Day 2: Sunday, 2017 February 19th Story
…i Kidude and Unyago style. Throughout this trip we will encounter multiple stories about ‘women for women’ songs. In this case, the women in the village have a special dance that is performed by women only for women. It is all about teaching young girls to prepare for womanhood, be it how to behave in the village, how to behave as a wife, and how to be a mother. The women invited Sophie into one of the huts to watch their dance in private. In Ugan…
Day 1: Saturday, 2017 February 18th Story
…avel in the field, doing our best to record traditional groups, songs, and stories. All groups and songs mentioned here will eventually turn up on YouTube (see our current video collection here), as we prepare each of the videos. We will go back to these reports and provide hot links to all of these, but that will take a couple months or so, so please be patient. This is our first trip to Tanzania. For those of you that have followed Singing Wells…
Our journey to the Royal Drums: in the words of James Isabirye Story
…, 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 are losing the myths, the dances, and th…
Central and Eastern Kenya: Days 5-11:An Interview with Gregg Story
…is killing our culture. If the numbers don’t come in on something than you stop it. But culture is hard to really invest in. You don’t go for the popular musicians doing the big things. You have to go to the real groups in the rural villages. And they are out there. And it gets much deeper. Our view of development is hardware – give folks roads, modernise them. But Singing Wells has discovered in fact – the best sustainable development is to keep…
The History Of Benga Music: A Report by Ketebul Music Story
…enre and Ketebul has kindly given us permission to publish in full their history of Benga music. Here it is: Retracing the Benga Rhythm From simple traditional village entertainment to a national and regional music genre, this is the story of the making of benga music. Setting the Background A characteristic of popular music the world over is the element of mystery surrounding the origins of the genre and sometimes also, the real meaning of its na…
Central Uganda: Day 5 – Jinja to Kampala Story
…delighted to find a English football match on the TV (Arsenal vs. Southampton). And we were greeted by Air Conditioning which is most welcome by those of us from the North but feared and mistrusted by those of us from Nairobi. We look forward to recording tomorrow in Kampala. Apparently there is a marathon. We shall provide the soundtrack….
Central Uganda: Day 4 – Jinja Story
…s. The Bigwala Cultural Group One of this group’s primary purposes is to restore the Bigwala, the big Ugandan trumpet, to Ugandan musical culture. According to our local musical expert, James Isabirye, it was close to dead, but a Unesco project has helped to draw attention to the group by pointing out the instruments and its players are threatened with extinction. He also says there is a horn shortage because people don’t grow the right kind of go…
Discussions with Peter Cooke: ethnomusicologist and Ugandan music expert News
…referenced Peter many times in our field reports and blog posts: in our history of recording East African music summary, in our post about music archives across the world, when reflecting on the importance of archiving traditional music and, most recently, in our posts about our journey to discover and record the Royal Drums. It was James Isabirye, a lecturer at Kyambogo University and expert in traditional Ugandan music, who first introduced us…
Central Uganda: Day 3 – From Mbale to Iganga to Jinja Story
…pe. We were recording at his youth centre, which was a fairly large single story building in the middle of a field just off a small road in Mbale. The field was filled with drummers and dancers. The field was also filled with a large tower of red bricks and a separate hill of concrete – clearly there was more construction to follow. We found Julius to interview him and found a quiet place at the back of the building – we had to march across a fiel…
Central Uganda: Day 2 – Kampala to Budaka Story
…wo levels. Our ‘stage’ was on the lower level, with two small brick single story homes and a little kitchen cleaning area. On the second level to the right of the houses was a hill, with the school and a couple large trees, under which our two bands rested and changed clothes – each song brought new and more beautiful costumes. Before the performances started we also spent quite a bit of time filming ‘drum tuning’, which involves a lot of fire, a…
Singing Wells in Numbers…. News
…Andy did a litte homework for this one: Number of recordings of groups: 374 (this does not include other recordings like Magic Moments, Influences, etc…) Number of groups recorded: 83 Number of hours of music: 27 hours and 30 minutes. …
Report from Womex 2013 News
…ain at the Wales Millennium Centre and in a tent erected outside. In the Weston Studio we saw the magical Ross Ainslie and Jarlath Henderson, who after a 9 hour car journey had almost not made it in time. Jarlath popped via our stall the next day at the trade fair, and so left with a copy of the Singing Wells CD sampler to enjoy in the car journey home again. We then crossed to the tent to catch Scottish band Lau, who gave a stirring performance d…
SWP Uganda 2013 – our proposed itinerary News
…n Mata. Here are Steve’s notes from when they met in September: “Our first stop was at Kasokoso village to meet an elderly man who has been mentioned in several circles so far as being one of the remaining custodians of Basoga music history. Nathan ‘Mata’ is a composer and songwriter who plays the ‘Endongo’ (thumb piano). Mata, (Lusoga for ‘milk’) as he is popularly known, has lost his sight and lives in very humble conditions with his family. He…
A recording studio which fits into the back of an SUV Story
…f battery power. The laptops use Avid ProTools recording software – an industry standard for recording and music production. The microphones we have chosen are industry standard models used in studios the world over but, most likely, not seen in the villages of East Africa. The equipment has been carefully selected so it can easily fit into a few holdalls and four rugged peli-cases which protect everything while in transit, whether it be on a plan…
73,603 views on YouTube News
…enjoying what we are all about – bringing the more traditional sounds of East Africa to an enthusiastic audience. Thanks for watching! Our top 3 video hits In third place, this is the Nyerere Wa Konde Music Club from Sita Village, Gede in Kenya’s Malindi District. It was the very first video we uploaded to YouTube following our field visit to the Coast Region to record the music of the Mijikenda tribes. Is second place is a video from our fi…
A new type of city Story
…here and make-shift houses, which starkly contrasted to the taller office buildings you could see in the distance. Despite this unconventional type of city,I loved it. There was certainly a lot going on and during the week Akello told us many stories of the vibrant buzz in Kampala. Every night there’s music to listen to somewhere in the packed hub of 180,000 people . The image above of the tin houses and the Uganda House of Commons in the backgrou…