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Thumb piano: It's magical

Listen to Mark Holdaway perform the song 'First Look Inside' on the kalimba "I am just a poor boy/Though my story's seldom told,

I have squandered my resistance/For a pocketful of mumbles such are promises." Mark Holdaway echoes Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" for a crowd of 20 at a recent Green Fire Music and Arts Collective concert. He accompanies himself with his instrument of choice: the African thumb piano, or kalimba. Like a child playing his favorite video game, Holdaway's thumbs move nimbly along the tine-like metal strips mounted on the instrument's wooden frame. Each touch produces a bell tone similar to the notes from a music box. Holdaway plays 13 instruments - including the guitar, the original instrument used in "The Boxer" - but his self-proclaimed "obsession" is the kalimba. "It is a magic instrument," said Holdaway, 43. "It is just so tiny and makes these incredibly weird, beautiful noises. I fell in love with it the first time I heard it played the right way."

An instrument rooted in Africa, the kalimba serves as the Western adaptation of the traditional African mbira, created by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey. In his travels across the African continent in the mid-20th century, Tracey found more than 100 variations of the small wooden instrument. He created the kalimba to accommodate and sell to musicians used to the Western or diatonic music scale. Today, kalimbas ranging in price from $15 to $100 can be purchased at traditional music stores such as the Folk Shop, 2525 N. Campbell Ave. Holdaway, a radio astronomer with a Ph.D. in physics, was first exposed to the kalimba as a child. He didn't take it seriously, however, until he was in graduate school. "It was during spring break and I was with my friends," Holdaway said. "Somebody pulled out a Hugh Tracey kalimba. I thought, 'Huh, I can play that.' We all took turns playing. Ten minutes later, a guy I had never seen before came by and said, 'Ah, a kalimba.' He played this beautiful music that stuck with me. "For the past 19 years, I've been chasing after it with the memory of how beautiful the music was." Holdaway has not only chased the music, but created some of his own. The musician has about 40 songs in his repertoire, most of them original compositions. He has also recorded two CDs - "Two Thumbs Up" and "Christmas Kalimba" - and written two instructional books with a specialized tablature system that he created. His innovations with the instrument even caught the eye of African Musical Instruments, the main distributor of Hugh Tracey kalimbas and cultural resource for the instrument. Christian Carver, director of the South African-based company, praised Holdaway for his "incredibly ingenious" tablature system. Holdaway said he plans on helping the company with its archives. "They've got all these recordings that Hugh started in the 1950s," Holdaway said. "They've got more traditional music than I'd ever know what to do with. I wrote them and said I'd like to come visit, learn some of these traditional songs and put them into my tablature format."

On top of his advances in kalimba music, Holdaway started teaching others the way of the thumb piano in 2004. The musician has taken on several students over the past year and recently started an enrichment kalimba class at Miles Exploratory Learning Center, a TUSD elementary and middle school, at 1400 E. Broadway. Jordan McGary, 13, was Holdaway's first student, starting his private lessons with the musician a little less than a year ago.

Jordan has since written two songs of his own, one of which he played at his mom's wedding in April. "I love the way the kalimba sounds," said the seventh-grader. "I've always loved music and I've done a little piano, but I've never really gotten as deep into an instrument than I have with this. It's so different. Everyone has heard of the guitar and piano, but this is something completely different." Acupuncturist Della Estrada, a Holdaway student for the past seven months, wanted to play the kalimba before she even knew what it was. "I heard it years ago and immediately liked it," Estrada said. "I've always wondered if I'd ever be able to learn how to play this thing. I didn't even know what it was called." She eventually met Holdaway through a mutual friend and began taking classes. She now owns several kalimbas and has mastered one of many new songs she hopes to learn with the instrument. "The sound is just so earthy," she said. "So ethereal and uplifting. The one I memorized is my major accomplishment. But I'm still in kindergarten, compared to Mark." "It is like a really good gift that you give someone," Holdaway said. "You get back more than you give. I spent years figuring this thing out. Now, I can sit on it or share it. I have something that no one else has. Why not give it to the whole world."