The Kenyan octet Kenge Kenge makes music that sounds thrillingly new, but it's really as old as the hills of Kenya, or at least the people who live in those hills, the Luo. The band's name is a Luo expression that roughly means "fusion of small, exhilarating instruments," and you have to love any language that has a colloquial expression for something like that. This music sounds for all the world as though it's being created at least partially by electronic means, but there's actually not an electric instrument in earshot on the band's debut album (apart from a bit of bass), which finds them plying a style similar to the driving benga sound that's dominated Kenyan pop music since Daniel Owino Misiani's Shirati Jazz band brought it to national prominence in the late 1960s.
The twist here, though, is that benga, which developed over a roughly twenty-year period before becoming a mainstream force, is an electric form centered on the guitar. What the members of Kenge Kenge have done is look at benga, which is still a very popular style in East Africa, and subtract many of the foreign elements that influenced its evolution, including Congolese soukous and South African kwela. That means no electric guitars, or even acoustic guitars. Kenge Kenge have brought out the genre's Luo cultural roots by playing it on traditional regional instruments, including an eight-stringed lyre, a "sound box," a small gong called a nyangile, assorted tuned percussion instruments, and a one-stringed fiddle.
The driving rhythm of benga, with all four beats of the measure fully accented, is very much here, but the implication is that the pulse is one part of the overall benga sound that was supplied by traditional Kenyan styles. The lyrics, all in Luo, frequently deal with the subject of dancing, but love songs and praise songs (for both people and animals) are also on tap, and "Piny Agonda" is social commentary to dance to. If the great African styles-- benga, highlife, soukous, kwela, mbalax, juju, apala, Afrobeat, mbaqanga, local hip-hop subgenres, and others-- have much in common, it's probably the tendency to get people dancing to music that tells a story or comments on a the social condition, a descendant of oral history traditions such as West African griots and Ethiopian azmari. This music follows that tendency.
The disc's opener, "Kenge Kenge", begins with a modal flute solo before the percussion enters; when the drums do arrive, it's like aliens landing in your Western ears. These drums have extremely distinct pitch and musical tone-- the underlying rhythm of the song is as much a melody as what the fiddle snaking around the vocals plays. The "sound box," as it's credited, produces a piercing tone similar to striking metal with a mallet-- it also calls to mind the amplification of the thumb piano with which DR Congo's Konono No. 1 stormed the world a couple years ago. Lead singer George Achieng sings a series of cascading, fluid phrases over the beat, backed by a constantly repeating, three-part harmony recitation of the title.
The beat on "Anyango Mbeo" sounds like a slow drum machine program until you listen closely and realize the subtle differences in each percussive sound and the spaciousness of the recording. Audio illusions such as this abound to tease our rock 'n' roll-trained ears. "Otenga" is a surging dance track that uses the flute as a rhythm instrument and features an odd horn that resembles a distorted percussion instrument.
Western listeners accustomed to deliberate variety and song structures shaped by recording formats and commercial radio airplay concerns may find it somewhat difficult to sit still through the disc's full 70 minutes, but it's important to realize that Kenge Kenge are working with a completely different paradigm. With no verse/chorus structure and a tendency toward hypnotic stasis, this is somehow simultaneously folk music and melodic pop music that functions in much the same way that a lot of club music does: It aims to move you and keep you moving, and wants to tell you a story in the bargain. Whatever its musicological place, it does its job well, returning a popular style to its roots and making something new and fresh in the process.
