Andrew Tracey (born 5 May 1936, Durban, South Africa) is a South African ethnomusicologist, promoter of African music, composer, folk singer, band leader, and actor. His father, Hugh Tracey (1903–1977), pioneered the study of traditional African music in the 1920s–1970s, created the International Library of African Music (ILAM) in 1954, and started the company African Musical Instruments (AMI) which manufactured the first commercial kalimbas in the 1950s.
Tracey continued and complemented the work of his father in a variety of ways. With brother Paul, he co-wrote and performed in the world musical revue Wait a Minim! which travelled around the world for seven years. With his father and brother, Tracey wrote the first instructional materials for the Hugh Tracey kalimbas which were being sent around the world in the 1960s. Upon his father's death in 1977, Tracey took over his father's role as director of ILAM, which he filled until his retirement in 2005, and his wife Heather took over the role of director of AMI until 1999.
Upbringing
Tracey was exposed to African music from an early age as he observed his father's research on Chopi xylophone music at the family home in Durban. He attended the traditional African dance performances his father arranged on Sunday afternoons for the dock workers, and listened to his father's radio broadcasts which featured traditional African stories and African music. As Hugh Tracey became more devoted to his work on African music, his marriage frayed, and his wife Ursula Campbell Tracey (1910–1987) moved to England with sons Paul and Andrew. Andrew went to Oxford University where he studied anthropology, languages and, informally, folk music. He was especially intrigued by calypso and Brazilian music – rhythmic world music with strong African roots.
Return to Africa
Tracey returned to Africa, first in the British military, but then later came to South Africa to join brother Paul and his father at "The Farm", the property in Krugersdorp outside of Johannesburg where Hugh Tracey started ILAM and AMI. While Paul oversaw the production of kalimbas at AMI, Andrew began working with his father, seeking to understand and document the musics of south eastern Africa.
The spiritual center of the African lamellophone world is Zimbabwe. The instrument that Hugh Tracey had fallen in love with when he arrived in Africa in the 1920s was the mbira, a complex 24-note lamellophone used by the Shona people of Zimbabwe. It was a natural homage to this and other related instruments when Hugh and Andrew Tracey helped Robert Sibson found the Kwanongoma College of African Music (now United College of Music), in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in 1960. Part of Andrew's job in building Kwanongoma was to scout around in the townships for players of traditional instruments who could come and teach at the new college. His big find was Jege Tapera, who played the mbira nyunga nyunga, also known as the karimba. This was the first experience Andrew had learning from a traditional player of African music. Without any formal training in ethnomusicology, Tracey wrote several papers on African music for the Journal of African Music, the publication his father started as a means of disseminating the results of research at ILAM and other institutions about Africa and the world. One of Andrew's early papers was a description of the mbira music of Jege Tapera.
Wait a Minim!
Starting in 1961, Tracey co-wrote, with Jeremy Taylor and his brother Paul, the songs for two musical reviews that played in Johanesberg and in Rhodesia. After combining the best material into a single musical review, Wait a Minim!, they had a hit on their hands, and they performed in Wait a Minim! between 1962 and 1968 in South Africa, Rhodesia, England, United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, including 461 shows spanning more than a year on Broadway in New York. With over 50 instruments in the show, many of them African, Tracey helped educate the world about unique African instruments, including the kalimba. He appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson a number of times. This performance career put his ethnomusicology research on hold.