A Life's Work: Ssewa Ssewa

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 161, October 2020.



Air travel can be a fraught experience for musicians. There are many heart-breaking stories of delicate and priceless instruments arriving at their destination in irreparable pieces. For Ugandan musician Ssewa Ssewa, though, a brush with customs officials eventually led to the invention of a whole new instrument and a determination to bring Uganda to the world stage.

James Ssewakiryanga Jr, known on stage as Ssewa Ssewa, was always going to be a musician. His childhood was filled with music: “It was easy for me to pick up music because that’s the kind of language that was around me in my growing days as a little boy. Everyone that came into my home was a musician.” The start of Ssewa Ssewa’s musical education came from his mother, a dancer, who made sure to teach her son the basics and sent him to attend music schools. It also helped that his father was a master of the engoma drums and an accomplice to the late Albert Ssempeke as he rebuilt the ancient royal music of the Buganda Kingdom after the fall of Idi Amin.

Starting off by playing the large communal xylophone, the amadinda, Ssewa Ssewa soon moved on to study the engoma with his father and then the adungu (bow-harp). “From then I kept on adding different instruments!” As he became a professional musician, Ssewa Ssewa’s music was rooted in the traditional. With the adungu as his instrument of choice, he began touring the world with various ensembles. But he was exasperated at how little Ugandan culture was known in Europe. People knew the West African kora but not the adungu; they knew the Zimbabwean mbira but not its Ugandan cousin, the akogo. This cultural ignorance came to a head in 2014, at Copenhagen airport, where he was stopped from boarding a plane to Switzerland. His prized adungu, which used large nails as tuning pegs, was labelled as a security risk and couldn’t be brought on board. It was a frustration, but Ssewa Ssewa was equal to it, and understanding: “The reality stands that if you’re going into a culture where they don’t know this kind of instrument, and they’re looking at sharp objects, at some point you’re going to have trouble having this instrument go through.” Nevertheless, it was a problem he didn’t want to encounter again.

Over the next few years, an idea took shape and solidified. He would create his own instrument that could become known both inside and outside Uganda, one that could be both modern and traditional at once, and one that could tour the world uninhibited by unfair hostility. Working together with carpenters Mubiru Deo and Steven Kibombo, Ssewa Ssewa created the janzi. Although based on the adungu, the janzi is clearly a modern invention. The adungu’s skin soundboard is replaced with polished wood; the nails replaced with mechanical tuning pegs. Where the adungu has one set of strings, the janzi has two. “We worked through different tunings and we ended up with two different scales,” Ssewa Ssewa explains. “The uniqueness of the instrument is that I tune a Western diatonic scale on my left and an African pentatonic scale on my right. I describe it as collaboration, because I am bringing worlds together.”

By using two different tunings, the janzi itself becomes a metaphor for Ssewa Ssewa’s music and his whole outlook on life. He can switch effortlessly between the Ugandan and the international, and create music that speaks to people, whatever culture they’re from. It’s also reflected in the name: janzi comes from ‘ejanzi’, the Luganda word for grasshopper, an insect that flies from one place to another with ease. The imagery spoke to Ssewa Ssewa so strongly that he’s built his life around it: it’s the name of his instrument, his band, his recording studio, his charity (helping children with disabilities through music) and his youngest daughter. Janzi is his life’s work.

Ssewa Ssewa’s first worldwide release is a perfect representation of the Ugandan and the international. Nva K’la means ‘From Kampala,’ and it’s a love letter to the sounds of his home city. Kampala is a hub, attracting people from all over the country, each bringing with them their own rich musical heritage. When he plays, Ssewa Ssewa is making the music of the whole of Uganda, not just one set of people. “I want to explain through my music that if you come to Uganda, you’re going to listen to different kinds of sound. We have so many cultures here, and every culture has their own sound, their own style of playing music. When you come to Kampala you feel it, you feel and hear all those different cultures.” Nva K’la reflects that metropolitan hustle and bustle. Starting with the popular baksimba dance rhythm, he adds influences from many different traditional musics from Uganda and overlays them with modern sounds from the local and the global, including soul and reggae. Traditional instruments such as the adungu, akogo, endingidi (one-string fiddle), endongo (lyre), amadinda and engoma sit alongside a legion of guitars, basses and keyboards, all brought together and mediated by the new-traditional janzi. This is how Ssewa Ssewa wants people to think of Ugandan music: as an exciting plurality, a range of music spanning from the centuries-old to the freshly-made-this-morning but that could only come from one place. He wants to stoke pride in the Ugandan nation, where all its people, with their many cultures, can contribute to a united identity to share with the world.

At their core, however, the reasons for his innovations stem from European ignorance: ignorance of customs officials about the make-up and meaning of an ancient instrument, ignorance of the music-listening public about Ugandan music as its own, identifiable culture. It should shame us that this collective ignorance has led musicians to feel the need to create entirely new instruments and ways of playing just to get heard. But necessity is the mother of invention, and Ssewa Ssewa’s ambitions and achievements are important, potentially long-lasting, and very danceable. Stay tuned to hear more Ugandan music in the future, under Ssewa Ssewa’s watch: “I want to lead audiences to take note of our sounds from Uganda. We have so much talent here that the world has not seen. ”


Photo: Ssewa Ssewa and his janzi, by Walter Keys.

My Instrument: Pekko Käppi and his Jouhikko

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 161, October 2020.



Lyres are found in various shapes and sizes all over the world, but they are usually plucked with fingers or strummed with a plectrum. The bowed lyre is a much rarer beast. There are only three varieties that still exist today, including the Welsh crwth and the Estonian hiiu kannel. The third is the jouhikko from Finland, a fantastic instrument that came very close to extinction during the 20th century. Pekko Käppi has been at the forefront of its revival for the past 20 years.

The word jouhikko comes from jouhi – horsehair – which makes up both the instrument’s strings and bow. Traditionally with two strings and now as many as four, it is held between the knees and played by stopping one string with the finger knuckles while the bow also vibrates a second string as a drone. The player’s four fingers, held in a fixed position, mean that each string can only play five notes. The jouhikko’s scratchy, hair-on-hair timbre, constant drone and restricted range give it a guttural, throaty and naturalistic sound. It conjures in the mind smells of earth and woodsmoke, helped along by an evocative Nordic repertoire. It’s a sound that entranced Käppi from the start. He enthuses, “the first jouhikko I found, I plucked it, and it still gives me goosebumps to remember it. I hadn’t heard anything like that before. It sounded so old and otherworldly. It still sounds like that.”

No-one really knows how old the jouhikko is. It’s probably one of Europe’s oldest bowed instruments and there are theories that it evolved from Viking instruments, but, as Käppi laments, “there are lots of empty spots in the story of the jouhikko.” What is known is that by the turn of the 20th century, folk musicians had abandoned the instrument in favour of the more versatile fiddle and accordion. “There was only one family in Finland that kept playing,” he explains. “The fathers taught their children. The lineage was still going, but it wasn’t used in weddings or folk music any more. It had no functional use. It was practically dead.” It clung on, though, and a revival began in the 1980s amid renewed interest in the old Finnish music. It was pulled from the brink, but only just. By the time Käppi picked it up, there were still only a small handful of players, but that’s changing: “When I started to play jouhikko in 1997, there were maybe ten active players. I knew them all. But nowadays I don’t know all of them by name! It’s like the golden age of the bowed lyre, it starts to be again.”

A lot of that is down to Käppi and his contemporaries proving the range that the humble instrument can reach. Käppi himself, while also a scholar of the jouhikko’s folk repertoire, also turns it in the direction of heavy metal and punk – he even has a personalised instrument in the shape of a skull with flashing eyes. There is also Ilkka Heinonen, who finds space for the instrument among Baroque, jazz and avant-garde electronics, and Rauno Neimenen, now the premiere jouhikko maker in Finland. Together with Marianne Maans, they make up the Jouhiorkesteri, the first-ever all-jouhikko group.

The story of the past 20 years is encouraging, and Käppi has certainly played his part. He’s under no illusions, however, that the jouhikko is completely saved. For the instrument to be truly secure, it needs a next generation. Most players nowadays start in their 20s, and Käppi is searching for solutions. “There are not young kids playing jouhikko, because the jouhikkos are all too big! But a couple of years ago, we designed with Rauno a children’s jouhikko. It works really well, and my daughters have started to play. If it’s possible to start earlier, that’s a good thing for the future. That’s what makes the tradition living again, if there are younger people carrying it on. But we’ll see.”


Photo: Pekko Käppi live at WOMEX 19, by Jacob Crawfurd.

The Zonke Family - At the Studio

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 161, October 2020.

The Zonke Family
At the Studio
Lokalophon (39 mins)

The Zonke family hail from Nyampanda, a small border town on the Zimbabwean side of the boundary with Mozambique. They are also the knowledge bearers and masters of the matepe, a large mbira of the Marembe people. Here, three of the family – Anthony Zonke, Crispen Zonke and Chief Boyi Nyamande – share this age-old knowledge with the world.

So often mbira music is mixed with guitars, drum kits and synths, but its true power is most evident when it is allowed to stand alone, as it is here. It’s very refreshing to hear the music presented in this way – just the interlocking lines of the matepe, the polyrhythms of the hosho (rattles) and the overlapping yodels from all three participants. The power remains even when the musicians put down the matepe: ‘Tinotengana Kuipa’ is all ngoma (drums) and voice and is just as enchanting and entrancing.

It’s a sound that reflects back your own headspace. Light and airy, heavy and deep; it all depends on how much you choose to fall into the music. It’s a shame the album is so short. The force of the music is so irresistible that it feels like it could go on unabated for hours and hours on into the infinite.

Jacob Young / David Rothenberg / Sidiki Camara - They Say Humans Exist

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 161, October 2020.

Jacob Young / David Rothenberg / Sidiki Camara
They Say Humans Exist
Oslo Session Recordings (33 mins)

Three musicians from three continents get together in a studio in the woods outside Oslo for two days of collective improvisation. The sounds that coalesce could be from a different place altogether, an unknown realm.

Jacob Young is a Norwegian guitarist and electronicist best known for his forward-thinking releases on ECM Records; American zoomusicologist, philosopher and author David Rothenberg gets back to his roots as an out-jazz clarinettist; Sidiki Camara, from Mali, is an in-demand percussionist who also contributes balafon, kamalengoni and voice.

The music that the trio make together is, for the most part, calm and meditative; it is the feeling of an ethereal forest as spoken through wind, string and wood. Within that forest lie bluesy licks, unexpected jazz chromatics and West African melodies, as well as many other influences that float on the breeze.

Through improvisation, Young, Rothenberg and Camara maintain their own musical personalities while attaining a universality that joins them together. They Say Humans Exist is an album of atmospheres, but it contains enough spikey edges to never quite dip into New-Age-iness. A more solid sense of direction wouldn’t go amiss, though.

Dandana - Free the System

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 161, October 2020.

Dandana
Free the System
Rebel Up Records (40 mins)

About this album, Dandana say ‘the old system can’t easily deal with young or new ideas.’ In a time where people are rising up against old systems all over the world, it is a message that is being heard more – and louder – than ever.

This is the music of generation gaps. Dandana are made up of traditional musicians who are not afraid to look above and beyond, and of contemporary musicians eager to delve into the depths of musical lore. Often those people are one and the same. With members from the Netherlands, Gambia and Senegal, the group journey across Senegambian soundscapes with electronica as their vehicle – and gather many guests along the way.

It’s an unusual mix – inspirations from the region’s classic psychedelic dance bands such as Guelewar and Ifang Bondi sit very easily alongside electronica production – but it’s one that yields a surprising depth. The result is full of chill dance vibes, ecstatic beats that lend themselves to peaced-out nodding just as well as full-body dancing.

Whether Free the System can help to unite old ways with new ideas and bridge generation gaps remains to be seen. With it, however, Dandana add their voice to a burgeoning international movement that is changing the way of the world as we know it.