African Strings: The Nyatiti and The Adungu News
…2 Ruiz, Ana. The Spirit of Ancient Egypt, Algora Publishing, 2001 ‘Anyango Official Website’, 2012 JOWI music, ‘Nyatiti’, Available: http://anyango.com/e/nyatiti/ ‘Kaypacha’, Musical Instruments, Crafts, Aboriginal and Ethnic, Available: http://www.kaypacha.com.ar/en/instruments/nyatiti Wachsmann, K. Trowell, M. (1953). Tribal Crafts of Uganda. 1st. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ‘Traditional Instruments’ of the Uganda People’ (2012), Face M…
Day 5: Recording the Marakwet Story
…e stopped and 50 Cows announced ‘we’re here.’ We tried to find a recording site out of the burning sun but failed. We wanted the lovely 360 views and sacrificed shade for our art. The Music Groups Kasagat Traditional Dancers The first group was the Kas agat Traditional Dancers. Kathy talked to the tribal elder about them. They come from Tot, about 50km from where we were recording. They had walked here the night before and had been practicing all…
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…
Singing Wells – Origins News
…s for the whole group to perform, singing and dancing in front of ten microphones and three digital cameras.’ Video engineer, Patrick Ondiek, adds, ‘I love producing the final videos and getting phone calls from my friends asking me ‘how did you find these musicians?’ I feel like I’m on the cutting edge of music, bringing these talented musicians to my Nairobi friends.’ We have developed a three year plan to record a wide selection of important…
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…
How to Map 3: Prepare Your Data News
…n carry on with that. If you want to make your own nonsense data then this site will generate you some random data. Select CSV (basically Excel) as your Result Type and number range as your Data Type. When we downloaded the country outline of the UK, we downloaded three shapefiles of different administrative levels, called 0, 1 and 2. Administrative level 0 is the outline of the whole of the UK. Administrative level 1 is the outline of the countri…
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
…we combine all the fun of travelling from Kisoro back to Nairobi and from Nairobi to Kisumu. Kisoro to Nairobi: Passport Control, Genocide Memorial and Planes We left the Traveller’s Rest at 6.30 AM (we told the boys 5:30AM to ensure promptness – and they arrived promptly an hour late, on time. Get it?). Our goal was to hit the Uganda-Rwanda border by the 7AM opening. Let’s describe for a moment “the procedure.” We arrive at 7AM on the Uganda side…
Day 6: The Studio @ Traveller’s Rest Hotel, Kisoro Story
…inyo. Here, they put down their track. Not at all phased by the use 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 recor…
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 4: UOBDU and the Birara Dancers Story
…ogs up the mountain We finally struggled up the hill and saw the recording site for the first time. There’s a great irony about hills in Uganda. From a farming perspective, hill tops are often the worst land, far from towns and difficult to farm. The Batwa find themselves on a lot of hill tops. From an observers perspective, however, we found ourselves at the top of a hill, with a 360 degree view across the mountains and valleys. Every hill has be…
Day 1 & 2: Preparing to leave for Kisoro, Uganda Story
…dy, 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 Ketebul Studios to coordinate all the gear and prepare for our trip the next day and, importantly, to set out…
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…
Lake Turkana Cultural Festival 2011 News
…o 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 with the new mobile re…
Discovering music roots with SWP News
…background with brotherly advice. March 26, 2011, about 22.00 hours, JKIA Nairobi. Ketebul had partnered with Abubilla on the Singing Wells Project, just about the best thing, in my view, that has happened to the dwindling fortunes of Kenyan traditional genres of music. Tabu and I were at the airport to receive James Jimmy Allen and Andy Patterson from Abubilla. I’d met Andy towards the end of 2010 on his first visit to Africa and we’d gotten on f…