A ROTTEN LYRE
This post is a followup to my post on Chicago. Any exact similarities are intentional… This goes out to our fan club in Kenya. Which admittedly right now consists of 1 possibly 2 fans, but man are they avid. On a recent weekend afternoon the weather was 77 degrees with a light breeze and i found myself lost and wandering through the small towns of western kenya. A welcome break from east coast squalor and congestion, there’s nothing like this sturdy district by the lake in the summer.
While there, it occurred to me how much music I was hearing from throughout the day—and not from my Ipod headphones. Rather it came from everywhere— blasting out of battered Fiats that pulled up next to me, blaring in colorful VW and decrepit Suzuki bus taxis that hurtled past, seeping out of massive passenger buses idling at the dusty station, blending with honking rickshaws, drifting from second story windows, and distorting out of small boom -boxes in outdoor cafes & small takeaway shacks. Faces of musicians like Shaggy or Bob Marley or Prince were hand painted in gigantic murals on the side of the careening taxi microbuses and behemoth passenger buses alike. In the dust next to them sat old men plucking small catgut and cowskin lyres.* That same evening I went to a popular grill. After finishing dinner, I witnessed the spot transform into a wildly popular dance club. The small two level room was packed wall to wall with local Kenyans and the bass rattled the walls, floor, and out the door so heavily I was sure my heartbeat and breathing rate had synchronized to the BPM in order to just still keep me alive. Sure I was a bit of a fish out of water, but as a bassist I can’t not appreciate the low frequencies. Upon returning, it was evident to me how pervasive and vibrant sound was throughout my day in Kenya, and how sterile it seemed back home walking around DC, the silence punctuated only occasionally by a car horn symphony conducted by impatience. Urban areas by definition are going to be loud and chaotic, why not infuse a little more melody and rhythm into it the chaos?
As if on cue, soon after I had the good fortune to see Extra Golden play at the Black Cat. If you don’t already know, the band is a fantastic collaboration between Alex Minoff, Ian Eagleson and a number of dynamic Kenyan musicians that fuses the members numerous years experience in Indie rock and Benga . They’re a real story behind them and its great to see Thrill Jockey picked them up. Hypnotic yet chaotic, it begs for a Tusker lager, and in my opinion suited DC far better than most of the tailors in Georgetown.
*side note— I once brought back one of these great lyres (nyatiti) for myself and ben. mine rotted away a year later so i tossed it. ben, good friend that he is, didn’t have the heart to tell me his instrument was broken too until i discovered it disintegrating under a pile of books in his apartment. how were we to know the shelflife?