by Banning Eyre

As 2003 gets underway, there is a surprising amount of musical activity in East Africa. Afropop Worldwide's East African Renaissance program samples new music from Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. This feature fills out the picture with a deeper look at the material we gathered on Tanzania and Kenya. We introduce Tanzania's hot new radio station, Clouds-FM, and profile Michel and Rosa Tyabji, who set up a studio in Dar es Salaam and recorded over 15 albums worth of material, which they're now starting to release on their label, Limitless Sky. We also report on recent conversations with Seattle broadcaster and album producer Doug Patterson--who has been following East African music closely for some 30 years.

Among the good news from East Africa, we're pleased to report that you can now browse through and purchase a wide variety of East African music on the internet. Key labels and music outlets are provided at the end of this feature.

Clouds-FM

Ruge Mutahaba, 31, is the General Manager at Clouds-FM, a youth-oriented radio station that launched in the Tanzanian capital, Dar Es Salaam, in 1999. The station plays everything, but with more and more local artists recording high-quality, contemporary music, the station has found itself more and more able to play local sounds. Radio has helped to educate the public--including producers and artists--about what is going on elsewhere, and Ruge says, Dar es Salaam is responding.

Among the new sounds hitting the airwaves are hip-hop oriented acts that go under the label "Bongo Flava," updates and remakes of classic musiki wa dansi tunes, pop taraab, neo-traditional pop like that of Saida Karoli (whose gorgeous voice opens the East African Renaissance program), singer songwriters, and of course, all-powerful R&B. Ruge touts a 21-year-old singer named Lady J.D. "Lady J.D. started off doing very Anglo-American based, Tanzanian, R&B," says Ruge. "She did very well. For the past year, she's been the talk of the whole country." Lady J.D. performed at the KORA Music Awards in South Africa, and in the wake of that performance, her debut release topped 100,000 copies sold.

"That's such a big achievement that it totally changed everyones' perspective on music," says Ruge. In South Africa, artists like Oliver Mtukudzi and Lokua Kanza told this Lady J.D that she had talent, but that she need to reach higher. The message was: don't use machines; use instruments. She took the advice to heart, and created a new album using live musicians that is not only doing well, but also influencing other artists. "In the beginning," says Ruge, "drum machines looked easy and looked the best way. But now, people have thought about it and decided maybe this is not the best way. Use real equipment and get better instrumentalists. People actually take the time to listen and see who plays the best guitar, and who is the best bass player."

This is surely music to the ears of many Afropop listeners. Lots to look forward to in the future. For the moment Clouds-FM's website--www.cloudsfm.com--is under construction, but keep trying. If the sampler CD Ruge gave us at the end of 2002 is anything to go on, there will be lots of great new music on this site one day soon…

Makuti Studio, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Michel Tyabji is a citizen of India, but as his father worked with the UN, the family moved often, and Michel spent much of his early life in East Africa: Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia. His wife, Rosa is an American who grew up in a family of film documentarians. Her grandfather Thomas Horton was responsible for bringing Jacque Cousteau's "Undersea World" to the American public. By Rosa's time, the family specialty was producing shark-related TV programs for the Discovery Channel. But when Rosa met Michel at the Institute for Audio Research in New York in 1998, they set out to create history of their own.

Of all the places Michel had lived, Tanzania had a special pull on him, for its people, its natural wonders, and its amazingly rich music. As Rosa recalls, "He proposed to me that we should go to Tanzania and bring a recording facility. I was ready for the adventure. I said, 'Sure. Let's go.'"

Michel and Rosa petitioned the Tanzania government with the idea of setting up a studio to record local artists. The government was interested, not to the point of funding them, but they waived the customary 130% import tax on equipment, arranged all the paperwork and made it possible for Rosa and Michel to travel wherever they liked in the country. "So we took all our studio gear to Dar Es Salaam," says Michel, "and over a period of a year we sat down with the people at the Ministry of Education and Culture and the National Arts Council.

"We came out of a year of meetings with a proposal for a program called that we called Urithi Arts Program, and urithi in Swahili means 'heritage.' The idea of that program was to bus musicians to Dar Es Salaam from the villages and give them a bit of an education about copyright law, contracts, business--the conception of money. You know, people living in the villages don't need money, so they don't understand how is it that music can equal money, and why do we need contracts, so we had to somehow find a way of communicating these vague ideas to villagers."

Tanzania is home to 120 ethnic groups, a greater density of ethnicities than in any other African country. Over the next two years, in their studio--dubbed Studio Makuti--the Tyabjis would record over 15 albums of music. The styles range from deep, hypnotic ilimba (hand piano) and zeze (fiddle) music introduced around the world by Hukwe and Charles Zawose, to a traditional band called Tondo who play rootsy reinventions of classic Tanzanian dance pop, to urban veterans of the musiki wa dansi big band sound of Dar es Salaam. They even ventured to Zimbabwe to record one of that country's most innovative traditional musicians, mbira player Garikayi Tirikoti and his ensemble.

The Tondo recording was the first to get out to the world on a 2001 Dakar Sound release called Tanzanian Classics. Folksy acoustic guitars, backed by hand drums, shakers, and sometimes wooden marimba, back warm vocal harmonies led sometimes by a strong, searing woman's voice, and elsewhere by a male voice, not unlike that of the golden throated Congolese/Kenyan singer, Samba Mapangala. The rhythms tell a tale of Cuban son come home to the Congo and then transported across the heart of Africa to find a new home on the continent's East Coast. "Wanawake" hews very close to the old Cuban sound, while "Msafiri" cuts loose with a groove that seems informed by hearty village partying. It's a most unusual sound, and the group really cranks, a testimony not only to their original idea, but also to the manner in which they were recorded. Studio Makuti, in its first outing, proved that it could produce well-produced music brimming with spirit and spontaneity.

The key audience for that first recording was not the world music cognoscenti abroad, but Tanzanian musicians who wanted to see both the quality of the Tyabji's work, but also how they treated artists. "In Tanzania," says Michel, "people are very, very sensitive to foreigners. When I say that, I mean they are extremely distrustful of all foreigners: Arabs, Indians, and Westerners. And I think we all know the reasons why. So it took us a year just to get a group to come in and record."

The groups did not pay to be recorded, nor were they paid initially. They bought tapes and beers for the producers, and they got proper contracts ensuring them a fair share of all proceeds from eventual releases. Little by little things built. "We started with these fringe groups," says Michel, "but then towards the end, a lot of the people who came in were the highly established people within the East African region, like Ndala Kasheba."

Born in 1947 in the Katanga province of Congo, Kasheba came to Tanzania in 1969 and has since played guitar and sung in some of the most popular bands in the region. He is a major figure, and listening to the album he made at Studio Makuti, Yellow Card, one can see why. The warmth and grandeur of East African rumba comes through full force. It's the musiki wa dansi sound as Radio Tanzania could never have recorded it with the facilities they had at their disposal in the music's heyday. With his rich-toned, amplified 12-string acoustic guitar, Kasheba creates fabulous textures, shot through with sensuous rhythm and sweet melody.

"My playing was free," Kasheba once said, explaining why he became so popular in his youth, "No love problems, no money problems, no family matters. Only music and me. When I remember, tears come. I was very happy. Music took my mother's place. Even when I had sorrow and problems, I came back to my guitar. She is like my mother. There is a Swahili saying, 'Gita inalia.' The guitar is crying and I am trying to comfort it."

Rosa says that Yellow Card was Kasheba's first serious recording in some years. He had grown tired of the music piracy that victimizes artists on the local scene, preventing them from making any money from their recordings. He decided to take his chances with the Tyabjis.

Rosa says, "The music of Yellow Card is basically Kasheba classics from 70's. The only new song is 'Yellow Card' or 'Kadi ya Njano' in Swahili. This is a song he wrote with deep social context. He just goes off on the people who spread rumors about him. Kasheba been in public eye since the 70s, but in the '80s, he had a lull in his musical career, and people began to say, 'Oh, he's finished. The man is finished.' He was actually pronounced dead by the media of Tanzania, twice. They said he died of AIDS, and really, all he had done was take a trip back to the Congo to see his family. He came back, and he's sitting at a bar and hears on the radio that he's dead. This really affected him, because if he's hearing that, his family, his children, his best friends--everybody is hearing this. So he wrote this song saying, 'God has issued the world a yellow card [a warning in a soccer match]. AIDS is a warning to the world. We must take our lives seriously now.' He really has a lot of messages here about this modernity that has been imposed on people, and how this is creating schizophrenia in people."

The Achigo Band, once Kasheba's biggest rival on the club dance scene, also recorded at Studio Makuti. Achigo's sound is especially strong for its huge, choral sound. Achigo has two tracks on the Limitless Sky sampler, New African Composers, Volume 1, and we can anticipate a full release from this legendary musiki wa dansi in the near future.

The imprint of the Congolese rumba sound is evident in the work of both these groups, but Michel gives some insight into what's special about East African rumba. He says, "There's an important distinction and that is the way the rhythm section works. In the band Zaita Musika, the band that Kasheba uses, the bass player and the drummer are both Tanzanian and there is a certain laid back thing. You know, the Congolese are big on the clave, and the Tanzanians always seem to pull that time back, whereas the Congolese always seem to be pushing it forward. Unlike the Congolese music, the clave is not only on the snare. It's mostly on the hi-hat and the drum set is very muted. Tanzanians love to shake nice and smooth. It's not going to be jerky like the Congolese guys do it. You know, it's the Indian Ocean. It's the cool vibe, the chilled out vibe, you know."

The cool vibe definitely goes on in clubs in Dar es Salaam, but you do have to know where to go. "When we were in Dar es Salaam," says Rosa, "the club scene was really divided depending on what neighborhood you were in. Michel and I worked in the traditional African part of town, so we had access to clubs like the Vijana Amana Center where the famous group Ottu Jazz plays. Ottu Jazz is one probably the oldest group Unions band in Tanzania. This group is a powerhouse of Tanzanian artists. Their club gets pretty rockin' in Saturdays, any day of the week, really. It's a big band, one of the groups from the 60s that has continued that musiki wa dansi style, the classic music."

Dancing is what it's all about, of course, and sometimes there's more to the dance than you might expect. Michel says that the exact lineup and instrumentation for club bands often changes from night to night. "But what is constant," he emphasizes, "are the dance styles. Each band has coined its own dance style. They've got this guy they call the rapper, who shouts out. Well, what he is doing is letting everyone know what's the dance style. Now, at the Amana Vijana Center one night, we were there and the police--these are undercover cops--came to us and said, 'Look, you foreigners have got to get out of here.' We said, 'Why? We know this place and we're at home here.' And they said, 'No, no, no. Tonight, you've got to get out of here.' And the reason was that that night Ottu were playing a special kind of set where the dance involves getting pretty much naked, and you know, being 15 minutes with someone in the corner of the club, and then you switch partners, and the dancing that was going on was in that very naughty vein.

"Each one of these bands has their styles. For instance when Achigo Band plays, [the rapper] will say something like 'Chunguliya!' which in Swahili means 'Get down," and everyone will drop down and do this special dance move. Everyone knows what that's about. Or then, they have the handkerchief dance, where everyone dances with the handkerchief. Many different styles."

Back at Studio Makuti, the Tyabjis made many recordings in 2000 and 2001. The rootsy Yekete Beat Band from the Arusha region, a smooth singer named Delphin Mununga, and a few tracks by Garikayi Tirikoti from Zimbabwe all appear on New African Composers, which is reviewed by Afropop Worldwide at: New African Composers review. And there's lots more to come from the Limitless Sky vault.

New Sounds from Nairobi

At the WOMEX conference in Germany in 2002, Sean Barlow, picked up a set of excellent new releases by young Kenyan artists, the R&B act Jawabu, a super creative vocal sextet called Yunasi, and a young woman with a feisty spirit and powerful voice to rival Angelique Kidjo named Suzzana Owiyo. The best of these releases were produced by one Tedd Josiah, a one-man music powerhouse on the Nairobi scene these days. Josiah plays a variety of modern and traditional instruments, and he clearly understands that modernizing African roots music does not mean throwing away all the distinctive rhythms and sound textures and diving headlong into electronics and foreign grooves like American hip-hop and reggae.

Album after album, Josiah delivers personality and originality. One of his most successful groups is led by two rappers who go as GidiGidi MajiMaji. Their song "Unbwogable" (slang for unbeatable) was an enormous hit in Nairobi during the 2002 presidential elections. It played as something of a theme song for the triumphant opposition campaign of Mwai Kibaki. (Kibaki's election ended the 24-year rule of Daniel Arap Moi and his party, and hopefully signals a political renaissance in Kenya, which has known corruption, oppression and economic decline throughout the Moi regime.) Musically speaking, GidiGidi MajiMaji's album Ismarwa (A'mish Records) is one of the most interesting hip-hop inspired African releases yet. Use the link at the end of this feature to get your copy! Ismarwa uses traditional instruments, samples, humor, rap, and glorious music, all packaged in an edgy, fast-moving production that never runs short of ideas. Josiah is just what the doctor ordered in Nairobi--and in so many African cities--a genuinely talented producer who knows the technology, but also the value of his country's musical heritage.

Another song that rocked Nairobi during the 2002 elections, by the way, was Eric Wanaina's "Kitu Kidogo," a cheerful slam on the culture of bribery in Kenya. Interestingly enough, Wanaina made the record in the United States, while studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Boston, by the way, has become home away from home for a number of talented Kenyan artists. A great young singer named Sali Oyugi also lives there, and has produced her own crossover album called Vuma!, which will likely be featured on an upcoming Afropop program on musical collaborations. Wanaina and Oyugi are also part of Kenya's new music movement. Their productions so far are more imitative of American R&B and pop, and not as original as Tedd Josiah's by some measure. But collectively, these artists are creating exciting new possibilities for the future of Kenyan music.

Kenyan Benga Update

Of course, the first modern music to express the national identity of Kenya was the lively, guitar-driven sound called benga. In Seattle recently, I had the chance to sit down with Doug Paterson, producer, writer, and broadcaster at KBCS-Seattle. Doug has been traveling to East Africa since the 1970s, and he knows the music scene there, especially the older music, about as well as any non-Kenyan. Much of his wisdom and work can be found on his webpage, East African Music. The site is rich with reviews, background, discographies, and links to other sources.

Doug recently helped compile and wrote great liner notes for a fabulous benga release by the late Kakai Kilonzo and Les Kilimombogo Brothers, The Best of Kakai Volume One (Shava). In these 70s and 80s recordings, we get the essential charm of benga, the sting of tangling guitars, giddy Swahili vocal melodies with spare harmonies, and a trajectory that ramps up from lilting, rumba-like beginnings to spiraling guitar delight by the end of a songs, often over nine minutes long. The music certainly owes allegiance to Congo music to the west, but aside from language differences, there are important musical distinctions. The clave rhythm is de-emphasized; the hi-hat works in a whole new repertoire of local rhythms; and the guitars have more equal roles, conversing almost as equals as opposed to the clear lead guitar vs. rhythm guitar distinction in most Congolese music.

A lot of benga's originators have died in recent years, including Kilonzo, Dr. Ochieng Nelly Mengo and Collela Maze of the Victoria All Stars, and the great H.N. Ochieng Kabaselleh, leader of the Lunna Kidi Band. Doug Paterson says that in many cases, the sons and musicians of these bands have kept the flame alive, continuing to play in the benga haunts of Nairobi and around the country. And a few of the old timers, notably Daniel Misiana, the first king of benga and founder of the band Shiriti Jazz, are still in action.

Meanwhile, there's a whole new crop of young benga artists. This is music with a strong rural following. As with the old township music in South Africa, or sungura guitar pop in Zimbabwe, benga is largely disdained by sophisticated urbanites. The complaint that benga lacks creative producers and sticks to the same formulas is well-taken. Doug complains that recordings rarely let the guitarists cut lose and really solo. Still, there's an energy in this music that is unique and infectious.

One reason that benga has produced few big national stars is that it tends to cater to linguistic minorities. There are distinct benga scenes for the Luo, Luhya, Kamba, and Kikuyu communities, and while a few artists, like Kakai Kilonzo, have sung in Swahili and reached a larger public, the heart and soul the benga movement lies in these smaller linguistic enclaves. For the outsider, says Doug, it is possible to distinguish these sub-genres by their music as well. He says that Luo benga tends to be slower and more flowing, while Luhya is fast, and often incorporates 12/8 time. Kikuyu benga uses distinctive vocal unison, and a lot of sliding, double-stop guitar, like that heard in Zimbabwean sungura. Kamba benga makes a strong distinction between the low-register and high-register guitar, with the high one using lots of slides and string scratches to animate the sound. Also, when the tune heats up in Kamba benga, a driving cowbell often kicks in with the rhythm section.

Afropop Worldwide will dig more deeply into benga in the future. Helping us out, graduate student Ian Eagleson is heading over to Kenya in the fall of 2003 to begin a year of study for a PHD thesis on guitar styles there, and he will be reporting back and sending us up-to-date music and information from around the country. Meanwhile, you can find a good range of classic benga from the Equator Heritage Sounds label, out of Elizabeth, New Jersey. This label was started by Matthews Juma in 1995, and has released nearly 20 releases of great Kenyan music.

Music Sources

If you're going to use Amazon, we always recommend accessing it via a current CD review on the afropop.org homepage. That way you support us in the process. For titles you can't find that way, one good source for African music in general, is CDBaby-Africa.

Getting to East Africa concentrated sources, Doug Paterson says that this website in Nairobi, Kenya is reliable and good on customer service: biashara.biz. It has the best selection of titles. For good prices, he recommends giftshopkenya.com

Doug also likes this Georgia based site, with a good selection of Kenyan music: panafricanallstars.com. Happy shopping!

Editorial note: There are two errors in the East African Renaissance program. We list among the recently passed away Kenyan artists, Atoti. In fact, this associate of GidiGidi MajiMaji is actually named Wycliffe Omondi a.k.a. Wicky Mosh. "Atoti" is the song he performed with MajiMaji. The benga act identified as Ahsante Mama is in fact the Kakongo Sisters. The song is "Ahsante Mama," which means "Thank you, Mother." Afropop Worldwide regrets these errors.
Contributed by: Banning Eyre