pakistan to Tivoli…/ weeding out hate to plant a more peaceful crop,” M’bala stated whilst beating the talking-drum which mimicked a walking bass line.

The unplugged series shortly plans to offer for sale video and audio footage of the weekly sets.

“We have very good live musicians but once they perform and it is over what is next? We are trying to create a sustainable platform to get this music out there,” explained Lloyd Laing, the producer of the series.