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.