The half-American, half-Kenyan lineup of Extra Golden makes music that’s bound to puzzle the purists but also brings the snap and melody of Kenyan benga music to a fresh audience. Ian Eagleson (also of the Ohio-formed band Golden) founded Extra Golden during his years of studying African music as an ethnomusicologist, bringing on his American bandmate Alex Minoff, as well as benga singer Otieno Jagwasi and drummer Onyango Wuod Omari. Jagwasi died of liver failure before the band’s quickly recorded first album, 2006’s Ok-Oyot System, came out on the Thrill Jockey label. But the band pressed on with Otieno’s brother Onyango and singer-guitarist Opiyo Bilongo in the lineup. Their recently released third album, Thank You Very Quickly, is titled in tribute to fans and friends who donated their money to help the Kenya-side members make it through the turmoil touched off by Kenya’s corrupt 2007 elections. Extra Golden’s mix of American rock and benga goes far beyond mere sonic dabbling—in fact, Eagleson even set up his own African-music label, Kanyo. Ahead of the band's show tomorrow at the Empty Bottle, Decider asked Eagleson’s advice on getting into African music.
Decider: How did you make the transition from studying African musicians to collaborating with them?
Ian Eagleson: Well, when I went to Kenya in 2003, it was for a pretty long visit, about a year. I’d been there before doing research and had done some recordings, but they were more like field recordings, almost. Before I came back there, I spent some time learning how to record multi-track with a laptop and a mixer. It became more than just a field-recording thing; it was more like making records, because I’d have to work with them to just figure out how to put it together. The good thing is that the musicians I was working with, you know, they work in a tradition of music that uses the same materials a rock band would use. They have a few electric guitars, bass, drum kit, and singing, and they write songs that use a lot of the same chords we write music with in the U.S…. But as rock and benga developed from, say, 1970 on, they went in pretty different directions.
D: What initially got you interested in benga music or Kenya in particular?
IE: I guess the initial thing that sparked my interest in Africa was just that all the music that I admired the most in the U.S. came out of African-American tradition, so I just figured that Africa would be sort of a gold mine in terms of interesting things to learn about. Also, when I was in college I did a semester abroad program and that was in Kenya, so I kind of chose Kenya just because it sounded interesting. There wasn’t anything musically about it that I knew would make it a good place to go. But it was between that and Ghana, and East Africa just sounded a little more diverse in terms of what I could see and do there. While I was there, I got into this stringed instrument called the nyatiti, which is a traditional stringed instrument of the Luo people. That led me to get deeper into the Luo music traditions. They were always really big into this benga style, it was the contemporary music for them, as opposed to these more rural-based things like the nyatiti. As my studies went on, I just started realizing that benga was much more active and relevant, and it just made sense to get into it.
D: It seems like a lot of the African music that sells in America is West African music.
IE: West African music has been much more widely exposed in the U.S. and Europe…. Especially these days, there’s a lot of interest in music that comes from Mali, Guinea, places that are more powered by the Islamic cultural side of things, which you can hear in the music. Stuff like benga is more along the lines of highlife music, which is also in West Africa, but it’s also a lot like Congolese music. That kind of style has never caught on as much as some of the West African styles. I guess maybe the major exception to that is Franco, from the Congo. He was around from the ’50s, and that music’s cool, but the stuff I like from him is from the late ’70s and early ’80s. Tabu Ley was good. From Kenya, there’s a lot of cool stuff but none of it’s really available. There’s a couple of CDs on the GlobeStyle label, one is called The Mighty Kings Of Benga by Victoria Kings, the other one is called Shirati Jazz by DO Misiani. There’s a compilation called Kenya Dance Mania, which has a variety of stuff from there. There’s this label run by a Kenyan guy in New Jersey called Equator Heritage Sounds, you can get those CDs on, like, CDBaby. He’s got a CD by this guy called Collela Mazee, who was also in Victoria Kings.
In Guinea the government had a record company called Syliphone that just released tons of records, and they all sound great. There’s a band on there called Bembeya Jazz National, I would recommend that to anybody. And then if you like that kind of thing, just that whole part of Africa, like Senegal, Mali, and Guinea, the culture there and the history has developed this style of music there that’s pretty interesting, because it mixes African beats with some of these melodic styles that go back to Arabic traditions. Like Baaba Maal, we just played some shows with him.
D: How was your music received on that tour?
IE: I think a lot of people liked it, but it also wasn’t what people were expecting. Our driver, who was also selling merch, he told us a story, it was kind of funny. He said a woman came up to him and she was complaining about us. She wasn’t that old, but she was saying, “Oh, it sounds like a war zone! That’s not African music!” Well, first of all, the band is not all African, so I guess she could be right in some ways. For people who are expecting a sort of mellow thing with old musicians wearing nice robes like Baaba Maal, it’s definitely not what they’re looking for. It’s hard to gauge what the overall reception was, but I think it was good. A lot of people sounded like they were into it.
D: Well, speaking of the louder side, “Ilando Gima Onge,” from Ok-Oyot System, has that really sharp fuzz guitar riff at the beginning.
IE: The guitar thing you’re talking about, that’s just a fuzz guitar line, but if you listen to a lot of that ’70s African guitar stuff, they do stuff like that. That was pretty big back then. We’ve always been into those kind of vintage guitar tones that you hear coming from the ’60s and ’70s. In Kenya, they’re more into plugging the guitar directly into the mixing board and putting some digital delay on it, so one thing we thought would be cool is to bring those kind of [raw] sounds, I guess, back into that process of how those guys write songs. Even though it’s not new, it sounds kind of fresh, because a lot of contemporary African guitar music is really clean-sounding.
D: What’s the current situation with the band members who lived in Kenya?
IE: They’re actually in the States right now. I think they’ll be here possibly for quite a while, which is good because our band has always had to operate on a real tight schedule, time-wise. It’s also good for them, because the whole economic situation is affecting everywhere, and I know things are bad in Kenya. That swelling of chaos and violence after the 2007 election in Kenya, it really hurt the music business. People just weren’t going out, so there weren’t real work opportunities for those guys to be entertaining people. Now that the economy is bad, musicians are getting less and less work there, and getting paid less. Three or four years ago, it wasn’t a bad job there.
D: Is it a challenge to convey all those problems to a western audience?
IE: We have that song “Thank You Very Quickly,” and that talks about it a little bit. That was a really crazy thing that happened, ’cause all the guys in the band were just stranded for months, and it was really sad, what was going on in Kenya. In their style of music, a lot of the songs they write talk about people who help them, thanking them or praising them. That was how we got that song “Obama.” It’s okay to do that and not be a professional poet in terms of how you put things across. It’s hard to say, because I don’t really understand their language that well. I know they appreciate poetic things, but they’re certainly less shy about being very direct in the lyrics.
G.A. Minoff
