KONEK LO GRAON, EMI MAMA!
TIO BANG was born in Ambrym and moved to Port Vila to study. Unfortunately, he dropped out of school but his path to learning and his desire to grow, didn’t end there. He turned to music and used it as a “weapon to connect with other people and also to learn”. He can be described as an artist but is not defined by only one form of expression. “I believe art is life. In my life, everything I’m doing is art. That’s why I have dreads. Life is art”.
Tio is a musician, singer, songwriter and creator. He plays various musical instruments and is probably the only NiVanuatu musician who plays the violin. “I’ve been hearing people here play the violin through a keyboard but I love the real sound. Taught myself, I learnt by ear and by practicing. It’s been six years since I’ve been playing that instrument.”
Tio has performed at many local music festivals with his band Koncerners. Internationally, he performed at the recent Woodford Folk Festival in Australia, an annual event that features more than 2000 performers, 35 venues and 438 acts. His most notable performance is with Grammy award winning singer-songwriter, Joss Stone from Devon, UK. Stone has collaborated with and contributed to albums for many of the world’s finest musicians, including Jeff Beck, Sting, Mick Jagger, Damien Marley and the list goes on. Her mission is to explore and understand the universal language of music in every country on the planet. And she has just completed her project called The Total World Tour where she has performed and collaborated with local artists in over 200 countries around the world. One of those artists is Tio. Joss Stone travelled to Vanuatu in 2019 as part of the Total World Tour project. “I don’t know how she chose the song that I wrote because a few musicians sent their songs, she listened and chose which one she liked”. And the song she chose was written by Tio, called Black Butterfly, a song about life & nature and how they’re connected. “Black Butterfly was written in Melbourne, I’m naming a kind of life I’m dreaming of, it’s a good life, life with nature, a peaceful life. But in the city, people are dreaming but not living it, it’s like a black thing just flying. At the end of the day, are we connecting our life to nature or are we destroying it?”
The more I spoke to Tio, the more I learnt how much nature means to him. This passion for connecting with the land and preserving the environment has led to a project that he started for the unemployed youth in Pango. They are creating artistic all natural pot plants, using plants & nature. The idea behind this is to eradicate the use of plastic and unnatural materials for pot plants. Tio believes that by using nature as pot plants, nothing is really destroyed because it comes from the ground and returns to the ground when it rots or breaks. This project has been a dream of his for a few years now and he has finally brought it to fruition. “Mifala all youth we i stap, mifala i save se i gat generation behind lo mifala we bae oli learn thru lo mifala. So every walkabout steps blo mifala emi olsem ol model so olgeta oli save learn. So yumi mas lanem ol pikinini to create, create, create”.
Tio believes that communities need to help their unemployed youth by giving them options, ideas and suggestions on what they can do to be self-sufficient. “Many youth don’t have the opportunity to work, mostly because of the systems in place, and people just look down on them and talk about them but they don’t help or give them solutions. They just think they are school drop outs and let them go and their attitude is to focus on people who are bright”. Tio has gathered like-minded young men who have a passion to creative and a passion for the environment. The pot plants are all unique in that no two are the same. Tio and these amazing creations can be found at a road side table in Pango, just before Breakers Beach Resort.
As we reflect on the last 40 years and our way forward into the future, this is the message Tio wants to leave with all of us, “Tajem graon! Tajem graon emi important. Yu no fraet se nails blo yu i gat dirt from graon, emi life. Yu no fraet lo graon. Konek lo graon, emi mama”.
