The Music (Tanzania Heritage Project)
Bio
The music is a collection of recordings under the Tanzania Heritage Project. It contains recordings such as ‘Wagogo Tribal Music’; this recording was made in the field by Tanzanian ethnomusicologists using portable mikes. One can get a sense of the polyrhythmic base from which the genre arose. Of course, the Wagogo are just one tribe out of more than a hundred, and a lot of the other tribal music doesn’t sound anything like this.
It also has a collection of Afro-rhumba, imported from West Africa to Cuba and then brought back to East Africa beginning in the 30s. This began a huge rhumba craze throughout the continent, which lasted for several decades. A good example is then ‘Kiko Kids – Mambo Rumba’ recording of 1963, and is basically indistinguishable from what one might hear in a pre-Castro Havana nightclub, except that it is sung in Swahili instead of Spanish. The name of the track is a sort of polyglot pun: “Mambo” is the name of the famous Cuban dance, and the traditional Swahili greeting.
One other recording is the ‘Western Jazz – Title UnknownMusicians’. The song changes course like four times and features two polyrhythmic guitars, an independent vocal melody, and an electric bass player who is just all over the place.