TIKI TAANE: Ol’ Manky
Tiki Taane’s son is 7-years-old. He desperately wants to play the putatara.
He puts his lips to the carved wooden mouthpiece and blows and blows into the conch shell, but he can’t get the right sound to come out.
It’s not fair. His sister can do it, and she’s only four.
‘‘My son can’t blow it properly yet, but my daughter can, and it’s really annoying him,’’ Taane says.
‘‘I love the fact that that’s going on. When he finally does get it, he’s going to be super proud.’’
Putatara are a pre-European type of Maori trumpet, and have been used to communicate and make music for centuries. A carved wooden mouthpiece feeds the sound of the player’s lips into a conch shell, where it’s blasted out as an urgent, haunting call that makes the hairs on your neck stand up.
‘‘Some of them have massive amounts of history behind them, and mana behind them. If you want to go really deep on it, I guess the shell kind of represents Tangaroa, the god of the sea, and the wood, the mouthpiece, represents Tane Mahuta, so it’s the coming together of those two energies,’’ Taane says.
Taane, of Ngati Maniapoto descent, first learned to play the putatara when he was growing up in Christchurch. It was the second taonga puoro, or traditional Maori instrument, he picked up, after first learning the koauau – a carved flute. But it didn’t come easily.
‘‘Finally one day I just got it, and it was that incredible magic feeling,’’ he remembers. He hopes his son gets to feel it one day soon.
Taane has a whole collection of putatara and other taongo puoro at his home in Papamoa, but the two he has loaned to the museum for Volume are particularly special.
The larger of the pair – the ‘‘big mumma’’, as Taane calls it – belonged to the late Pauly Fuemana, of OMC. Taane’s close friendship with Fuemana’s whanau has meant he has become the instrument’s kaitiaki.
Taane doesn’t believe you really own an instrument like this; you just look after it during your time on Earth.
‘‘They’re going to outlive me, and outlive my kids, so they have so much history and mauri, energy, around them. Every time I pick it up and play it, or see it, or my kids play it, I just think it’s really beautiful. I love the sound of it, and I love that my kids love it.’’
Taane has one more instrument he’s lending the exhibition, and although it’s perhaps a little less glamorous than the putatara, to him it’s no less significant.
His steel-string acoustic guitar called ‘‘Ol’ Manky’’ is fairly battered, plastered with stickers and coated in dust. Spiders have strung their homes inside its body.
‘‘To most people it’s just a crappy, beaten up, cheap-ass guitar, and it looks it, and it sounds it as well. But for me it represents so much: dreams and aspirations and hope and freedom. It was my ticket,’’ he says.
Taane was 11 or 12 when he first started playing guitar. He was into heavy metal at the time, but his family couldn’t afford an electric guitar or an amplifier. That didn’t stop him shredding riffs from Metallica and Megadeth songs on his classical acoustic axe, though.
He picked up Ol’ Manky around 2002, when he was playing with Salmonella Dub. It was his main guitar while touring and he’s played to thousands of people with it.
Ol’ Manky was also the instrument Taane wrote a lot of his solo material on, including his biggest hit, You’re Always on My Mind.
‘‘Even though it looks manky, to me it’s probably my pride and joy out of all the amazing guitars I have. I’ve got really expensive guitars, but this $300 thing, because it’s a part of my life, we’ve done so much together, it’s got so many memories.
‘‘So that’s why I thought, when I was asked about this exhibition, I said I’ve got this guitar, it’s pretty stink, but it means so much to me, I wrote my biggest song on it.’’
He hopes a ‘‘punk-ass’’ kid like he was might come through, see Ol’ Manky and realise you don’t necessarily need top-of-the-range gear to make good music.