Ribbe Ber (Drummers) Group
…Music of the Acholi Acet, Northern Uganda…
Uganda: music of the Batwa Gallery
…ere the team boarded a flight to Kigali, Rwanda. From there we travelled by road to Kisoro where we stayed at the Traveller’s Rest Hotel. Our hosts were from the United Organisation for Batwa Development in Uganda (UOBDU) who arranged for us to record the performances of six Batwa communities from the district of Kisoro – Birara, Mpwera, Kanyabukunga, Micyingo, Gatera and Kabahenda….
2. Naizungwe Drums – progress report 1 Story
…We decided 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 docum…
1. Introducing the Naizungwe drums Story
…ing 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 endeavours and will be posting about the project’s development, which has been under way for a month no…
Day 2: Sunday, 2017 February 19th Story
…n 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. We learned about the Bi Kidude and Unyago style. Throughout this trip we will encounter multiple stories about ‘women for women’ songs. In this case,…
Day 1: Saturday, 2017 February 18th Story
…. This is our first trip to Tanzania. For those of you that have followed Singing Wells, you will know that we’ve been working for seven years now in Kenya and Uganda. We thought we would have covered more countries by now, but we have been blown away by the richness of the traditional music in these two countries, so we kept going back. We are very excited now to start our work in Dar es Salaam and Bagamoyo on this trip but also recognize this is…
A Report by Professor James Isabirye – Indigenous music learning in contemporary contexts: Nurturing learner identity, agency, and passion News
…t analysing how indigenous learning can inform modern schooling, in which Singing Well’s gets a featured mention as collaborators within his project. You can read more about that here: https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/XGBCQ8EJIVZXHMMGUZ2V/full James Isabirye is a lecturer of music and music education in the Department of Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kyambogo University, Uganda. His research interests include: social con…
Our journey to the Royal Drums: in the words of James Isabirye Story
…: James Isabirye, Left: Tabu (Ketebul), 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 ar…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 4, Part 2 – Flutes Story
…sing of the circle with Albert Ssempeke This is our final day in the field in Uganda. Tomorrow we head back to Nairobi to record in the Ketebul Studios: we identified a whole set of extraordinary musicians from our 2013 visit to Uganda and have invited them back to do studio recordings. But today, we focused on two things: 1) Discussing in detail some of our observations from our time exploring the royal instruments of the Kingdoms of Uganda. 2) R…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 4, Part 1 – Reflections Story
…villages that focused on instrument making or villages that focused on training potential musicians for the palaces. This patronage was not free, however, and the resources to fund the palaces and their music ultimately came from the same villages, through taxation and food contributions. Moreover, these musicians were not empowered to create, to lead rich musical lives, to become artists, to use the palace as a stepping stone to develop their ar…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 3, Part 2 – Interviews with Musicians of Uganda’s Royal Palaces Story
…he good news is that there are some. The bad news is that the group is declining rapidly. In some cases, we refer to musicians as the ‘last surviving’ musician. This is based on James’ best reckoning, having tried for years to find others. Neither James nor the musician involved wants the title of ‘last surviving’ and we would love to be proven wrong. Musisi is looking for more drummers and the ones we talked to today are desperate to find others…
Central & Eastern Uganda: Day 3, Part 1- Drum Making and Palace Players Story
…ing. For this step, the re-stringing, he stopped after a few strings, explaining that he was ruining his drum by showing us. Here, you saw the real skill levels of the drum maker. With his hands moving very fast, he was taking 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…
Central and Eastern Uganda: Day 2 – Kampala to Jinja Story
…playing the Bigwala First, why are we here? Well, there’s the obvious: at Singing Wells, we record and share the great music of East African villages. But, there’s another, equally important reason: the revival of the Bigwala trumpets was the model we used for the restoration of the Royal Drums. We felt it was critical to check in on their progress. We focused on three main things on this visit: Interviewing James about the instruments themselves…
Musisi’s Story, Part 1: The Fall of the Buganda Kingdom Story
…rs his own story. Musisi being recorded on camera telling his story We are in Uganda to revive the Royal Drums of the Buganda Kingdom, the Entenga. This project was the result of the work of a very large team, but at its center is Musisi, the last surviving drummer that we know of. Here is his story, in roughly his words: “My father was the leader of the flutes at the Buganda Kingdom, and as his son, I was trained to play the flutes and eventually…
The Return of Bigwala News
…eserving traditional Ugandan music, but also gives an optimistic and uplifting insight into the work being done on the ground to achieve this. Bigwala is the name of a monotone trumpet, carved very simply from a long natural gourd that is a perfect shape and length for the sound to resonate. The gourds are marked and sawed at the point where the hollow fruit expands to a bulb, which creates a ‘bell’ shape that helps the sound to carry. Often multi…
Rediscovering the lost Royal Drums of the Buganda Kingdom: Day 1, Uganda Story
…rofessor and his students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpG0HLNxVQA The Singing Wells team united in Nairobi on November 28th and flew together to Kampala on November 29th. We are: Tabu Osusa, Jimmy Allen, Steve Kivutia, Patrick Ondiek, Hunter Allen and Nick Abonyo. After a night at the Fairway Hotel, we met James Isabirye at his university, Kyambogo University, to record the Entenga. Centre: James Isabirye We have been working closely with Jame…