THE KING OF HISTORY
The first thing you have to be ready for with Benga music is the shrill voices. They are not unnaturally high like Bollywood playback singers, but still they strain up an octave. Then you can get into the sheer propulsive energy of it. It is perhaps the speediest music from Africa, and it is stripped for action: two guitars, bass and drums with only occasional sax, or even bottle percussion. Misiani is (or was) the master: this collection comes from the 1970s, which was his greatest era. Misiani, a talented guitarist himself, brought up on Losta Abele, Bosco, et al, assembled the best possible band -- so you don't have a rhythm guitarist strumming on an open chord, a bass playing the one and a drummer keeping a four-square beat: you have four individuals playing their hearts out from the word go. The bass is the most unusual: he is soloing throughout, paying very little attention to the tune or the other musicians. The two guitarists also don't really play together, they make little musical sorties, only occasionally at the same time. The drums are quite bizarre actually. In his classic novel, The Music in my Head, Mark Hudson has a very funny passage about the greatest air guitar song of all time: He goes on about this gem of rock & roll, and then says that when the drums come in they are so badly recorded it ruins everything. The Kenyan drums are not badly recorded, just badly made, I think. They sound like plastic buckets, very different from other trap drums on record. But the high energy guitars and insane bass soloing completely overwhelm any need for sonic fidelity on the tubs. Amazingly, the two albums released in the UK in the late 80s presented a strong showing of Misiani's music, and hooked a lot of us on Benga, but this earlier material is even better!
The CD notes don't say who is on here. However the 1989 album PINY OSE MER, which has liner notes by Werner Graebner, lists D.O. as bandleader, solo guitar and voice, Ochieng Oninga as first rhythm guitar, Juma Obai as 2nd rhythm guitar, and Nyabuon Nyang as merely the rhythm guitar. Two bassists are identified: Okech Oro and Pasy Aloo, with Caleb Odemba on drums. I don't know how many of them were in the band two decades earlier. Trying to explain the name, a fan said "Benga is the feeling you get when dancing." The music was influential in neighbouring Zambia and Zimbabwe, but also as far away as Nigeria where it was popular among fans of Ibo highlife. The direct influences on the sound might be traced to the orutu, a traditional one-stringed violin, or the nyatiti, the 8-stringed lyre. These can be heard on the Hugh Tracey recordings of the 50s, if you want to look for parallels in the rhythm and lead guitar. Although the Luo are only the third-largest ethnic group in Kenya their music became hugely popular in the 70s and eclipsed the other forms of Swahili- and Congolese-language dance music in East Africa. Misiani's pointed lyrics (couched in fables and folk tales) often got him in trouble with the authorities, and he was once arrested as an illegal immigrant (being from Tanzania) but not deported. At their peak Shirati Jazz sold 20,000 singles a month in the 70s, but in the 80s piracy and cassettes severely dented the African music industry. Misiani, who died in 2006, would have been amused that Barack Obama, son of a Luo man, became president of the United States while Kenya has never had a Luo president, Doug Paterson tells us in his liner notes. The booklet includes photos and translations of all the songs.
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