[About the word Tembe: One translation that I have seen suggests that it means doubt or suspicion (as in a marriage or between lovers or friends)]
Franco's Tembe na Tembe is a prized oldie (though we never knew what the words meant), and has been a true companion, on and off, through life's uncertain detours and milestones. Long, indeed, have been its absences from our individually remembered pasts, as attentions shifted and trends ebbed and flowed with Time and age and travel and responsibility in the stifling analog era and the early digital years.
The song is tellingly nostalgic in its tone, playing now after all those years since one's true youth. This is a nostalgia which millennials will find hard to fathom. And playing it so long after it was last heard, a chance happening in itself for many (given all the distractions of modernity and work-life), is itself a nostalgic act. A nostalgic act so deeply evocative of days and places and things that one cannot quite clearly put into words and define for others. That is, evocative of slices of life that are now distinctly fuzzy and elusive and altogether inexplicably patchy, even for one and to oneself.
With its emphatically universal ring, this Tembe na Tembe hints, too, somehow, if you like, at things yet to come, and which we're glad to wait for -- not really knowing when or how they will, or if they will ever find us if they do. And I dare myself to suggest that this song, this Tembe na Tembe, should find a place in every interstellar voyager's back-pack when such a time truly comes, as I reckon it will.
Here below is the audio version (there is no video). It runs for 5:44 minutes, the last three seconds of which are pure silence:
The song starts on a low key, aptly suggesting a long journey ahead. Two male voices, the only distinct ones in the whole song, set it all off in perfect harmony and symmetry, warming up the aural spaces that the song clears and opens up as it moves along. Then the instruments kick in -- two guitars specifically, strummed, I reckon, by the very same vocalists. Tentatively at first, and then, rapidly, on to a frenzy of sound: led by the two guitars, and spiced with muffled percussion and drumming in the background. All interspersed with the singing-duo's melodic and commanding voices.
With all protocols thus observed, artistic boldness goes a notch higher, and a duet of voices and sounds ensues. But from 1:50 to 3:15, we have a glorious stringfest, led by Maestro Franco; indeed a frolic of heavenly strings plucked by fingers God himself can be proud of. Another fest, surely the last, is had from 4:25 to 5: 41. It closes with three seconds of pure silence, as already noted.
