Listen to documentary about impact of COVID-19 on musicians in Nairobi

The audio documentary Locking Down the Beat: Musical Livelihoods in Nairobi at the Height of the COVID-19 Pandemic explores the impacts of the pandemic on the lives and livelihoods of four music professionals in Nairobi, Kenya, during the pandemic’s acute phase in 2020 and 2021.

Produced by myself and a group of students and faculty at NYU Abu Dhabi, the work includes extended interviews woven together with music excerpts and location audio.

Locking Down the Beat centres on interviews with four music professionals in Nairobi: Amin ‘Elchie’ Virani has been involved in Kenyan music production since the country’s youth music boom at the turn of the millennium, and now runs his own audio and video production firm. Janet Otieno is a popular gospel singer, who burst on the scene in 2013 after decades of singing in church. Makadem (Charles Ademsen) is a singer and multi-instrumentalist who performs in the Afro-fusion genre, while Timothy ‘Still Alive’ Boikwa is a multi award-winning music producer and the founder of Still Alive Records.

We conducted our interviews over Zoom during March and April of 2021. It had been about a year since Kenya had seen its first COVID cases. Though a vaccination programme was getting underway, the country was experiencing a new wave of infections. A new partial lockdown of Nairobi was instituted while we were still in the midst of carrying out our interviews.

Each interview lasted over an hour, and so a great deal has necessarily been left on the cutting room floor. In addition to chopping up and reordering the discussions, we also made surgical edits to remove long pauses, redundancies and lengthy tangents. In a few cases, we even moved around an individual word or phrase for the sake of clarity and flow. But we endeavoured not to muddle any intended meanings, and the final product has been approved by all of our interviewees.

Our overall aim was not to provide a comprehensive survey of the music industry in Nairobi during the COVID-19 pandemic, but rather an ethnographic portrait of the industry at an extraordinary moment, pieced together from a diverse set of voices and perspectives.

Listen to the documentary below: