Kirundo Group
…r the harvest. New composition. Mjomba – Uncle, celebrating the good hunt. New composition Uye – Come Back Please, used at a wake after someone is buried. New composition. Uringe – Be Proud. Old Traditional song Kyaso – old traditional Zanzibarian song of celebration Mnyamwana – Respect for women. New Composition. They sang in a combination of Hehe and Kigogo, both languages from mainland Tanzania, as well as Swahili. They had incredible energy an…
Day Four: February 19, 2020 (Maruhabi Palace) Story
…the harvest. New composition. Mjomba – Uncle, celebrating the good hunt. New composition Uye – Come Back Please, used at a wake after someone is buried. New composition. Uringe – Be Proud. Old Traditional song Kyaso – old traditional Zanzibarian song of celebration Mnyamwana – Respect for women. New Composition. They sang in a combination of Hehe and Kigogo, both languages from mainland Tanzania, as well as Swahili. They had incredible energ…
The Revival of the Entongooli Page
…hreads are used to tune the Entongooli base. Stringing it Together In this latest video, we go back to visit our music scholars after a month away (due to the political climate and the Covid pandemic). Here we go back to our original instrument and strings, and begin to thread everything together to start the tuning process. It was great to go back and visit these students who are all working so hard and progressing so quickly towards their goal o…
2. Naizungwe Drums – progress report 1 Story
…ded to make many because we would like to have enough drums for training a new generation of players. However, the basic number includes: 1 large Uganda drum (played with short heavy beaters) 3 smaller drums (played with long curved sticks) 1 medium drum (played with sticks) 1 long drum (ngalabi – hand-beaten) All together, 6 drums. Therefore, we are making four sets of naizungwe drums mainly to facilitate learning.” Below is a video documenting t…
1. Introducing the Naizungwe drums Story
…by long time Singing Wells partner Prof. James Isabirye about an exciting new project he was hoping to undertake – the revival of the naizungwe drums of the Basoga people in Uganda. James led our revival of the entenga royal drums of the Buganda kingdom starting in 2015 and contacted Singing Wells with the hope that we would support him with funding for his new project. We are excited to announce that we have agreed to support James in his endeav…
Day 5: Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017 Story
…ord the group Liwambwe. The Group Leader is: Atanas Teleni. It is a fairly new group, having played off and on for three years. They had unique drums, including small drums with wooden spikes on bottom to be embedded in sand, called the Siganga. They also had a pair of drums called the Likuti and a long drum called the Msondo, and a very long thin drum called a Neya. Here’s the set: In the dance they had a character in a mask called a Lipiko, who…
Day 3: Monday, 2017 February 20th Story
…s and instruments die. But another mission is to bring these traditions to new audiences, allowing new artists to work with traditional artists to bring new life to these sounds and movements. So, we want the grandson of Mzee Morris to work with current artists like Leo, Sophie and Elliot. We want Leo, Sophie and Elliot to be inspired by Rajab and Henry’s music and hopefully they will bring these styles to new audiences. This theme is critical to…
Day 1: Saturday, 2017 February 18th Story
…had listened to his drums all my life – his drums are used to announce the news on Tanzania Broadcast Corporation (TBC) hourly news bulletins. At 14 years old, I would sit at my drums just trying to recreate that one riff. It took me three months of non-stop listening to get it down. And that was just 30 seconds of his lifetime of drumming. All I want to do is master his style.” As Daudi mentioned, Mzee Morris became the sound of Tanzanian news….
Ketebul Music presents Shades of Benga Online News
…Benga: The Story of Popular Music in Kenya 1946 -2016’. You can watch the latest episode below, and also find out more at their website here. Shades of Benga: The Story of Popular 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 musici…
Our journey to the Royal Drums: in the words of James Isabirye Story
…the Busoga King. We talked about the problems: no one played the music, no new musicians knew the trumpets, farmers had forgotten how to grow the gourds used to make the trumpets, and the seeds were lost. That conversation started everything. We needed to revive these trumpets. I got UNESCO support, I got Singing Wells support and gradually, we formed a group. Singing Wells filmed them in 2013 and helped us tell their story. We also invested in th…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 4, Part 1 – Reflections Story
…music. And yet, we all walked away convinced that you will see an exciting new East African artist writing new amazing music with these drums as part of the rhythm section. Are there lessons from this journey? Yes, and the most important of these is our discovery of a single repeatable model to restore these instruments: we refer to this as the Bigwala Model. What James Isabirye discovered from his work to restore the Bigwala trumpets is a five st…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 3, Part 2 – Interviews with Musicians of Uganda’s Royal Palaces Story
…ed in a bus to travel to his house. There was an older man on the bus who knew the village. When he climbed on the bus, he knew Kizito (the boy who’s mum we were visiting and Musisi’s half-brother, shared mother). The gentlemen said that when we reached the village he would bike ahead and tell the village we were coming, so we walked very slowly to the village. But when we got to the village I saw a sight I had never seen before. By the time we ar…
The Revival of Ohangla Music! News
…TtU…
Support for the Elgon Ngoma Troupe News
…ur favourite artists, the Elgon Ngoma Troupe, is seeking sponsorship for a new piggery on their project. The piggery will allow the troupe to establish a sustainable form of income for the project, which houses children from disadvantaged backgrounds through performance of traditional music, through breeding and meat production. Donate to Elgon Ngoma’s gofundme page here! And you can watch one of their brilliant performances, recorded on our 2014…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 3, Part 1- Drum Making and Palace Players Story
…ing 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 the four instruments to tune, using a new bigger drum that is already stringed with animal skin strings. “I fix the wood, hammer them in to stretch the strings and then use the awl to pull the string up and then move to the…
Singing Wells Youtube Channel hits 2.5Million views News
…This was filmed back in 2011, on the very first day of the Singing Wells pilot trip to Kenya. Seeing the generations of Nyerere’s family performing together was a special moment (his son Mr Bado is also a musician). We captured a great fusion of old and new https://youtu.be/-MU13FLg_io You also need to check out the Elgon Ngoma Troupe, performing a traditional circumcision ritual dance. Please keep following our channel – with new videos going u…