We have received wonderful news from Singing Wells partner Prof. James Isabirye that he and the rest of the Entenga players performed for the second time at the coronation anniversary of King Ronald Mutebi. We were first introduced to the Entenga drums in 2015 and have since been supporting James in an initiative to revive…
We’ve just returned from our latest field trip discovering the music which took us to the eastern side of Tanzania. We witnessed an amazingly rich offering of music and met some extremely talented musicians. Read our field reports here to learn about our experiences with a snake dance, an amazing performance of a female initiation ceremony ,and recording…
We’re delighted to annouce that our esteemed colleague and Singing Wells partner Prof James Isabirye has been featured in an article in Uganda’s Daily Monitor about his work to revive the Entenga Royal Drums. Read now. You can watch the full documentary of our initiative to save the Royal Drums here.
A few years ago we learned about a group in Tanzania who, like Singing Wells, is working to preserve traditional music, but for them the act of preservation is quite literal – the Tanzania Heritage Project is scrambling to digitise reams of reel-to-reel tape recorded between the 1960s and 1980s, which has been literally rotting…
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…
In 2015 I had the pleasure of meeting Holly Rahman, a Kenyan musician of the band Ndoto Afrika. The band blends traditional and modern sounds to create a unique blend of catchy fusion music (trust me, you will be humming their Window Shopping tune all day). We interviewed them to find out more: Hi Holly. Tell…
Recently, Singing Wells embarked on our latest field trip to Uganda. We went in search of the lost musicians of the Ugandan Kingdoms, to discover and record the royal music. Fundamental to our understanding of traditional Ugandan music and our accurate sharing of the music we captured during the trip has been Peter Cooke, a…
In our increasingly global world, it’s easy for traditional ways of living to be left behind. From London to Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro to Cape Town, people flock to the cities and leave behind their cultural traditions. But in some pockets of the world, there are still tribes that have preserved centuries-old traditions. Singing…
