The performance group “Uganda Heritage Roots,” comprised of street children from Kampala, Uganda, perform the Bagandan ngoma “Baakisimba.”

by Julie Neumann
The music of a 90-year-old blind Ugandan thumb piano player fills the room. The sound is so clear and full it gives the impression of a live performance. But the aging artist is not giving a concert nor has he ever set foot inside a recording studio. A fellow African musician, using state-of-the-art field recording equipment, has collected 80 minutes of the thumb piano player in his own village, creating a CD that is now being played in an office at the Blair School of Music. This rare recording is the foundation for Blair’s new Music Archive of Africa and the Americas.

“We are trying to approach music, in particular music of smaller communities in Africa and America, on their own terms,” said Greg Barz, assistant professor of ethnomusicology. “We want to empower other communities, other countries, to record for themselves and make choices on what they want preserved by Vanderbilt.”

Barz began to consider such an archive on a research trip to Africa when he was approached by villagers concerned over the gradual disappearance of their traditional music. Dennis Clark, director of the Anne Potter Wilson Music Library, confirmed that they had both the technology and expertise to set up a modern archive at Vanderbilt that would act as a repository for indigenous music.

In May, Clark and Barz traveled to Uganda with high-level recording equipment to begin collecting music for the archive. After establishing a network in Africa, they turned over their equipment to Centurio Balikoowa, a world-famous Ugandan traditional artist and close friend of Barz who has visited Vanderbilt several times. Balikoowa agreed to travel to rural villages and record music over the span of one year, sending CDs back to Barz and Clark every month.

“We think we will get much more authentic and realistic recordings that [way],” said Clark. “So it can be very proactive and very organic – it can grow wherever it goes rather than us putting a predetermined imprint on top of it.”

The archive is unique in that the artists provide written consent, allowing Vanderbilt the freedom to license and share the music with the world via the Internet. Similar archives generally do not provide such broad access. Clark also foresees the release of CDs through a University-run record label, with the creators of the music sharing in the proceeds.

“There are tons of wonderful recordings in archives all around the world that [you] can’t make copies of,” Clark said. “Some of them [you] can’t even play, [because] the format is so fragile that playing it would destroy it. We have committed to this process of not only having it available for access but migrating to the next level of technology in perpetuity.”

After Barz and Clark realized the potential importance of the archive, they began to tackle the difficulties of making a top-quality recording in rural Africa.

“We had to figure out the idiosyncrasies of making a field recording with no electricity,” said Clark. “We used a direct-to-CD machine that runs on a lead acid battery so you can take it into a village and make a recording on CD in a place that does not have electricity, much less the ability to play a CD.”

The equipment also had to travel well. Many East African villages are inaccessible by car, so the entire recording platform had to fit into a backpack that could be worn during bumpy motorcycle rides into the countryside.

Clark viewed all of these technological hurdles as signs of progress.

“It is an experiment not only as a project of ethnomusicological importance but also in the changing paradigm of the library,” he said. “Libraries need to embrace this technology, to become proactive and more niche-based to their user community.”

During their trip, Clark and Barz discovered that being proactive archivists did not eliminate the possibility of gathering existing recorded material. Though the focus of the research trip was on making traditional music recordings, Barz began a side project of collecting kandas, cassette tapes of popular music that are sold in kiosks and on street corners throughout Uganda.

“As someone who has been working in Africa for a long time, I realize cassettes are the reality of everyday music in Africa,” Barz said. “You can’t buy them, you can’t just go on Amazon.com and find the cassettes that are for sale in the villages and towns throughout Africa.”

Western music libraries and archives generally don’t collect these, rather collecting CDs of African music produced in Europe.

“It would be like us only collecting people who covered other people’s music, which is ridiculous to even think about,” he said. “But when it comes to other people’s cultures we very often will only trust interpretations rather than going to the source.”

With help from young Ugandans and Barz’s research assistant, Vanderbilt undergraduate John Dick, the research team collected hundreds of these tapes in an effort to document the cassette culture and its affect on other music. The result is the largest archive of popular African cassette recordings in the world, truly representative of contemporary Ugandan culture and music.

Building and supporting relationships between Africa and America is at the heart of this project, and one of the most difficult moments for the research team was leaving Uganda and the work they had begun in the hands of others. But the first recordings they received proved beyond all doubt that the new archive would be a success.

“Balikoowa has been traveling throughout East Africa taking this project very seriously, collecting from the true culture bearers,” said Barz. “The field recording made of the thumb piano player was a triumph not only in the quality and importance of the recording, but it also proved the importance of entrusting the recording process to the culture itself.”

Balikoowa’s collection of 80 minutes of recorded materials of the notable blind musician is probably one of the last links to a very old playing culture, he said.

“I know how difficult it can be for a foreign researcher with limited time to locate and record local African musicians in optimal recording conditions,” Barz said. “The fact that Vanderbilt has a true partner on the ground makes me realize that the archive is not only for Vanderbilt. This is clearly of importance to Ugandans themselves.”

Posted 7/19/04