Born in the town of Bindura, Zimbabwe, Patience Chaitezvi grew up immersed in traditional music through her mother, a traditional healer and spirit medium who used mbira music as part of her healing sessions. When she was in fifth grade, Patience learned to play mbira by observing her older brother, and by the next year, she was playing with him in ceremonies for ancestral spirits. Patience now plays in a duo with her brother Endiby, as well as teaching history in high school. She toured America in 2008 with the all-women Vakaranga Venharetare: Women of the Spirits.

Berkeley's Erica Azim fell in love with Shona mbira music when she first heard it at the age of 16. In 1974, she became one of the first Americans to study the instrument in Zimbabwe, and her teachers have included many of Zimbabwe's top mbira masters past and present, including Forward Kwenda, with whom she has appeared on the Freight stage. Erica currently records, performs, and leads mbira workshops throughout the U.S. and directs the non-profit organization MBIRA, which provides financial support to Zimbabwean mbira players and instrument makers.

Mbira music has been used by the Shona people of Zimbabwe in religious and secular ceremonies for over a millennium. The instrument, made of two dozen metal keys mounted on a wood soundboard inside a resonating calabash gourd and played with the thumbs, produces music that combines entrancing melodies with invigorating polyphony and polyrhythms.