December 1, 2015: Checking the progress of the Bigwala trumpets Today, we travelled 3 hours from Kampala to Jinja, to the village of Bukakaire, to listen to the Bukakaire Bigwala Players, led by the last surviving trumpeter from the Busoga Kingdom, James Lugolole. A woman playing the Bigwala First, why are we here? Well, there’s…
First, a caveat: this blog does not claim to be historically accurate and we can’t verify all the events told here. It reports on the memories of a former royal drummer, who is reflecting back on his time at the Buganda palace, on the night the palace was attacked and on the importance of seeing…
November 30: Meeting the professor and his students The Singing Wells team united in Nairobi on November 28th and flew together to Kampala on November 29th. We are: Tabu Osusa, Jimmy Allen, Steve Kivutia, Patrick Ondiek, Hunter Allen and Nick Abonyo. After a night at the Fairway Hotel, we met James Isabirye at his university,…
The Entenga Drums were part of a set of royal instruments of the Buganda Kingdom. We know from Musisi, the last surviving drummer who played in the palace, that the King in the early 1960’s loved the Entenga drums so much that he asked the drummers to play every morning at 3AM. He felt that…
We interview a key member of this set of field visits. He likes what he sees but worries we are not thinking big enough about the task at hand…
With great pleasure, we reprint Ketebul music’s history of Benga music.
