Can we understand each other?

It all started on a sunny day in the beautiful Ilm park in Weimar, Germany. Mukasa Wafula, a superb musician, researcher and composer from Western Kenya, and I went on a walk chatting about music, culture and all kinds of interesting things when it occurred to me “– Hey, can we actually understand each other musically? I mean, if you sing a song in your language, can I guess what the content could be?” We then started a guessing game with songs from the Bukusu community from Western Kenya, and were both surprised, how close my guesses could come only by means of trying to understand the mood and the attitude of the songs.

Can we understand each other? is now a duo project of ours, where we blend Kenyan and Brazilian musical elements developing our very own musical dialogue. Since our first meeting in 2016, we were featured by the NGOMA ZETU Symposium (Weimar, Germany), the Sarau Mundi series (Berlin, Germany), the Deutschlandfunk Kultur (German culture broadcasting) as well as the Amani Afrikafest (Weimar, Germany).

los excêntricos

Los Excêntricos was my last band project in Weimar, together with some incredible musicians such as Luís “Güicho” Palácio, Jordan White, Kamái Freire, Daniel Moreno, and Thomas Tito.