Acoustic guitar masters from East and Central Africa, an expansion of Mississippi’s beloved African Guitar Box project.
In 1979 and 1980, a young British-Kenyan musician named John Low hit the road to learn finger-style guitar from his heroes. He traveled across Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, and Zambia. He visited giants like Jean-Bosco Mwenda, Losta Abelo, and Emmanuel Mulemena, whose records sold hundreds of thousands of copies across the continent in the 1950s and 60s. He also documented brilliant but previously under-recorded artists like Tanzania’s Francis Kitime and Kenya’s Mtonga Wanganangu.
Regardless of status, John approached each artist humbly, as a student. He recorded in homes, village squares, and watering holes. The sessions are intimate and casual, the artists at ease. It’s a transporting and profound listening experience - children laughing, glasses clinking, the thump of the Marantz cassette deck, and John’s single mic moving through space, sometimes documenting the vocals, sometimes zeroing in on the right hand against the strings.
Five decades later, these practice tapes provide a rare glimpse into how fingerstyle guitar was actually played for family and friends, outside the tense confines of commercial studios.
Some of these songs appeared on John Storm Roberts’ out-of print Original Music compilations, which inspired the African Guitar Box. Others have never been made publicly available. All have been expertly restored and remastered from the original tapes by Andrew Walter (Honest Jon’s, Abbey Road). John Low’s liner notes and lyric translations provide insights into the recording context, and Tanzanian music scholar John Kitime’s intro gives the musicians’ perspective. Licensed from John Low and the artists, pressed at Chicago’s Smashed Plastic.