Day 1 & 2: Preparing to leave for Kisoro, Uganda Story
…c. Chief Sound Engineer: Commands the audio team and is in charge of input for all sessions and for completing all finished audio for that day. Assistant Engineer: In charge of set up/breakdown of set and assisting Chief Sound Engineer on day Trainee: Supports Assistant Engineer and takes tutorial from Chief Engineer during session. Chief Video Engineer: In charge of Stationary Camera and placement of Roving Camera 2 Roving Camera 1: In charge of…
Diamond Jubilee Pageant at Windsor Castle News
…11‘ and features music videos from our field trips to the Coastal Region and Nyanza Province. We are grateful to our friends at the Kenya Tourist Board and Hills Balfour for arranging this for us and giving Singing Wells a presence at this wonderful cultural celebration. …
News from the Batwa in Kisoro News
…rom UOBDU Following our trip to Kisoro last year we sent a parcel to UOBDU for the Batwa communities we visited. The parcel contained printed books of photos of all the people we met and CDs and DVDs of the music performances we recorded. We also printed some leaflets about the Batwa in Uganda and their traditional music and dance which we hope will help to promote their standing in the community in Kisoro and beyond. Zaninka Penninah from UOBDU s…
Kenya (Coast): Day 4 – the road back to Nairobi Story
…vocalists and instruments. We did an amazing job of archiving the full performance, in video and audio way. Going forward, we should work to use our second studio to capture individual sounds. On the video side, we need a main crew focused on the performance and a secondary crew focused on Selling Wells, archiving the stories of the music and the artists. TO: The pilot was a success and proved we were right – take the studio to the talent not the…
Kathy’s reflections on her Singing Wells experience News
…hours before we recorded them. They were proud and wanted to show us their best performances. I really felt for them if they thought they hadn’t done something right in the performance. For instance if they started singing before the clapper board was out of the shot they had to start again. This unnerved and embarrassed them and they had to regroup before they could sing again. I felt it was important to talk to them before the performances to pu…
Kenya (Coast): Day 3 – our final recording day Story
…s of ‘props’ including a baby doll, hay stack and lots of bowls of water and spices. Some final shots at our last village. Enjoy…. Winyo and the kids… That’s enough for now. There’s 150 pictures more for every one we show, but the internet is too slow to keep posting Jimmy…
Kenya (Coast): Day 2 continued…. Story
…n… Katana bin Kalama, with beautiful costume of shells… The Group prepares for their performance… Sengenya The most energetic group by far, brought the house down, with wonderful dancing. Led by Munyaka Chimega, they danced in the style of Sengenya (which bears their name). Non-stop dancing, multiple songs and they didn’t want to stop (but we ran out of video!). Fantastic energetic dancers that we’ve only captured on video…. …and all the kids jo…
Day 1: The very first field recording day for Singing Wells Story
…probably two dozen little kids watching. At close of day we were invited to some coconuts to celebrate the music Winyo with Coconuts Maddo, Chairman of Ketebul during our coconut break That’s it for now. This is only Day 1 of recording… we look forward to the next two days, 6 more groups, 3 more villages and of course 600 kilometres back to Nairobi. Jimmy …
On the eve of our very first field recording trip….. Story
…Winyo: He’s the current new star from the Ketebul stable. He sang back up for Samba and when he came on he said he was humbled by the extraordinary talent in the room. 50 years of East African music, the hand-off of one generation to the next. Massive respect for each others talent and an amazing evening that only Tabu could pull off. Amazing voice: We recorded video and used the mobile recording studio to record most of the concert. We’ll post t…
Best of Singing Wells 2011 News
…ance was unique and special – we loved them all – so picking just 10 songs for a ‘Best of’ album was not easy. Here are our final choices….it’s just a small reflection of what was an extraordinary year of recording music in East Africa. We hope you enjoy listening. Please get in touch and let us know what you think. Just send us an email – we’d love to hear from you. Email Victoria You can see and hear more on our YouTube channel : Singing Wells o…
Matthew Morin News
…onducted in Kenya and Tanzania during 2010 and 2011. He currently lives in Japan and is continuing research on music and civil society from a global perspective. Matt has been following the progress of the Singing Wells project since March 2011 when he met the team in Nairobi. He has praised the project for its ‘value to academic fields like musicology and anthropology in addition to the broader benefit of providing an open sourced educational res…
A Year in Review March 2011 – March 2012 News
…tance of capturing the cultural legacy of East Africa with tribal music, before it was lost to all of us forever. We were reminded of the importance of this in December, when one of the most extraordinary musicians we’ve recorded, Okumu K’Orengo, died only weeks after our visit. Ironically, his last recording with us was a funeral song that our team at Ketebul Music felt was the best version they’d ever heard sung. Here it is: But, this journe…
A message from Henry Neza at UOBDU News
…ide their community when they visited the Ketebul Music studios in Nairobi for more recordings. During this trip they were able to interact with the Ford Foundation and benefit from new clothes and shoes, which improved their social status among the dominant tribes here. This gave them confidence and changed their behaviour. Now the non Batwa community agree that the Batwa can compete with others in many different fields if they are given the chan…
Discovering music roots with SWP News
…e entertained by traditional troupes – who shall be reasonably remunerated for their efforts (and not depend on handouts from politicians who use them to spread their own skewed policies or lack of them in the music industry). It would be with absolute satisfaction to watch these groups outside their tourist hotel runs as occurs with the groups we covered in the pilot phase of the Singing Wells Project at the Kenyan coast. So, when Abubilla Music…
More Ketebul voices…Steve reports from the field News
…The cold tusker s we picked in Voi also helped to while away the hours. Unfortunately for The Leader and The Guide, he was the designated driver, and could only enjoy the sight and sounds of us downing the tuskers. We finally made it to Mombasa a little after 7pm and it was unanimously decided we proceed straight to Malindi, our third and final leg of the trip. Tabu in car number 01 had the pedal to the metal and was almost 45 minutes ahead of us…
What we learned from the pilot phase News
…that we are on to something very big here. First, there is an urgent need for what we are doing: the average age of the performers was about 60 and there were NO young adults or kids involved. This music, these traditions are dying fast. Moreover, on three different cases local young men from the villages approached us and said they also had some music for us to hear. In each case they were trying to imitate US artists from 50 Cent to Justin Timb…