From his tone of voice, I suspect Njacko Backo thinks I’m crazy.

“You have Afrofest; you have Small World music and those guys; you have the International Drum Festival; you have also things like the Gladstone Hotel, they do a lot of African shows there.
“When you have interest in something, you have to fight to find where it’s taking place. When people want African music, they will find it.”

Asking whether there was a network of African music in Toronto that a non-African person might not hear about was, in retrospect, stupid. I imagined that as a Cameroon-born, Toronto-based bandleader, Backo would know of secret, smoky backroom jam sessions. Instead, he tells me what anyone paying attention to Toronto’s live music scene should have known — that we have an above-ground network of gigs for African musicians. Until recently, it just wasn’t seen as hip.
The organizers of Wavelength, a cornerstone of the Toronto indie scene, are going where many in the community have feared to tread. They’ve put together the first Kalimba Summit, which will bring together four musicians who play the kalimba, a hand-held African percussion instrument whose antecedents date back thousands of years. It consists of a wooden box with many metal or wooden tines attached to it, all tuned to different notes which the player strikes with their thumbs (hence the nickname “thumb piano”).

The four musicians come from disparate styles: Kahil El’Zabar is a veteran percussionist rooted in Chicago’s legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM); Njacko Backo leads his own world fusion band, Kalimba Kalimba, and teaches music seminars in schools across Ontario; Matt Smith, a.k.a. Prince Nifty, uses thumb pianos in his effects-laden post-rock; and Laura Barrett plays kalimba and sings in her acclaimed indie-pop solo work.

Bringing musicians together from different genres —?and a variety of skill levels — is an ambitious project for Wavelength, who conceived the summit out of a panel discussion last year on cultural diversity in independent music. There are numerous opportunities to see African music in Toronto, but younger rock fans rarely take advantage of them. With its warm tones and percussive attack, the kalimba is the perfect candidate to entice new fans from outside the world-music audience.

“It’s an African instrument that people don’t really know,” says Backo, “because, when it comes to African music, people just think drum, drum, drum. Africa is a continent, you know, it’s not a country. You have a million different instruments in Africa. You’ve got your different ethnic groups, different sets of music. It’s good to start to break the barriers.”

That those barriers have only recently started to fall seems shocking. But maybe it isn’t so surprising, given that the last time art-rock and African idioms started flirting with each other was during the ’80s, when the combined weight of debates over cultural appropriation as well as scorn over rock stars’ one-world posturing (see “We Are the World”) made it less kosher for someone with a western background to, say, pick up a kalimba and make a record with it.

If you need proof that such a thing is possible now, look to Laura Barrett. She was classically trained on piano, and found the kalimba while surfing eBay for MIDI controllers.

Even though she wasn’t intimately familiar with traditional African music at the time, she was influenced by the music’s formal qualities, as well as the kalimba itself.

“By the time I was working things through on these bigger kalimbas,” she explains, “I had a feel for sort of the structures that a lot of mbira and kalimba music has in it. The sort of cyclical, rhythmic kind of thing — you can’t even really think of it in terms of chord changes, there’s a pattern that just shifts.

“But at the same time, I was tuning [the kalimbas] in such a way that I could work with clearer ideas of chords in my own head so I was actually still being influenced by my classical music background.
 “I think I ended up with something that’s kind of in-between. Because the instrument itself, the structure, dictates a certain flow.”

This will be Barrett’s first time performing in public with other kalimba players — which, along with the cross-pollination among the musicians, will expose indie-pop fans enamoured of Barrett’s idiosyncratic songs to the kalimba’s rich legacy. Had she picked up a guitar instead, it might never have happened.