Jazz made in Germany happens to Kampala

The band may have been German, but the sounds played by Matthäus Winnitzki – keyboarder/composer, Konrad Ullrich -percussionist (drummer) and Stephan Meinburg, who plays the trumpet and euphonium, produced a rare exotic sound with an eerie touch that is neither solely jazz, metal, rock, or electronic but with influences of African and Caribbean music.
This jazz trio from Hamburg, Germany, CNIRBS, in collaboration with Goethe-Zentrum Kampala/Ugandan German Cultural Society, managed to captivate the multi-national audience at the Uganda National Cultural Centre on Wednesday.
The band, who only started working as a trio in 2011 despite knowing each other for a decade, are on tour with their new album Hey Kollege.
Prior to stopping in Kampala, they had been to Maputo, Mozambique, Antananarivo, Madagascar, Johannesburg, South Africa and Kigali, Rwanda.

The music
Segou named after a town in Mali, West Africa, sprung the audience into an eccentric pulse of African drums and trumpet, followed by Murray Bozinsky (inspired by a funny scientist) whose slow tempo and light touch of drums unexpectedly jabbed into a thick dark peddle of effects and heartbeat. Piosenka dla Rodziny, Multiple Pain, Polinka Polkapops and Don Calypso which has Latin Caribbean salsa energy strum the stage before Uganda aritists Lawrence Okello and Joel Sebunjo introduced the interplay of Adungu, flute, African drum and the Kora.
The humorous Okello dedicated his first piece to the bachelors and spinsters, and stayed true to music with voice when his Acholi lyrics blended effortlessly with the marriage of the Adungu with the keyboard, trumpet drum and euphonium.
So did Sebunjo’s reverberating vocal art stream through the audience with bird-like whistles in the forest, in his Luganda love song which rippled with the exotic sound from CNIRBS.
Disco Girl, Matthäus’ recent composition resounded with hard African and Western drums, thick bursts of smoke; and had climaxed the show until the audience’s applause involuntarily drew them back to perform one more song.
Played in addition with the harmonica, the climax was a revelation that music is an international language and brings people of different nations and culture together.
Their artistic fusion with two of Uganda’s finest gave the audience an unforgettable intercultural fusions.
Okello defines the product as “New tunings of our traditional instruments interlocking into melodies that are of the highest composition methodologies. Ugandan drums, the tuber and jazz drums having a conversation never heard before.” adding that Jazz lovers have a chance to experience what he thinks is the future of music.
CNIRBS will be touring Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Brussels next, before closing at Hafenbahnhof in Hamburg.

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