The Singing Wells Project completed a succesful trip yet again and this time the focus was on Uganda. The Singing Wells project, now in it's 4th year, is a partnership between Ketebul Music and Abubilla Music Foundation, which aims at preserving East Africa’s cultural music heritage now and for the future.
The journey to Uganda began on the 28th of November, 2015 when the team which included, Tabu Osusa, Founder, Ketebul Music Jimmy Allen, Founder Abubilla Music Foundation , Steve Kivutia, Patrick Ondiek, Hunter Allen and Nick Abonyo assembled in Kenya and flew to Uganda in the quest to rediscover the Lost Royal Drums of the Buganda Kingdom, the entenga drums.
Along with flutes, trumpets, strings and the xylophone, the entenga were part of a set of instruments used by palace musicians of the Buganda Kingdom whose job was to entertain the Kabaka (Baganda King). From an interview with Musisi, the last surviving drummer who played in the palace, we learnt that the Kabaka in the early 1960’s loved the entenga drums so much that he had the drummers play every morning at 3am. He felt that the drums were so perfect, that this was the only time of the day when it was quiet enough to appreciate them fully. This music largely died when the Buganda palace was attacked and destroyed on May 23-24 1966. The Kabaka fled, the musicians were disbanded and the drums as well as other instruments destroyed. Thereafter the entenge were considered dead.
That is until we discovered that Livingstone Musisi, who was 16 when the palace was destroyed, was alive and well in his home village. In 2013, encouraged by the works of James Isabirye, a lecturer at Kyambogo University in Uganda, as well as our partner for the Singing Wells project in Uganda who has been actively reviving the bigwara trumpets, we decided to revive the entenga drums. The Abubilla Music Foundation availed funds to James and Musisi and charged them with the task of assembling an entire set of entenga drums as well as putting together a team of musicians and train them in the almost extinct art of playing the entenga drums.
At the end of November 2015, armed with the recordings of palace musicians that were done by ethnomusicologist, Hugh Tracey, and thanks to the International Library of African Music, the Singing Wells embarked on our field trip which also included repatriating Hugh Tracey's recordings to the last surviving palace musicians and institutions of learning in Uganda.
All through the few days we spent in Uganda, we learnt a great