Music of Northern Uganda News
…holding a Likembe Rikiriki Dongu tube fiddle Ndara – a giant wooden xylophone The ndara or giant xylophone is made by digging a hole in the ground and placing fresh banana tree trunks around the edges. Wooden planks of various sizes and tones are then placed over the hole. The instrument is played using a wooden stick with a large rubber head. One of the groups the guys were able to see perform in Arua was the Aynu Traditional Music Group, led…
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…
Victoria’s reflections on the music of the Batwa Story
…cks of potatoes, lush green hills, patchwork of fields, stunning lakes and lots and lots of rain! But, surprisingly, very few animals. The bicycle seems to be the object of choice to help transport heavy loads up and down those steep hills. There was not one animal harnessed to a cart to take the load. The border crossing goes without a hitch, despite some fears we were harboring about entering Uganda, ie. the possibility of customs taking a very…
Return of the Batwa @ Ketebul Music Studios Story
…covered him and the magic bass. He is an extraordinary guitar player and a lot of fun. He joined in all our group sessions over the weekend. Moses Nzikumua-Kamuntu (Tiny Moses) Jovah (and baby Jonain) We met Jovah our second day of recording in Kisoro; she was the lead singer of the Mperwa Dancers and we loved her voice. She has been a revelation this weekend, with the strongest lead vocals by far. She also happily does back-up vocals for a lot of…
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
…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 countries within the UK – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Administrative level 2 is th…
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…
Day 3: Homa Bay and the Kochia Dancers Story
…ke fish. We smell like a lot of other things by this time – there aren’t a lot of opportunities to wash and you’ll notice a lot shots of us in the same Singing Wells t-shirt – but luckily not yet fish. Fish would turn their noses at us. Our set, below, with recording equipment set up under the bar and the dancers ready to do their stuff… The Kochia Dancers Today is all about dances, so our videos will be much better than still photographs. Let us…
From Kisoro to Nairobi to Lake Victoria Story
…ravelled from the airport just ahead of us. We like the Kenyan President a lot. We waved the Ketebul team off on Friday and the Abubilla team used Saturday to backup drives, write blogs and post ‘excerpts’ on Soundcloud. We took the time to reflect on our travels so far. Ten observations: The Casket. We have travelled about 5,000 kilometres so far on African roads for Singing Wells. And we’ve observed Africans carry just about anything on their he…
Day 6: The Studio @ Traveller’s Rest Hotel, Kisoro Story
…d his growing fan base…. And that was that for our trip to Kisoro. We have lots of music, lots of video and lots more stories to tell. But we want to keep disciplined and report daily, so forgive us if we can’t give you everything at once. Over the coming weeks, these blogs will be filled with the music and videos and far more background on the project and the Batwa. For now leave for Nairobi again and then, on Sunday, travel to Western Kenya for…
Day 4 (later): Recording for ‘Influences’ with the Birara Dancers Story
…ree days, rain or shine, night or day. Which was good, because it rained a lot. https://youtu.be/c1XBVlNQL6E We continued to use this ‘hotel studio’ to record our ‘Influences’ sessions. A word on what we mean. We have multiple goals at Singing Wells. The first is to preserve the vast musical heritage of East Africa, capturing the diversity of music and dance throughout the region. Most of the music is ‘trapped’ in remote villages – everyday in 100…
Day 4: UOBDU and the Birara Dancers Story
…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 been farmed, creating a mosaic of fields. Same were tilled, others in full bloom, so we faced a beautiful patchwork of terracotta and green. These are the predominate colours of this trip. The dance site i…
Congratulations Singing Wells! News
…to be referred to the Singing Wells Project website. I’ve shared it with a lot of people because these sorts of collaborative efforts at recording, archiving and disseminating music ethically are so important. I met Tabu Osusa and Bill Odidi while doing some training on audiovisual archiving in Kenya as part of a British Library World Collections Programme initiative. It was a great pleasure and it is wonderful to see these fruits of their experti…
Day 1 & 2: Preparing to leave for Kisoro, Uganda Story
…1. Cable Bag/Headphones: This is full of all the jacks, mic connects, headphone extenders. There’s a lot of cables. Mega Tripod: This is the bag for Pado’s pride and joy, the mega tripod for Stationary Camera 1. Project Management: How do we now set ourselves up for audio-video recording on site? Again, based on lessons from both the March Pilot and Lake Turkana, here’s the set up: Overall Project Manager: This is the person in charge of the site…
Kenya (Coast): Day 4 – the road back to Nairobi Story
…s been more painful then it needed to be. We’ll fix that. SK: With this ‘pilot phase’ we’ve now covered a lot of the ground. We’ve really proven that we can do it and we believe this is much bigger than we thought. We are collecting a wide range of material that we can use on multiple projects. We think the music is far better than we thought – both sides. The traditional music is beautiful and thank goodness the artists are still around. But we’v…
News from the Batwa in Kisoro News
…things they can. This is the same group that came to Kisoro and gave us a lot of money last which made Batwa a nice food that time. This is Winyo, we shall always remember him for his passionate and his sweet soft voice. Winyo loved the song a parake yacu yo mgahinga. UOBDU say thanks to Singing Wells. Those are the comments from those who were viewing the photos. Best wishes, Zaninka Penninah UOBDU Coordinator P. O. Box 169, Bazanyamaso Road, Ki…