Guitar god has given Kabul kids some normality
I was feeling slightly drunk and very chippy at a party on the lawn of The New York Times‘ Kabul bureau when I first heard about Lanny Cordola, Mursal the Afghan guitar girl, and the Miraculous Love Kids.
The Times still knows how to throw a party, long after most other newspapers have closed their regional outposts and chosen to define ‘‘entertainment’’ as a kebab and a Coke.
‘‘Hey, have you met Lanny Cordola yet?’’ asked an American journalist. ‘‘You should check him out. He’s a guitarist who played with Slash and Brian Wilson. You really should see him. He’s cool.’’
And so it came to pass, just when I thought I had seen it all, that I found myself on another Kabul lawn a few days later, this time in the warm sunshine of early afternoon, listening to Lanny Cordola and a gathering of Afghan street kids holding together a pretty decent guitar rendition of the Foo Fighters’ Times Like These.
Among them was Mursal, a 13-year-old Kabul girl who had been a member of one of the innumerable gangs of kids in the Afghan capital hawking trinkets – bracelets, scarves, chewing gum – when a teenage suicide bomber killed two of her elder sisters during an attack outside the gates of a Nato base in the city in September 2012.
‘‘I didn’t see them die, but I was there and heard the bomb go off,’’ Mursal told me between songs, tears shining her eyes.
‘‘I couldn’t find them. It was later that day, when my mum came weeping out of a hospital and said, ‘Your sisters are dead’ that I realised they were gone.’’
Her story had inspired Cordola, a professional musician from Long Beach, California, who had previously collaborated with Guns N’ Roses, Nancy Sinatra, Cypress Hill and the Beach Boys, to come to Afghanistan to work with deprived and vulnerable children, including the survivors of suicide attacks, through music.
‘‘I had been looking for something else,’’ he said, recalling the healing transformation he underwent at a dark stage of his life by listening to John Coltrane’s 1965 album A Love Supreme. ‘‘It’s all a journey. Fame and fortune hadn’t resonated with my soul. John Coltrane’s words – that music could transform the world – had given me a Love Supreme epiphany.’’
Moving to Kabul in 2015, Cordola raised funds through his friends in the music business and began teaching the guitar to street children as part of a non-profit project, The Miraculous Love Kids.
Gibson, Fender and Godin donated guitars and he now tutors a core group of around 50 children, each of whom receives a small supplementary sum of cash through Cordola’s charity work to ensure they attend school. Mursal has become his star pupil.
‘‘Aside from their normal schooling,’’ Cordola says, ‘‘with me they are learning about Australia through Nick Cave, about Ireland through U2, about political and civil rights, about Jamaica through reggae, and about the US from John Coltrane.’’
Together, in the garden of a friend’s house that Cordola moved to in June after his previous home was damaged by a bomb attack, they perform songs by the Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Sting – whose song Fragile has become emblematic for the children –Coldplay, U2, and the Foo Fighters.
Earlier this year the reclusive Brian Wilson, co-founder of the Beach Boys, agreed to sing a version of Love and Mercy with the children, and in February Cordola recorded him playing in an LA studio, before bringing the audio files of his vocals back to Afghanistan. He took the girls to a recording studio in Kabul and added their voices and guitars.
‘‘Brian is on another dimension,’’ Cordola said, smiling. ‘‘And with so many musicians worshipping at the altar of Brian Wilson, his involvement was hugely helpful to our work here.’’
Next came an invitation from Wilson asking Mursal to attend the final concert of the singer’s world tour this week. But not all stories have a happy ending, especially those involving visas to the US.
Visa applications by Mursal to attend the concert in California were rejected by the US embassy in Kabul.
‘‘It was kind of disappointing but we’ve got over it,’’ Cordola said. ‘‘Like I said, it’s all part of the journey. I don’t know what spirit called me here, but it’s where I should be.’’
I could so easily have felt cynical or doubting when I walked away at the end of our conversation. But these days it is war plans and revised strategies that make me dubious in Afghanistan, not renditions of the Foo Fighters and the Beach Boys.
The war that has been going on there for 39 years is still bad, but it is also stale and boring. I will easily settle for some guitar riffs and talk of John Coltrane instead.
– The Times