root salad Owiny Sigoma Band
A bit of cultural exchange resulted in a very satisfying project. Jamie Renton hears how London met Kenya.
I
t’s a long way from a North London comprehensive school to a makeshift studio in an East African factory, but that’s the journey that the three English members of the Owiny Sigoma Band made, resulting in their self-titled debut album. It’s released on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label and features an unusually subtle and rhythmically inventive combination of UK contemporary and Kenyan traditional sounds.
Tom Skinner (drums), Jesse Hackett (keyboards/vocals) and guitarist/singer Sam Lewis all went to the same secondary school and have been playing together in various bands ever since. Initially they were listening to rock, thrash, rave and hip-hop, but one of their friends from school, Hetty Hughes, is half Kenyan. “Her mum is a radio DJ in Kenya” explains Sam, when I meet the three of them in a swanky hotel bar in Central London. “She grew up in London, but she spoke Swahili and would go back to Kenya to see her family.” After she finished school, Hetty set up Art Of Protest, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to promoting cultural exchange between Western and Kenyan artists, rop- ing in her old schoolmates for this project.
‘Cultural exchange’ is definitely what
it’s all about. The UK contingent hadn’t heard any Kenyan music before (although they were aware of other African styles) and as a result bring a fresh approach, without any of the ego-heavy bombast of some more high profile ‘West meets African’ collaborations. “Whenever you’re not used to something, you’re gonna approach it in a way that’s open,” reckons Jesse. “My reference point is blues,” explains Sam. “And I heard some heavy blues riffs on the nyatiti.”
Ah yes, the nyatiti, an eight-stringed lyre introduced to Tom, Sam and Jesse on their first morning in Nairobi by master musician, singer and teacher Joseph Nya- mungu. They’d arrived in the city the night before, which by chance happened to be the day of Obama’s inauguration and so the whole place was celebrating. The next morning, somewhat the worse for wear, our intrepid trio were awoken by the afore- mentioned Joseph. “He turned up at the flat we were staying in,” recalls Jesse, “drinking a beer, smoking a fag and ready to play!” The Brits groggily joined in on gui- tar and bouzouki. “He was quite a heavy presence in this small room,” remembers Tom. “Quite a serious musician, sitting there playing right in front of us. It was intense, but also made us really excited.”
It was only after a couple of days jam- ming that they discovered Joseph sang as
well. “He’s got a proper blues voice,” reckons Sam. “Like Son House.” At this point they were joined by Joseph’s colleague and friend Charles Owoko who plays the nyiduonge or ‘lead drums’, a set of five to eight drums that are set out on the floor and played with a stick. “The music is naturally rhyth- mic,” reckons Tom. “The drums play a central role. Often you don’t notice that they’re there, but if they weren’t there you’d notice!”
Following that first trip out, they passed on a few of their recordings to fellow north Londoner Gilles Peter- son, who played them on his Radio One show and subse- quently signed OSB to his Brownswood label. The original plan was to bring the Kenyan musicians over to London for further recordings, but the bureau- cratic nightmare of trying to secure visas proved too much and so, more than a year after the initial record- ings, they went back to Nairobi to play with more local musicians (as many as
J
12 altogether at one point) with a second drummer, someone on cow horn and an orutu (one-string violin) player. They were all from the Lau tribe from the south-west of the country and had come to Nairobi to pass on their musical culture, working at the local university, teaching, making instruments and running music workshops.
oseph still took the lead role, providing the melodies and patterns on the nyatiti around which the others shaped the sound. “When Joseph played something on the nyatiti,” Sam explains. “The key that we’d think he was in wasn’t necessarily how everyone else heard it. We processed it through our Western ears. So we realised everyone was hearing it in a different way.”
“The drums were all tuned to certain keys as well,” chips in Tom. “That locked in with the nyatiti and then the vocals cut through it, so harmonically it was a debate where to put ourselves.”
Finding a studio wasn’t easy. Like almost everywhere else on the planet, Kenya’s youth are in thrall to US rap and R’n’B and consequently finding some- where with enough space and equipment to cater for a 12-piece band (rather than a
rapper and a cheap laptop) proved a chal- lenge. They finally ended up in a disused factory, with borrowed mics and cables. Not ideal, but it got the job done.
Producer Chris Morphitis – who plays in Chartwell Dutiro’s Spirit Talk Mbira – came out with them on the first trip, but not the second. It was after that though that his work really began, trying to edit down 30 hours of recorded improvisations and musi- cal explorations into something that sound- ed like a proper album and yet retained the loose, rhythmically supple quality of the original recordings. “Chris said that through the process of working on this music, we had to really open up,” remem- bers Jesse. “We had to dispel our normal techniques and approach. He felt that it made his ears open up to different possibili- ties and different sounds and was a liberat- ing thing for all of us. Realising that you don’t all have to be playing in the same key or feeling the beat in the same place.”
Owiny Sigoma Band play The Barbican on 12th July and The Shoreditch Festival on the 16th.
www.gillespetersonworldwide.com/ brownswood-recordings/artists/owiny- sigoma-band
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