We’re delighted to annouce that our esteemed colleague and Singing Wells partner Prof James Isabirye has been featured in an article in Uganda’s Daily Monitor about his work to revive the Entenga Royal Drums. Read now. You can watch the full documentary of our initiative to save the Royal Drums here.
A few years ago we learned about a group in Tanzania who, like Singing Wells, is working to preserve traditional music, but for them the act of preservation is quite literal – the Tanzania Heritage Project is scrambling to digitise reams of reel-to-reel tape recorded between the 1960s and 1980s, which has been literally rotting…
During our recording trips around Kenya – which have taken us over the years to the coast, the west and the central regions – we’ve come across a broad range of fascinating musical instruments played with impressive confidence and mastery by the communities that created them. Since many of these instruments are all but unknown…
In 2015 I had the pleasure of meeting Holly Rahman, a Kenyan musician of the band Ndoto Afrika. The band blends traditional and modern sounds to create a unique blend of catchy fusion music (trust me, you will be humming their Window Shopping tune all day). We interviewed them to find out more: Hi Holly. Tell…
Recently, Singing Wells embarked on our latest field trip to Uganda. We went in search of the lost musicians of the Ugandan Kingdoms, to discover and record the royal music. Fundamental to our understanding of traditional Ugandan music and our accurate sharing of the music we captured during the trip has been Peter Cooke, a…
In our increasingly global world, it’s easy for traditional ways of living to be left behind. From London to Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro to Cape Town, people flock to the cities and leave behind their cultural traditions. But in some pockets of the world, there are still tribes that have preserved centuries-old traditions. Singing…
Happy new year! We hope your 2016s have gotten off to a good start, and that you’ve been bringing in the year by listening to lots of traditional East African music. Before we start posting exciting news about the upcoming year, here’s a quick recap of what we got up to in 2015: 1. We went discovering…
We’re currently in the field discovering and recording the lost music of the Ugandan Kingdoms. Our journey so far has taken us to the capital of Uganda – Kampala, over to Jinja in the east and back in search of musicians who haven’t played in the royal palaces since they were children. We’ve been posting…
