Fundraiser for Matthew Watmon News
…rt him and his family in this difficult time, and we hope that some of our followers may be able to help us. If you are based in East Africa, please get in touch with Matthew’s brother, Constantine Odida ((MTN) +256-782-236-742 and (Airtel) +256-704-261-037). If you are based elsewhere in the world, we have created a GoFundMe page: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-mathew-watmon The donors of Abubilla Music Foundation, who support the Singing Wel…
Our journey to the Royal Drums: in the words of James Isabirye Story
…: James Isabirye, Left: Tabu (Ketebul), Right: Musisi (one of the last remaining Royal Drummers) Here is James’s story about how we ended up recording the Royal Drums of the Buganda Kingdom: “Let’s first just consider the state of our traditional music. From a government perspective, it is the music you roll out for foreigners, like the Pope, or on some special occasion. But otherwise you ignore it and don’t value it. We don’t support it and we ar…
Ketebul Music presents Shades of Benga Online News
…lar Music in Kenya delves into the foundations of modern Kenyan music, examining external influences from the English waltz to Afro Cuban Rumba and how they helped mould new music styles across Africa. Rumba was brought to Eastern Africa via the itinerant Congolese musicians Edouard Masengo and Jean Bosco Mwenda who’s intricate guitar-picking styles largely shaped the present Kenyan sound, with the Benga playing a dominant role. Currently, you can…
Singing Wells Approaches 5 Million Views News
We are so excited to see that our hard work is paying off – in the last few months we have almost doubled our views on our Youtube channel and are now approaching 5 million total views across our videos. When we started Singing Wells almost ten years ago, we set an aim to bring the traditional music of East Africa to a wider audience. It amazing to see the Youtube algorithm agreeing that this is a project worth showing people! We can’t wait to b…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 4, Part 2 – Flutes Story
…s and the closing of the circle with Albert Ssempeke This is our final day in the field in Uganda. Tomorrow we head back to Nairobi to record in the Ketebul Studios: we identified a whole set of extraordinary musicians from our 2013 visit to Uganda and have invited them back to do studio recordings. But today, we focused on two things: 1) Discussing in detail some of our observations from our time exploring the royal instruments of the Kingdoms of…
Recce to Tanzania for our 2020 Field Visit News
The Singing Wells team has been travelling through Tanzania in search of the best groups to record during our upcoming field visit in February. We are struck once again by the amazing talent this country has to offer, and can’t wait to capture some amazing moments with these artists when we visit again with the full team in a few weeks time. Thanks to the good people at Dhow Countries Music Academy for helping us with the information and contact…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 4, Part 1 – Reflections Story
…fore it dies? What part of our efforts should focus on reviving the music, using it to inspire new generations to build on it in their own way, as thousands of generations did before? This has always been the core tension of Singing Wells. We have always had two missions. First, and sadly, we must preserve elements of a dying culture. And sadly, we have dozens of the only or last great village performances of musicians who have died after our visi…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 3, Part 2 – Interviews with Musicians of Uganda’s Royal Palaces Story
…he good news is that there are some. The bad news is that the group is declining rapidly. In some cases, we refer to musicians as the ‘last surviving’ musician. This is based on James’ best reckoning, having tried for years to find others. Neither James nor the musician involved wants the title of ‘last surviving’ and we would love to be proven wrong. Musisi is looking for more drummers and the ones we talked to today are desperate to find others…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 3, Part 1- Drum Making and Palace Players Story
…ing. For this step, the re-stringing, he stopped after a few strings, explaining that he was ruining his drum by showing us. Here, you saw the real skill levels of the drum maker. With his hands moving very fast, he was taking out the stitch of nylon string, cutting off the former holes, creating new holes and re-lacing the drum skins together with leather strings. Very fast. 9. Tuning The final stage is tuning. He showed us in detail how he uses…
Singing Wells Youtube Channel hits 2.5Million views News
We are thrilled to announce that in the past year, the Singing Wells Youtube channel has doubled its view count, and we are now on a staggering 2.6million views across our videos on the channel! Since 2011, we’ve been sharing our work discovering, recording, archiving and celebrating the traditional music of East Africa, and its an amazing reward to see the impact our work is having. We want to take this opportunity to thank you all for supporti…
Central and Eastern Uganda: Day 2 – Kampala to Jinja Story
…playing the Bigwala First, why are we here? Well, there’s the obvious: at Singing Wells, we record and share the great music of East African villages. But, there’s another, equally important reason: the revival of the Bigwala trumpets was the model we used for the restoration of the Royal Drums. We felt it was critical to check in on their progress. We focused on three main things on this visit: Interviewing James about the instruments themselves…
Musisi’s Story, Part 1: The Fall of the Buganda Kingdom Story
…ke up to the sound of gun fire. At first, I wasn’t too scared and rose to brush my teeth as I always do. But the guns got louder – the Central Government was attacking the Buganda Kingdom and had attacked the Parliament first, which was about a kilometer away from the palace. I realized it was very real when bullets started hitting the palace and the hut where we kept our drums caught fire. People started running around all over and I was getting…
Rediscovering the lost Royal Drums of the Buganda Kingdom: Day 1, Uganda Story
…rofessor and his students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpG0HLNxVQA 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, Kyambogo University, to record the Entenga. Centre: James Isabirye We have been working closely with Jame…
The Return of Bigwala News
…s of this unique gourd, which were thought to have been lost, to be rediscovered and grown. Now over 100 students have been trained in building the instruments, and have played at two royal celebrations. There seems to be a promising future for this important thread in the tapestry of Uganda’s cultural history. Sources: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ugandan-music-bigwalahttps://ich.unesco.org/en/news/uganda-young-ugandans-mobilized-for-saf…
Entenga drums perform with Akadinda Xylophone News
A year ago we brought you the news of Entenga players performing in front of King Ronald Metebi at the 25th anniversary of his coronation (available here). At this event they also performed a piece with the Akadinda xylophone in front of the Asantehene (the monarch) of the Asante people from Ghana. A recording of this performance has just become available, and is posted below https://youtu.be/CCQ72al2pEo Fore more information about the Entenga dr…
Central and Eastern Kenya: Days 5-11:An Interview with Gregg Story
…he government is focused on politics and big money items like tourism and business is focused on marketing which demands immediate return. So on one hand, our government investing in messages that say ‘see our animals not our people.’ And business is looking for big numbers which means popular things, which sadly means easy to digest, disposable pop culture. The whole drive to “marketing” is killing our culture. If the numbers don’t come in on som…