Hitching a ride Story
…passing lorry. Most people seemed to be on foot and many of the Batwa make the arduous journey to town three times a week, without being able to hitch a ride….
Ten More Singing Wells Stories News
…d one extraordinary ‘boy’s group’ and their energy is seductive. They told us the full story of Male Circumcision rites, which this performance shows, here. A word about brass bands: It isn’t every day you discover a brass band in the middle of Africa, but it isn’t every day you meet Julius, an orphan determined to save orphans. Click here. Benga: The beauty of cultural integration: I was able to tell two stories involving music as part of my da…
Current Leading Figures News
…oes it contribute to development; job creation, tax revenue?”. This is because they do not understand the value of culture in providing employment, promoting patriotism, love, hard work, name it. Music for instance speaks to the heart of the person..goes beyond the ears and brain as you might know, science has proved this already. Now, we have a festival annually that singly gives joy to the people in the villages but nobody around here would see…
Music Depositories and Archives around the World News
…) main aim is ‘to provide access to sound recordings and images of indigenous music from communities in Africa and the Americas’ and, as it is a public facility, it achieves this aim by allowing public access to the archive onsite and online. It states that the GMA tries to be inclusive, rather than exclusive, with material and will look at origin, idiom, transmission, and style of performance when debating whether it is relevant to their collecti…
Archiving Guidelines News
…igher education and research sectors, although knowledge of its use within the museums and cultural heritage sectors is limited but growing.”[1] The second is FEDORA. However, it is clear that to set up an online data repository, to be used as an archive, substantial technological knowledge is needed – but this guide is most definitely a great help for gaining understanding of all the issues needed be considered when setting up an online music arc…
A History of Recording East African Music News
…archiving African Music, particularly in their country of origin. He gave frustrating examples of tapes being stored in terrible conditions, archives being so disorganised that, even with funding, it would take 20 years to archive properly and equipment being broken because it was not used according to instructions. However, there were examples that gave hope for the archiving of East African music, in Africa; ‘I visited the Ethiopian archives whi…
ILAM, Repatriation and Jimmie Rodgers/Chemirocha News
…s his favourite Hugh Tracey story. Here’s the story as told in Muzik: “And then the big bomber: the song I consider Tracey’s single most outstanding recording, “Chemirocha,” a paean to Jimmy Rogers (yes, the country singer) by some Kenyan girls. The song is haunting but made more so by Tracey’s introduction on the LP record (not included on the CD): “The mysterious singer and dancer Chemirocha has been turned into a local god Pan — a faun — half m…
James Isabirye and Tabu Osusa Discuss East African Music News
…g us to be like a white person from England or America, not to be Ugandan. The English and Americans don’t want to know me because I am like them – they know I am not. They want to know me because I am Ugandan, because I am different. And yet that is not what we teach. Tabu: Exactly. Rather than embrace our identify we aspire to be something else. In Kenya, all the young musicians want to play Hip Hop and want to become like a musician from LA, al…
Ketebul Music: A Year in Review News
…Ketebul mission. Ewaala Turkana: The most important project this year with the music of the Turkana – we did a CD called Ewaala Turkana with the Loiyangalani Stars. We had first met them with Singing Wells in 2011 at the Turkhana Festival where we worked with the Loiyangalani tribe of Lake Turkana. This tribe had previously discovered oil and water; when we started working with the group, the leaders said that with our help they also ‘discovered t…
Preserving Threatened Heritage News
…New Vision, warns about the need to preserve ‘Bigwala’, the royal music of the Busoga region. Bigwala music is performed at ceremonies such as coronations, funerals and, recently, other social events. It is the music of gourd trumpets and is accompanied by a specific dance. UNESCO cites Bigwala music as playing ‘a significant role in contributing to unity among the Basoga people’, as it narrates the history of the Basoga people, especially concern…
Obuell-Lira and the Macedonia Band Story
…ce and music. We met the Macedonia Band and their leader, Joshua, who told us their incredible story, which we will try and do justice to here… During the civil war villages in the region were under rebel control from 1989-1992. The rebels came to the village to kill the men and seize the boys to take into the bush to fight. Joshua tried to convince the rebel leaders that he was a man of peace and music and asked them to listen to his music. The b…
Report from Womex 2013 News
The Singing Wells project attended the World Music Expo this year in Cardiff. The festival lasted from Wednesday 23rd to the 27th of October. The trade fair and conferences were held at the Motorpoint arena, with the evening showcases and events held at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay. For our first visit to Womex, we booked a stand at the trade fair, with the main intentions being to spread the word of the project and the work we are doing…
SWP Uganda 2013 – our proposed itinerary News
…ing which will focus on the music of the Baganda and also the recording of new newly arranged songs for our Influences series. First, our Baganda musicians. We will be recording Albert Bissaso Ssempeke, who plays a variety of Baganda instruments including the Ennanga (bow harp), Entongoli (bowl lyre), Amadinda (xylophone), Endere (flute) and Engoma (drums). We have also arranged to record a performance from the Kadinda Players, a Baganda group led…
The Birara Batwa Community Story
…Ketebul Music studios in Nairobi to record more Batwa songs and others for the the Influences series. Since our visit to Kisoro we have been in regular contact with the local NGO the United Organisation for Batwa Development in Uganda (UOBDU). Their latest report to us included the following information about the Birara group: “This is one of the communities that is still cherishing music and dance as the Batwa culture it is still leading and very…
Group of the Month – Otacho Young Stars News
…e Otacho Young Stars. We first encountered the group on our trip to record the music of the Luo in Western Kenya in December 2011. Up to that point, we had had a bad day – which included Andy taking the collected rainfall of the past hour, in the face from the roof of the tent…. We then moved from our original recording location to the DRC – not the Democratic Republic of Congo, but Dinky’s Resort Club, down the road in Rongo. We set up the record…
A recording studio which fits into the back of an SUV Story
…mobile recording units, each capable of recording from four microphones plus other sources at a high resolution to Apple MacBook Pro laptops. The benefit of the systems we have chosen is that they can run off the battery power of the laptops if we are in the situation where we do not have a generator (or there is a power cut mid-session which happened to us when we recorded to the Batwa at the Traveller’s Rest Hotel in Kisoro, Uganda!) We can als…