ATTA is following Singing Wells News
…guest at the World Travel Market at Excel and I met representatives from a number of organisations and companies in the travel and tourism industry operating in the East African counties we are visiting during our field recording trips. I met Nigel Vere Nicoll, Chief Executive of the African Travel & Tourism Association and explained a little about Singing Wells and our aims to record and celebrate the cultural music heritage of East Africa. It se…
A day in the field with Singing Wells News
…alier omni-directional mics 2 Rode NTG-1 condenser Shotgun mics 1 Matched Pair of AKG C414 XL Microphones 1 Matched Pair of Rode NT5 Microphones2 Rode professional boom pole 1 K&M telescopic mic stand/boom 1 Canon EOS 7D 1 Canon EOS 60D 1 Canon EOS 5D 1 LED video camera lights 1 Flip HD video camera ThinkTank sun screens (for the laptops) Various Canon zoom and fixed lenses Plus at least 9 Sandisk memory cards and 15 portable back-up drives and a…
The Tribal and Musical Structure of East Africa – Worldmap Research News
…arch, and, naturally, this was difficult as information on the subject is fairly scarce and sometimes contradictory. However, the beauty of the map (as with search engines and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia), it is Open Source and so people from all around the world can add information to make the map a very useful source of information. By creating the basics, as we have, the broad tribal and musical structure of East Africa is there, now…
Northern Uganda: Day 0 – London to Entebbe Story
…, sunglasses, papers) and then took the train to C57, where we boarded our flight and left pretty much on time. Jimmy sat next to Andrew who lives in Kampala and married to a Uganda woman with whom he’s had a one year old son. He was passionate about West African music and did a paper on drumming in Ghana. So Vicki switched seats with Jimmy and talked to Andrew about the Singing Wells project for an hour. We then all settled down to watch Ted befo…
Day 9: Ketebul Studios with Ben Kisinja Story
…end the ‘field visit.’ Now the hard work begins of producing all the videos… Jimmy March 11th, Joma Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi Kenya…
Day 3 continued – an interview with Steve Kivutia Story
…our first session. Interview with Steve Kivutia Steve was born in 1982 in Nairobi but his ‘home’ is the village of Kakamenga; his father moved villages to Moi’s Bridge (names after Kenyan President at the time). He was born in Mata Hospital and sent to Maseno Highschool, graduating in 2000. During school he loved Alpha Blondy, a reggae artist from the Ivory Coast, but also loved Hip Hop. He took a gap year and the joined a university to take compu…
Bill Odidi reporting on Singing Wells from London News
…med up with Andy Patterson while he was here and together they conducted a number of interviews with Kenyan musicians who are now based in the UK. They also had the chance to visit Kenya House in Stratford as a guest of our friends at the Kenya Tourist Board. Here’s Bill’s article published in Business Daily Africa: http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Where+the+world+got+real+flavour+of+Kenya+in+London/-/1248928/1480860/-/djb5mf/-/index.html Phot…
Day 1: In Nairobi, packing and talking to Tabu Story
…eep art alive and well in the community and in particular in the youth of Nairobi. At the Art Centre we went to a photograph exhibition of “Nairobi Burning” during the 2007 riots. There were some poignant photos of the slums burning and people being beaten and killed. The unrest mainly affected the poor areas of Nairobi. One of the artists, Uncle Subu, from the Art Centre took corrugated iron from the slums after they burned and has made life size…
How to Map 3: Prepare Your Data News
…rly formatted and so on. The Unicorn Distribution data set we’re using is fairly simple so not all of these points will be applicable, but here are some things you need to think about when preparing your data: The title of each column must not exceed 14 characters. The shorter the better. E.g. instead of ‘Number of Unicorns’, have ‘unic_no’. None of the cells of your Excel file can contain more than 256 characters. Make sure there are no hidden ch…
Victoria’s reflections on the music of the Batwa Story
…I feel I know him already. The complete Singing Wells team congregates at Nairobi airport. After many months of planning the trip, this is the first time I actually put faces to the names. Steve has been integral to the planning – preparing the budget down to the last shilling and organizing the logistics of taking a team of 10 to Kisoro and beyond. We have spoken on the phone and emailed many times. It’s good to meet at last. The flight to Kigali…
How to Map 2: The Map Outline News
…ase, GBR_adm.zip. Open it up and take a look. What you will see is a crazy number of files, none of which your computer seems to really recognise. Don’t panic. What you’re seeing is just a few shapefiles (remember shapefiles? No? Let me jog your memory). As we’re looking at the shapefiles in the C: drive rather than in ArcMap itself, you can see the six individual files which make up the one shapefile. In fact, in this case you’re looking at 18 fi…
From Kisoro to Nairobi to Lake Victoria Story
…ch story as horrible as the one before. As you can imagine, we boarded our flight to Nairobi somberly. We reflected on all the people we met on the long drives through Rwanda and wondered how they now face their neighbours – you are fairly certain every person knows a either victim or an executioner well. To prove the point, we asked our Ugandan driver what he thought of the memorial. He said he now understood how his dad died – he was a Ugandan w…
Day 6: The Studio @ Traveller’s Rest Hotel, Kisoro Story
…of headphones and mics, they take everything in there stride, performing a number of takes as the song develops. We start by giving them a simple click to follow the beat but quickly realised that their tempos are far more subtle than this. Francis comes back to set the rhythm with their natural clapping and it suddenly all came together again. Once we have the female vocals recorded, Winyo joins the ladies for the full ‘Influences’ set. And all t…
Day 4 (later): Recording for ‘Influences’ with the Birara Dancers Story
…y East African radio stations sound like they are competing on Los Angeles air waves. So the second major goal of Singing Wells is to inspire current artists to pick up on the traditions of these tribal artists. One way we do this is to record ‘Influences’ sessions, where Winyo and other artists work with a sub-set of the tribe to create a new song. This is an altogether different way of recording and something very new and often scary to the trib…
Day 1 & 2: Preparing to leave for Kisoro, Uganda Story
…oject and met the Ketebul team in the studios for a day . Day 1: 11.11.19, Flight to Nairobi: Jimmy and Andy, Founder and Sound Engineer of Abubilla Music respectively, set out to Nairobi on Saturday for Nairobi. All good with flights, visas, bags and customs and we were greated by Tabu Osusa. Checked into Fairview, had the obligatory fries in a chip basket and crashed. Day 2: 11.11.20 Day in Ketebul Studio: Jimmy and Andy meet the SWP team at Ket…
Kenya (Coast): Day 4 – the road back to Nairobi Story
…is worth it guys? [This is a pretty relevant question 470 kilometres into a 800 kilometre journey back from the coast to Nairobi] TO: We have no choice. We have to do something and I don’t see anyone else doing what we’re doing. We’ve got to get three things right going forward: we have to get the audio right. People need to hear the music like we’re hearing it in the field. We’ve got to get world class at this. Second, we’ve got to get the video…