Sunday, February 18th, 2018: This day is all about the Iteso people and their music. The Iteso are a smaller ethnic community in Kenya but has very distinctive music. In Uganda, they are more Iteso, located in Soroti. Its language is Ateso. The Iteso are Nilotics, one of the people of the Nile. We drove…
Monday, February 19, 2018: Woke up early and drove to Sirisia to record the band Namatete. The band was founded by Weput Khulu Namatete in 1992. He and his friends gradually made instruments and learned to play them while taking care of their cattle. By 1992 they were good enough to call themselves a ‘serious’ band. …
You can watch all the nyatiti players we recorded in this playlist. This report is to inform interested parties of the results of field recordings for “Masters of the Nyatiti” programme under Singing Wells project series, produced by Abubilla Music and Ketebul Music. It reports on the field interviews and recordings conducted between Kisumu and…
Tuesday, February 20th, 2018: Today, we returned to record Wilbert Wanyama in Bungoma Town. As mentioned, we met Wilbert on the evening of February 19th, but were unable to record his band due to thunderstorms. So we returned to Santa Maria Resort to record him the next morning. And the weather was sunny and crisp,…
Day one of our field mission was originally reserved for travel, for the road from Nairobi to Kisumu City. However, as our schedule was going to be tight, and some of the preliminary work had not been completed, we opted for a semi‐formal preparative interview with John Otieno ‘Rapasa’, a young nyatiti player based in…
Wednesday, 21 February 2018 We drove from our hotel, in Kakamega, to Shiriese Ikolomani to record the Super Phoenix Band. The band was founded originally by Jacob Luseno, who mentored the current band leader Julius Intenya. The musical style is Mutibu. They played roughly 8-10 songs, including several goes with our influences artist. These songs included:…
