Tanzania's music group "JAGWA" to quench American's thirst..

 
Tanzanian band Jagwa Music, who have long championed mchiriku music on the streets of Dar es Salaam, are set to tour the USA for the first time in September and October. The band will tour the US as part of the Center Stage cultural exchange programme, an ambitious project initiated by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Jagwa Music got its start in the early 1990s, when young Dar es Salaam musicians began realizing they could make small Casio keyboards roar. Like many mchiriku groups, Jagwa is a collective project. The band was originally founded in 1992. Except for the chief composer Abdallah Gora and the band's patron George Abdul Jolijo, all their current members joined the group within the past 10 to 12 years. Due to a busy live schedule that sees them performing regularly at family celebrations in Dar es Salaam and its surroundings, the group is currently comprised of around 15 to 20 musicians, who rotate so that only about 6 to 8 perform at any given occasasion. Although gaining international prominence, in the local Tanzanian media mchiriku music and Jagwa do not exist. According to Werner Graebner, a cultural anthropologist who has spent years writing about Dar es Salaam’s music scene and working with Jagwa Music, “Even with a history of 25 years and international acclaim for Jagwa, the style is still marginalized within Tanzania. Performed on the streets of Dar es Salaam in poorer suburbs like Tandale and Manzese, the style is currently banned by the authorities because of extra-musical reasons, with no media coverage to speak of, translating into a hard life for the musicians." Mchiriku, like other original street styles from around Africa, takes only limited cues from global pop or hip-hop, owing more to East African coastal traditions like Taarab, which bears the imprint of Arabic and chakacha dance music, using the traditional rhythms from the Zaramo, an ethnic group that has long lived in the Dar es Salaam region.
See the video below by clicking the link below

https://youtu.be/DmoaZ4Tv924