Sep 27, 2019
Palmer Keen travels with his Hugh Tracey Alto kalimba and uses it to make new friends. He writes:
"This photo is from a field recording trip to the Mentawai islands off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. The man is a kind of shaman called sikerei, highly respected and powerful men in the community who adhere most strongly to traditional Mentawai culture - an adherence most visible in his traditional loincloth and tattoos. Many Mentawai people reject formal education and so often can’t speak Indonesian (the lingua franca I use here), so sharing my kalimba with those folks was a way of bridging the language gap, just as I did in Kyrgyzstan years ago!
