Bill Odidi reporting on Singing Wells from London News
…f Ketebul Music’s ‘Kenya @ 50’ music documentary. He teamed 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+…
How to Map 3: Prepare Your Data News
…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 characters such as spaces or backspaces in any of the data cells. Anything upon which a join will be based, e.g. counties in this example, must be spelled exactly the same in ArcMap and in your Excel file. If your data follo…
How to Map 2: The Map Outline News
…as elevation and population density, but for our purposes we’re only interested in administrative areas, i.e. the regions and districts of a country (though these may have other names, such as aimags in Mongolia). Clicking OK will take you to a page which displays the data you are about to download – an outline of the United Kingdom. Click Download. This will download a .zip file called, in this case, GBR_adm.zip. Open it up and take a look. What…
From Kisoro to Nairobi to Lake Victoria Story
…e for a moment “the procedure.” We arrive at 7AM on the Uganda side and first register with the police. They took down our names and passports and wished us well. We then walked over to Ugandan passport control to ‘exit.’ They were not open, however, but arrived about 7:10. We exited and then walked across the 100 metre ‘no man’s land’ to the Rwandan side, leaving the cars to come through separately. We check in with police and then go to Rwanda p…
Day 6: The Studio @ Traveller’s Rest Hotel, Kisoro Story
…g and dance. They each brought over 20. In two vans. Both groups were fantastic, the first was the Gatera Community: https://youtu.be/ab4ZEqPNYpE https://youtu.be/yMq_r9XSXM0 https://youtu.be/lrowXUbwTSU https://youtu.be/lu1YXMKnJts https://youtu.be/BulZceL6gXs Kabahenda Batwa Community We now think we know where James Brown got “the act” from. You know the one – he dances and dances and pretends to be exhausted then falls to the floor. Handlers…
Kenya (Coast): Day 4 – the road back to Nairobi Story
…both sides. The traditional music is beautiful and thank goodness the artists are still around. But we’ve also been able to record with the artists, through Winyo, on a more modern sound.. We’ve done a very good job recording, especially day 2. We had no issue with equipment and the team was trained very quickly. I think the main area to improve is to emulate a studio even more, isolating certain sounds so that we can really capture individual vo…
Nick Abonyo (the ‘clapper-man’) News
…cord Benga music and Nick went to the sessions. His primary school teacher Paul Wau was an artist (we recorded him on a Singing Wells visit to Nyanza). Paul told him to check out Ketebul. He applied for an internship and in May 2011 was hired. He loves the professionalism, equipment and teamwork of Ketebul and its mission. In the words of CNN, he says, “I like that we ‘go beyond borders’ to discover real music.” Nick’s favourite Singing Wells mome…
Paul Kelemba – Chairman of Ketebul Music News
…Ketebul Music is continuing its documentation and archiving of East African music genres, both past and contemporary. We are now in a strong partnership with The Singing Wells Project (SWP) whose goals are similar to ours in the preservation of the region’s music heritage. …
May 2011 – Jimmy reports back on the pilot phase News
…st Africa, while also making these traditions relevant to contemporary artists, starting with East African musicians. Maddo (aka Paul Kelemba — see his website: It’s A Madd Madd World), Chairman of Ketebul, describes the Singing Wells Mission: “Of course the world cannot live in the past and must move on, but there is no future without a past. Countries that have rich music industries and whose music crosses borders have their successes deeply emb…
Lake Turkana Cultural Festival 2011 News
…e funds to allow them to undertake the trip to this remote area of North West Kenya, 800 km from Nairobi and home to the Turkana and Samburu tribes and the original ‘singing wells’. When Steve Kivutia (Ketebul Music) presented the idea of recording music at the Festival to the AMF, it seemed a perfect fit with the objectives of the Singing Wells project and the trustees were happy to approve a grant to cover the costs of travelling to the Festival…
Discovering music roots with SWP News
…here and there instead (see graphic below). For the material-gathering first step on the Singing Wells Project, which shall eventually cover the whole country, the Kenyan Coastal region was selected. The strip is mainly composed of the Mijikenda group of culturally related people; the Chonyi, Rabai, Duruma, Kauma, Kambe, Ribe, Jibana and the more known Giriama and Digo whom we focused on at this stage. Their music is relatively well known at the…
More Ketebul voices…Steve reports from the field News
…king the night bus from Nairobi to Malindi, joined us in car number 02. First stop was Watamu at the fuel station to fill up the cars and Jenny, our beloved and reliable generator, and also to pick up our man on the ground, otherwise known as The Fixer, Deche. He had been on the ground in Malindi, Kilifi, Kaloleni and Kwale, a week earlier, liaising with the groups we were going to record in the villages. We then proceeded to Gede stopping briefly…
Meet the team from Ketebul Music News
…rchivist. Willie Gachuche: Willie is a Ketebul Sound Engineer who will assist on field and studio recordings for Singing Wells. Willie: Sound Engineer for Field and Studio Projects Polycarb Onyango (Winyo): Winyo is one of two Ketebul artists that will be heavily involved in the first phases. Winyo doubles as photographer, but led the ‘fusion’ work in our Pilot Phase and will lead our ‘Influences’ project’. Winyo will lead ‘Influences’…