News

Kenya’s Amazing Musical Instruments

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During our recording trips around Kenya – which have taken us over the years to the coast, the west and the central regions – we’ve come across a broad range of fascinating musical instruments played with impressive confidence and mastery by the communities that created them. Since many of these instruments are all but unknown…

Happy new year from Singing Wells

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Published in: News & Views

Happy new year! We hope your 2016s have gotten off to a good start, and that you’ve been bringing in the year by listening to lots of traditional East African music. Before we start posting exciting news about the upcoming year, here’s a quick recap of what we got up to in 2015: 1. We went discovering…

Rediscovering Afropop and its influences

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Published in: News & Views

Have you ever asked yourself where music genres come from? Why do we have Jazz or Blues, and what’s going to be the next big thing? The answer is influences; something that Singing Wells is deeply passionate about. Many genres of popular music like Blues, Jazz, Salsa and Rumba derive to varying degrees from traditional…

Discussions on music and culture with a young Kenyan

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Published in: News & Views

As part of our drive to promote the traditional music of East Africa I’ve been spending some time meeting the urban community in Nairobi. I’ve been talking to people about their music interests, whether the idea of Singing Wells appeals to them and what more we can do to ensure this musical culture is not…

Our top 5 Singing Wells songs for March

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Published in: News & Views

I’m new to Singing Wells and I’ve spent the last few weeks listening to pretty much every song on the site, getting to know the amazing traditional music of East Africa! It was tough to pick, but for my first blog post I thought I’d share my top 5 songs so far. 1. Otacho Young…

Group of the Month – Otacho Young Stars

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Published in: Group of the Month

We are pleased to announce that the Group of the Month for October 2013 are the Otacho Young Stars. We first encountered the group on our trip to record the music of the Luo in Western Kenya in December 2011. Up to that point, we had had a bad day – which included Andy taking…

The New Singing Wells website

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Published in: About Singing Wells

We are proud and pleased to announce the latest version of The Singing Wells website. We hope this will make it easier for you to find and explore our recordings of East African Traditional Music. Here are some of the added features of the new site: Stories Most of what we do is story-telling, in…