Day 9: Ketebul Studios with Ben Kisinja
We welcome Ben into the studio to record Kotuyo, the song that blew us away in the field. The Otacho Young Stars were so impressed they stayed an extra day to play with him.
We welcome Ben into the studio to record Kotuyo, the song that blew us away in the field. The Otacho Young Stars were so impressed they stayed an extra day to play with him.
Having recorded the Batwa in the Ketebul studios in December 2011, we follow this with our first studio recordings from the Nyanza trip – starting with the wonderful Otacho Young Stars
After 5 straight days in the field, half the group uses their Nairobi Friday to finish blogs, continue work on videos and sneak in a pizza…The other half of the group fixes a van and limps home from Nakuru.
Our day really started at 7:30am when Tabu discovered the Jeep had a flat tyre. This moved our departure time from the two hotels (Eldoret Club and Pine Tree) from 8am to about 9.30am. The tyre had a damaged tube that just wore out. We reassembled and headed off for a spectacular trip from an altitude of 2,800m down to 1,114m at one of the floors of the Great Rift Valley. The roads were more winding and steeper than on our trip to Rwanda last November but there was no rain and there were guard rails on the roadside which made it all feel safer.
We left around 9am from the Eldoret Club to start our third day of recording, this time with the Marakwet tribes. The drive was long but spectacular. Our journey took us from Eldoret to Iten, the home of Kenya’s world class athletes.
It’s our forth day of the trip (second recording day in the field) and, despite difficulties with internet connections, we are still managing to keep you posted on our progress and had an extraordinary moment when we received a Skype call from Andy in the Uk and he actually joined in a live Influences session!
First off, we had a great opportunity to interview Steve, the Singing Wells Project Manager, on the way to our first session.
We met for breakfast at 7am, departed from Kitale Club, Kitale at 8.30 and arrived at our first shoot of the trip – Kapsokwony Kenya, 56 kilometers from Kitale. We drove onto the athletic grounds of Chesamis High School to record four groups. Our fixer was ’50 Cows’ – clearly taken from 50 Cent, but…