Berklee in Kenya

This was in Kenya's Sunday Nation newspaper yesterday:

My alma mater, Berklee College of Music came to Nairobi at the end of June to hold auditions for aspiring African musicians who hope to gain a scholarship to study there. They've been doing this for a few years now, and musicians from all over Africa fly to Nairobi for a shot at a scholarship - they come from South Africa, Morocco, Ghana, Egpyt, and Tanzania to name just a few, simply for the opportunity to be heard.

And the best ones really do end up with oftentimes a full-ride scholarship to the best music school in the world. This is just another reason why Berklee is so awesome - it's a school that truly celebrates music from all cultures and traditions from all over the world, and gives its students the opportunity to jam with top-notch musicians from all over this great big planet. When I was there, I met amazing musicians/people from South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. I would estimate that at least a fourth of its student body is from outside the U.S. Consider this for instance: my freshman dorm roommate was from Ecuador.

At the top of the article above, it proclaims, "Berklee is to budding musicians what Harvard is to business execs." As an alum, I'll gladly take that analogy. Kudos to Berklee President Roger Brown and his wife Linda Mason for setting up the Africa scholarship program and expanding the school's brand globally. I was happy to hear from my classmate Kate Raum (who is in Tanzania this summer) that she recently saw a guy riding on a bus with his Berklee College of Music t-shirt flapping in the wind. Here's to international public service, Berklee. :)

Jammin' with Flat Bill

My dream of jamming with Bill Clinton - me on piano, him on sax - lives on. One day it will happen....it just has to (especially now that the Clinton School has not one but two former music majors!). In preparation for that moment, I've been jamming with Flat Bill here in Kenya (see picture to left). It will suffice for now.

What's a musician to do when he's got a sweet melody in his head but no piano or keyboard readily available to pluck it out? The answer: search Google for "java piano".

At five weeks and counting, this is the longest I have gone without touching a piano/keyboard since I started playing piano in second grade at age seven (surpassing the previous high of four weeks). I try not to be as melodramatic about my need to play piano as some of the people I met at Berklee College of Music ("I can't live without music, bro!"), but I'm honestly beginning to hanker for the opportunity to lay my fingers on ivorite (fake ivory - the ethical way to go!) keys once again. Making music just makes life more fun.

Patrick and I have begun co-writing a song that I am going to finish when I get back to the States. I first had the idea when I was in Kenya in 2007, but I never followed up on it, but Patrick has helped breathe some new life into it. It's going to be called, "How Are You, Mzungu?" You may recall from a previous blog post that "mzungu" is the Swahili word for "white person," which I hear regularly around here being shouted by surprised children as they take notice of me. But I failed to mention in that previous post that the word is also inevitably accompanied by the greeting "How are you?", which seems to be the first bit of English that every Kenyan child learns (and I have reason to believe that most of them don't even know what the phrase means, based on my attempts at returning the question to them).

But what is most interesting about their greeting is the way they say it. The kids - all of them, meaning I literally haven't heard a kid here stray from this rule - put the three words to separate pitches, making a little melody out of it. They say it very quickly, putting a little dip in the "are," sandwiched in between two higher pitches for "how," and "you" (for my musician friends out there, the solfège is Mi-Do-Re for How-Are-You).

So seeing how they have naturally constructed a melody out of the line, I'm really just pilfering it to make a song out of the only two things they say to me as I pass by them: "How are you?" and "mzungu." And isn't it convenient that these two things rhyme?

Here's the vision for the song - a typical African pop sound with beautiful, clean electric guitar, simple harmony, and groove-inducing drums/percussion. Patrick helped round out the lyrics in the chorus, which will be sung by some kijanas (kids): "How are you, mzungu? / I hope you're having a very nice day / How are you, mzungu? / I know you came from so far away."

A future Kenyan pop hit? Bill on sax?