The Tribal and Musical Structure of East Africa – Worldmap Research News
…ch I recommend to any interested. WorldMap has benefitted Singing Wells greatly even leading us to create our own Music Map which archives our own raw data from our field trips. You can access this on the ‘Discover the Music’ part of the website….
Northern Uganda: Day 0 – London to Entebbe Story
…The London gang travels to Entebbe and reunites with some friends from Kisoro……
Day 8: Ketebul Studios with the Otacho Young Stars Story
…o Kisoro Uganda last year, we realised something – the musicians we were discovering were often so good, we needed to bring them back to the Nairobi studio. That led to 10 Batwa musicians and 5 Batwa babies travelling from Kisoro to Kampala to Nairobi and recording some great songs over the course of four days. We now want to repeat this for every field visit and decided to invite the Otacho Young Stars, the great find of our field visit to record…
Day 6: Recording the Tugen & back to Nairobi Story
…en Tabu discovered the Jeep had a flat tyre. This moved our departure time from the two hotels (Eldoret Club and Pine Tree) from 8am to about 9.30am. The tyre had a damaged tube that just wore out. We reassembled and headed off for a spectacular trip from an altitude of 2,800m down to 1,114m at one of the floors of the Great Rift Valley. The roads were more winding and steeper than on our trip to Rwanda last November but there was no rain and ther…
Day 5: Recording the Marakwet Story
…on the men’s arms represents the River Nile and where the tribe originated from. They came from Israel to Egypt along the Nile to the Sudan. This occurred in the 18th century. The women have white dots on their arms and faces representing the soil and harvest. The white paint comes from a special kind of soil and only one person in the tribe keeps this soil as the custodian. Their aprons are made out of goat or cow hide and signify prayers and ble…
Day 4: the Pokot Tribes Story
…ech. Click here to go to Song Translations Everything Else Everything else from today can be divided into three key events. First, we survived the drive. There were a few scary moments, the first being driving to the village for the shoot – straight up a very steep hill. This was not a hill for most humans and certainly wasn’t a hill for cars and certainly not cars filled with Ketebul folks and all our equipment. We got up and down, but we imagine…
Day 3 continued – an interview with Steve Kivutia Story
…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 computer classes in 2002-3. He tried to join the Air Force but his mother wouldn’t let him sign up so he joined Creative Edge a graphics design firm, and then Smoke and Mirrors a multi-media company in 2003-2004. In 2005 Steve mo…
Singing Wells – Origins News
…neer, 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 tribal musicians in East Africa. We are recording music in Northern Uganda in Autumn 2012 and then we will travel to Tan…
Day 3: Kitale to Kapsokwony, Kenya Story
…d arrived at our first shoot of the trip – Kapsokwony Kenya, 56 kilometers from Kitale. We drove onto the athletic grounds of Chesamis High School to record four groups. Our fixer was ’50 Cows’ – clearly taken from 50 Cent, but taking the Kalenjin love of cattle to a new level. 50 Cows is a local journalist and student at United States International University (USIU). The Music Groups Ben Kisinja First up for recording was Ben Kisinja, a wonderful…
Day 2: Nairobi to Kitale & an interview with Pato Story
…asked Pato whether he always knew he would be involved in music. “No, but from high school I knew I was going to be working on videos. And music is my life. I started listening to Joseph Kamaru when I was growing up in the Ngara Estate, another part of Nairobi. He was the biggest Kikuyu artist around and would walk around our area with a guitar and play to all the little kids. My brothers all love salsa music and I grew up listening to Ochieng Ne…
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…
Day 1: In Nairobi, packing and talking to Tabu Story
…mainly affected the poor areas of Nairobi. One of the artists, Uncle Subu, from the Art Centre took corrugated iron from the slums after they burned and has made life size cut outs of people in various happy and natural poses. He wants to be sure we are reminded of this terrible time so it won’t happen again. After a busy day of packing, meeting the whole team and getting organised we headed back to the hotel to get a good night’s sleep before tom…
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…
Victoria’s reflections on the music of the Batwa Story
…ich might hold us up. It was a good decision. Despite leaving a bit behind schedule (a familiar scenario) we are first to the border and get through pretty quickly, just as large crowd is forming behind us. We get to Kigali in good time, which means we can visit the Genocide Memorial Centre before the flight back to Nairobi. We all remember watching the news at the time but nothing we saw on our TV screens portrayed the full extent of what happene…
How to Map 2: The Map Outline News
…will open a box; click this icon till you reach ‘Home – Documents/ArcGIS’: From here click on Folder Connections. This is where you will connect folders from elsewhere on your computer to ArcMap. Click on this icon: and select the folder where all of your GIS files are to be saved, in this case C:\How To Map. The folder will appear under Folder Connections. You can now go into the folder to add the map outline shapefile to ArcMap. Go into C:\How T…
Return of the Batwa @ Ketebul Music Studios Story
…He played kid golf during his live performances, gently knocking the kids from the ‘stage’ with his spear. He is an amazing visual performer, especially in his songs about cranes where he does the Batwa ‘Bird Dance.’ He is the leader of the Kisoro Batwa in terms of music and we could not have recorded further without him at the heart of our sessions. Francis Sembagare Tiny Moses Tiny Moses blew us away at the hotel one evening when we discovered…