Day Zero: February 15, 2020 – Assemble in Zanzibar Story
…lly, what you hear in Zanzibar is a wonderful fusion of Arabic music and African beats, with a bit of Cuban and Indian spices. The Dhow Countries. The most important and famous of the musical styles originating from Zanzibar is Taarab, which roughly translates in Arabic as ‘having joy with music.’ Taarab’s origins are in the late 1800s. Mohamed Ibrahim, studied music in Egypt, where he learned to play the Qanun and returned to Zanzibar to form…
Report from Womex 2013 News
…s heading up with support from Siemens and the Goethe institute in South Africa. The board of directors of Music in Africa includes our good friend and project advisor to the Singing Wells Bill Odidi. The project is to provide an online portal for African musicians to showcase their work, and it looks great. Hopefully we can help the project and work together in some way in the future. Showcases Visited Mike and I were present at the opening con…
The Tribal and Musical Structure of East Africa – Worldmap Research News
…s open source we were able to use a map of the distribution of tribes in Africa created by a Harvard professor named Suzanne Blier. By using her research we could create a map of only the tribal borders of East Africa, from a layer she had created. Once we had a map that only represented these tribal groups we then attached further information on each tribe to this layer so there would be extra information about each group, anyone can access this…
Day 1: The very first field recording day for Singing Wells Story
…to today’s artists. Part of that mission then is to help create an East African musical identity to rival the South and West African successes. We had a taste of what this could be on March 29th in Sati, when Winyo joined Bado and his father, Nyerere wa Konde, to do a new song. Bado participates in his dad’s group, but separately records his own music. Bado’s music is great, propelled by his wonderful voice, but it’s American-sounding and could h…