Benga

Benga Music story telling

  • By Kepher Odhiambo Mak'Anyengo

This song may go down in history as one of the last songs the legendary Tedd Josiah recorded for public consumption. However, for reasons, beyond human control, but which I wouldn't like to go into here, he was unable to complete the project, so the final bits were tied up elsewhere. A few years ago, I was introduced to Tedd by Titi Solomon, who had in turn Ben introduced to me buy my friend Makadem, who both felt that Tedd would bring out an angle from my music which had not come out in my earlier recordings. We had initially only planned for 1 song, but within 5 days, we'd agreed to do 2 songs, one of which (Jawar Nitie), has already been shared in both YouTube and Facebook "Odhi the Villager" pages. In the course of our studio engagements, I informed Tedd that at home in Homa Bay I had regular gigs with the living legend, him of Benga history, Samuel Akech Jabuya, aka Akech Oyosi - the man who at around age 20 years actually imagined and founded the then revolutionary Benga sound (now world-renowned) in early 1960s, while a member of Ogara Boys Band. Tedd was very excited, and asked me to bring along Oyosi at the earliest opportunity. When Akech came, he was adamant that he would not record (or even play) Benga, stating that, as a creative artist, he no longer found any excitement in the genre. He had carried along a self-made xylophone, on which he had creating new sounds. So as a compromise with Tedd, he only agreed to do a remix of one of his older songs before recording his xylophone song.


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