A set of sounds and imagery inspired by a trip to Tanzania during the summer of 2024. This was a transformational trip for me in so many ways. We spent the first two days in Dar es Salem, a city of 8 million young people hustling to survive. And where we came close to being mugged… We then traveled to Bukoba, a smaller town on the western edge of Lake Victoria. Most of the music was composed on the balcony of the Stella Hotel in Bukoba in the early morning as I listened to the church bells pealing along with the call to prayer…which became a metaphor for the various cultural forces battling for the souls of all the young people we met. The first part of our trip we visited many rural schools, and during the second, we did a Safari and visited Zanzibar. So it was a very bifurcated odyssey where we got to engage with both the “real” version of Tanzania and the “theme park” version. In so many ways, we enjoyed the real version better…
The music in this set was inspired by the music we heard while on our trip – at the schools we visited, where the children and the teachers performed songs and dances for us, and at the church service we attended in Bukoba, which had a fabulous choir. Everything is based on call and response chants, which I layered other instruments and vocals on top of. The lyrics are all about me coming to grips with my impressions of a country so different from the world I occupied in Texas, and trying to make sense of how things were evolving there. In particular, I worried about the revolution of rising expectations, and what all those kids would be doing once they became adults. We spent a great deal of time driving through the national parks during our four day safari, and this is where I composed most of the lyrics, which I hummed to the basic tracks I had composed at the Stella as we bounced along in our Toyota Land Cruiser, racing toward our next big game sighting. I did daily Facebook postings, which because very detailed as the trip progressed, and this is also where many of the lyrics came from. In the end, I am very happy with the project, and how the music, the lyrics, and the photographs all intertwine to capture what I was actually experiencing during the trip in what is (for me) a very intense way.
I’m happy to say no generative AI was involved in creating this project. I was so inspired by the experiences we had and the photographs we took that none was required. The girl on the cover of the album is holding a homemade soccer ball, which she is very proud of. AI cannot generate an image that powerful.
Enjoy!
Music available on all the major streaming platforms.
Watch the individual videos below.