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Where Tanzania Taps Its Feet

By RACHEL B. DOYLEFEB. 18, 2014

The concrete lot next to the Hotel Travertine in downtown Dar es Salaam was full of swaying women in elaborate floor-length gowns trimmed with sequins. Spotlights reflected off bottles of Kilimanjaro beer, and the scent of shisha smoke hung in the air.

It was 11 on a Sunday night in Tanzania’s largest city, and members ofJahazi Modern Taarab, a popular local group, were performing a spirited song about love gone wrong, featuring a male-female call-and-response. Young men, chewing khat leaves and tapping their feet to the music, sat in white plastic chairs next to older women in neon-colored headscarves. For certain songs, the crowd rushed to the dance floor en masse.Stop by the hotel on any Sunday and you’ll find the band in full swing. Indeed, many bands in this laid-back city on the Indian Ocean have regular gigs at the same venues every weekend, and as many as four concerts at other clubs during the week — all part of a boisterous and exciting music scene that rivals that of any in Eastern Africa.

“Tanzanians, they love music. I think they want music to play every day so they can come,” said Jackie Kazimoto, lead singer of Jagwa Music, one of the city’s most thrilling live acts.

Dar’s soundscape is a riot of genres, from the music on offer that evening, called modern taarab, which mixes a traditional Swahili sung-poetry style with electronic and Arab-influenced rhythms, to mchiriku, the raw, urban sound that Jagwa Music plays, which is generally found at neighborhood block parties. You can also dance to classic rumba or bongo flava, the local brand of hip-hop, on soft white sand at any number of palm-laden beach clubs, while a pink sun sets over the ocean.

At the open-air venue Mango Garden, you can enjoy a tasty chicken pilau dish while dancers in matching outfits stomp to the catchy Congolese-style rhythms of African Stars Band, whose songs blare from radios across the city. Amid the greenery at the outdoor Triniti Bar, a young crowd mixes hip-hop and soul with poetry slams. At Selander Bridge Club, fans dance in formation to Kilimanjaro Band’s hypnotic grooves under a massive thatched roof.

The scene bleeds into the streets as well. Wander behind a downtown high-rise and you may find locals feasting on roasted goat in a nondescript courtyard that will turn into a bustling music scene later that night. Follow the tinny strains of taarab on a transistor radio to discover members of the city’s South Asian community playing cards and eating Indian street snacks like pani puri on tables set up on the sidewalk.

Leo Mkanyia, a 32-year-old Dar musician, attributes this diversity to the country itself. “We have 125 tribes, and all of them have different tunes, different melodies, different music and even different traditional musical instruments,” he said.

I met Leo at Kibo Bar at the Serena Hotel, where he was performing for guests as the leader of a five-piece band. He shares the stage with his father, Henry, who performed for 15 years in the city’s legendary Mlimani Park Orchestra, but now plays guitar alongside his son in a group that mixes Tanzanian drumming with blues melodies and dansi, an indigenous dance music. Leo calls this style “Swahili Blues.”

He told me about a recent visit to Nairobi, where he met Kenyan musicians. “They were all praising Dar, like ‘I wish I could be in Dar,’ ” he said, adding that such envy is a source of pride in this Tanzanian city. “People here are proud of their music. They love their music, and support it.”

On a recent Sunday, Leo and I watched a group called Super Maya Baikokoperform a combination of traditional ngoma drumming and risqué dancing that originated in the Digo villages of the country’s northeast coast, now a favored genre in Dar. The venue, Max Hall & Bar, was in an open courtyard where the only decorations were a large six-point star hung behind the eight-person band, and posters for Safari Lager taped up on electric blue walls.

The lineup consisted of two percussionists beating makeshift drums made out of plastic drainage pipes, a duo wielding shakers made from tin cans, a male singer and three barefoot female dancers. The drumming began slowly, with the dancers languidly moving their hips, and the singer repeating a phrase in Swahili that Leo translated as “dance mama dance.”

Soon, the drumming and rattling grew more feverish, and the dancers began gyrating; one slid to the floor and began undulating her entire body. In a distinctively raspy voice, the singer had segued from “dance mama dance” to a riff on police corruption to a “story about a woman who had an abortion and whose husband threw her away,” Leo explained.

“You need to be very good to sing like that, with nothing giving you a melody,” he added, admiringly. “No keyboard, nothing. You have to grow up with this music.”

Local beats didn’t always dominate in Dar as they do now. In colonial times, interest in Tanzanian musicians among the country’s British rulers was generally limited to finding a few competent at playing fox trots for ballroom dances. The feeling was mutual; performances of traditional drumming and dancing encouraged resistance against the colonizers.

In 1961, when Tanganyika, now the Tanzanian mainland, gained independence, a revival of indigenous cultural practices was high on the agenda of the government of Julius Nyerere, the country’s first president. The government sent engineers to Tanzanian villages to find ngoma groups to record for broadcast, and later took control of the sole radio station. Music venues, some of which were nationalized, began hiring house bands to play several times a week. The government also encouraged public institutions to have what were known as “entertainment units.”

Kilimanjaro Band has been performing dansi, the genre that combines traditional drumming and a relaxed backbeat, with Congolese-inspired guitar and horn sections, for 40 years. John Kitime, a guitarist for the group, remembers this time well. “There were a number of police bands, a number of army bands, Immigration had a band,” he said. “These bands were just playing ordinary popular music.”

With government agencies paying salaries, pensions, health care and transportation for many groups — in essence, removing almost everything about being a musician that isn’t fun — the cultural flowering in Tanzania was immense. But while government sponsorship certainly encouraged the local music scene, there were many independent music groups active during that era, too.

“Some of the classic bands from the ’70s are still playing around Dar,” said David Tinning, of the Tanzanian Heritage Project, a project to digitize rare music recordings. “They have these huge events. They are titans, giants in their scene.”

Mlimani Park Orchestra, the dansi group that Leo’s father performed in, is particularly beloved; people here compare them in terms of popularity with the Beatles and in longevity with the Rolling Stones. Although some members are now in their 60s, the group continues to play packed shows several times a week.

“Their music, everybody knows it, and loves it. They’ve been great forever,” Leo said. “You can see that people feel the music, and understand the music and the way of dancing.”

We saw the band on a Friday night at Breakpoint, a buzzing downtown club. After a warm-up performance by a pair of Michael Jackson impersonators, Mlimani Park Orchestra took to the stage, amid cheers, to present the same act it had been perfecting since 1978.

The group, whose members wore matching orange collared shirts, fused mellifluous singing and shifting harmonies with a polished brass section. The enthusiastic audience alternated between crowding the laser-lit dance floor during the faster, percussive songs and eating grilled beef skewers and drinking beer at their tables during the slower, lyrical songs.

I left Leo at Breakpoint after midnight, the band still going strong. I asked the driver of the beat-up taxi whisking me back to my guesthouse if he was a fan of Mlimani Park Orchestra. “It’d be strange if I said no,” he answered. The warm breeze from the Indian Ocean blew through an open window as we sped along the coastal road, past Maasai men in their red-checked shukas, and stylish women in heels heading home from the clubs. He smiled. “It’s just the melody,” he said.