Before getting to the post, a quick heads-up that I’m doing a small tour of the Midwest, starting next Saturday, May 2, in St. Louis, then hitting Kansas City, Urbana, Bloomington IN, Chicago, and Louisville. There’s a full schedule on my website at https://elijahwald.com/2026concertdates.html, and please spread the word.

As for the post…

Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes luckier than anyone deserves. Back in 1990, I hitchhiked from South Africa up through Zimbabwe and Zambia to Zaire (not yet renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where I studied guitar for several months with Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Masengo — about which I’ve written in a half-dozen previous posts, listed below — then on to Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and finally Kenya.

In Nairobi, I was hoping to find some of the musicians who had played on some wonderful acoustic guitar records that I’d heard on reissues from John Storm Roberts‘s Original Music record label. Those records had been recorded in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and I had no idea how to go about finding any of the artists, or even if they were still alive. So, since I had no other ideas, I went into a music store — looking online, I see the main one was Melodica, and that might have been right, though none of the photos seem to be from that period and I can’t be sure.

Anyway, I went in and there was an older-looking white (or maybe, if it was Melodica, South Asian) man behind the counter, and I went up and explained that I was trying to find some of the musicians who had recorded acoustic guitar music back thirty years earlier.

The man looked at me like it was kind of a crazy question, and said, “Like who?”

I didn’t remember a lot of names, but I said, “Well… like Herbert Misango, who recorded ‘Wazee Wa Kisa.”

And the man said, “He’s over there,” pointing to a man standing behind another counter on the other side of the store. And he was.

Misango wasn’t playing anymore, but he was friendly and agreed to meet me that Saturday and took me to a small nightclub in a field behind an apartment complex where another of the older musicians, John Nzenze, was performing with a small group. I should have interviewed both of them; I should have had a camera with me and taken pictures. I should have done all sorts of things…

…but I didn’t. I just enjoyed meeting them and spending some time with them, and John Nzenze gave me a phone number for Fadhili William, who had recorded “Malaika,” and now was working in a gas station in New Jersey, and I eventually did interview him, back in the States, for the Boston Globe.

And, back in the States, I buckled down and learned “Wazee Wa Kisa.” It’s the only guitar part I’ve ever learned by writing it out. I couldn’t figure out the rhythmic intricacies, how the bass worked against the treble, so I made some six-line tablature paper and wrote out the bass part, then wrote out the treble over it, then sat down with what I’d written and kind of got it, and went back to the record, and eventually worked it out. I showed it to my friend Dominic Kakolobango, who has also done a nice recording of it, and he translated the lyric for me, and a few years later I came up with an English translation to sing after the original Swahili.

And that’s about it, except that my wife, Sandrine Sheon, worked with me for a while as a duo, playing clarinet, and for this one she would play a clave rhythm on a coke bottle, and I miss having her on it.