Mchele Mchele Sanaa Group Group
…This group, from the Sukuma community, was formed in 2010 and performs with a number of styles: Bukomia Lume, Buchheye, Wigashe. Their instruments are: Ng’oma (Drums), Pembe (animal horns, large impala), Firimbi (flute), and Njuga (shakers). …
Day Zero: 6 March 2022 – Travel To Stream Story
…n. Travel to Stream After one week’s training and familiarization with the new software and equipment, we took the road to Western Kenya on the morning of Sunday, 6 March 2022. The Ketebul Music team met at our new offices at the GoDown Arts Centre on Kayahwe Road off Dennis Pritt by 9:00am. It took us an hour to load the van with the equipment and our personal effects. On our team was Tobias Odhiambo (or Shunkyz as he is known in the music circle…
Recording, archiving and sharing the traditional music of East Africa Page
…shared amongst the widest audiences and become a source of inspiration for new musicians. Here for Research? Click here! Whether you are a Musicologist, a student or just interested in the field, head this way to see more of our detailed field reports, group biographies and in-depth information regarding the various different instruments and styles of music we have encountered on our field trips. Here for the Music? Click here! Want to just enjoy…
The Revival of the Entongooli Page
…we love most about this project is that it is providing opportunities for free education to these young people, as learning an instrument can provide opportunities for scholarships to local schools. Some of the children here tell us about their reasons for learning the instruments, what other instruments they are learning and how they are enjoying the process. We cannot wait to see their progress and finally watch them perform with this incredibl…
Day 2 – Sunday 2nd July 2017 Story
…ct that younger traditional players do not (or only exceptionally) compose new tunes, but replicate existing old ones. Within the nyatiti tradition, tunes remain the same, whereas the lyrics can change, evolve. They are the fruit of a specific player’s imagination and can be adapted to the occasion and/or to tell the praise of a different person. The fact that Meshack picked up the instrument only once his father had passed away brought about seve…
Kiplagat Edwin Kwambai aka Fifty Cows Staff Profile
…r the Singing Wells project at the time. Fifty Cows went on to be the main contact person and “fixer” for the project. In 2014, the Singing Wells again called on Fifty Cows for the first Repatriation Project by the International Library of African Music, which was supported by the Singing Wells. This repatriation project involved retracing and locating surviving musicians who had been recorded and their music archived by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tra…
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
…val 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 endeavours and will be posting about the project’s development, which has been under way for a month now. James gives some background about his inspiration for starting this project: “I led the revival of en…
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 2: Sunday, 2017 February 19th Story
…ing for three reasons: We had the whole day so were able to record a large number of songs and do an “Influences” session. This gave the village children time to get to know us and understand our mission. By the end they were singing along to all the songs. In addition to being a professional musician, Leo also teaches music to school children so he is a natural with kids. On all the songs that he did, he had the whole village singing and laughing…
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….
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…
Ketebul Music presents Shades of Benga Online News
…ences 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 get advance copies from Ketebul Music Studios or place your order by contacting them directly….
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 4, Part 2 – Flutes Story
…orm and packed ourselves up for the hotel, and packed in the hotel for our flight on December 4th back to Nairobi. We will not provide a field report for December 4th, but stay tuned for December 5th, when we continue recording Uganda musicians, but not in a field. In a studio. To a click track. With other professionals. As we seek to revive these sounds… Read part one: reflections from our time exploring the royal instruments of the Kingdoms of U…
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…