Just A Band just got nominated for a Kora award for best African video. Do you know that they made the animated Iwino Piny video themselves? Museke.com asked them about it and other questions in this interview. The JAB guys are quite entertaining, and just like their music, this chat is a 'swell' rockas of a ride!

Museke.com: Can you tell us about your background and family?
DANIEL: Since I left the Touareg caravan, Azim has been like a father to me…

BLINKY: You’ll have to forgive me; I don’t remember large sections of my childhood. There’s a gap in my memory.

JIM: I grew up in Kilgoris. It’s a little town in Western Kenya – but we were indoors all the time, so it could have been anywhere. I still prefer dark rooms to this day.

Museke.com: How did the three of you meet?
DANIEL: If you’ve read our bio then you know we met under what other people would call strange circumstances.

JIM: It was more like concentrated doses of serendipity.

Museke.com:How did you all get into music?
BLINKY: I have a guitar that belongs to my mother, so I imagine there must have been music in my family. The earliest thing I remember is writing music for the choir in the convent where I spent some years. That was my entry into the world of song. Since then, I jammed a lot with various bands in Nairobi like Digibell Ku’damm and Conga-O-Matik and figured this is something I could do.

DANIEL: I spent a lot of years in a caravan somewhere in Northern Ethiopia. I had a tiny Walkman, which helped me stay sane; it can get a bit desolate out there in the desert. I remember trying to keep the sand out of the cassette player. I was a bit of a rabid music fan, always hunting for new bands and new sounds, and I did dream of being in a band one day myself, but not until I met these guys did I find someone with the patience to teach me what a chord was.

JIM: I was lucky to meet a guy called Daoussa who was frighteningly geeky about music. He had a massive suitcase full of vinyl LPs, and he even knew how to construct synthesizers and rough reproductions of analogue synthesizers; very cool. I’d just lock myself away with that chest and a record player for hours. I never imagined myself being anything other than a music enthusiast myself. I don’t have the – um – testicular fortitude to be on stage on my own, but with these guys it’s now possible.

Museke.com: Which foreign musicians did you listen to growing up?
BLINKY: Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder…

DANIEL: Michael Jackson was The Man, I wanted his shiny black trousers and I used to moonwalk and stuff (Did every kid try to moonwalk?). I liked soundtrack music to TV programs and movies; John Williams’ Superman Theme and The Imperial March from Star Wars are still favorites.
In high school I fell in with some hip hop heads, so listening to old Mobb Deep takes me back… With time I sampled music from people like Bjork, Jamiroquai, Phoenix, and Red Hot Chili Peppers…a lot of nameless dance music producers, and so forth, many of whom left a lasting mark on my musical tastes.

JIM: Since I had no access to regular radio, I was stuck in a 70s alternate universe for the first ten or so years of my life. I was listening to a lot of hippie folk and pop disco – Imagination, ABBA, John Denver and people like Nana Mouskouri and Demi Russo. Michael Jackson was Otherworldly. I also didn’t mind country music and folksy blues – John Denver, Skeeter Davies (I don’t admit that, usually) Dolly Parton et al. I’ve only mentioned that somewhat embarrassing fact because I find myself borrowing these guys’ guitars to play folksy stuff. Later on, I discovered early 90s funk – Black Box, Technotronic, C+C Music Factory – and the early R&B from people like Zhane and Brownstone; very cool.

Museke.com: Which African musicians did you listen to growing up?
BLINKY: My dad used to play a lot of Tabu Ley and Arlus Mabele records in the house, I also remember listening to Les Wanyika, and of course, San Fan Thomas!

DANIEL: Yvonne Chaka Chaka and that guy for I Need Some Money Oh!

JIM: That was Chicco! Those South African guys were so cool. I remember Om Alec Khaoli (he’s really good – I don’t know where he was from, though) and Tshala Muana. There were some songs on the Mbilia Bel and Tabu Ley album that were really cool, and Sam Fan Thomas – those seven minute jams were excellent! I still have them somewhere on my computer. The nice thing about all these songs is that most Kenyans grew up listening to them, so if you play them now you’d find people singing along. I was in a bus the other day, and that classic Anna Mwale song came on, and everyone was smiling…

Museke.com: Which African musicians do you admire (presently)?
BLINKY: I just got a Manu Dibango album that I really like, I think he’s funky; it’s like Isaac Hayes from Africa, Then my personal all time favorites are Richard Bona and Lionel Loueke. Asa is very cool, So are DJ Cleo and Bongo Maffin.

DANIEL: There’s a guy called Ismael Jingo who I would like to get more music from. This is Kenyan music from the 60s-70s. Currently, the South African Kwaito and House music scenes are really inspiring. I want to listen to more Kora music, and more of that group called Tinariwen. Zap Mama are very cool.

JIM: Is it Jingo or Djingo? Isn’t it strange how it’s easier to get new albums from the US than it is to get them from neighboring Uganda? I feel like there’s a lot of African music that we’ll never hear because our distribution here in Africa is a bit dodgy. There’s an energy and rawness in the old Benga from Kenya and people like Fela Kuti; we seem to have lost that energy somewhere along the way as Africans. People like Zap Mama and Asa are so cool – do Africans working from France count? It seems France agrees with African musicians.

Museke.com: What kind of music do you do and why do you do that kind of music?
BLINKY: Our music would be classified under experimental in my view, we’ve dabbled in house, pop, hip-hop, electronica, afro funk, jazz, neo soul and the list continues to grow daily, I guess we do the music that feels right at the moment that we are doing it.

DANIEL: We go wherever the feeling takes us. So far, we’ve journeyed through genres like dance/techno/disco, neo-soul, slow atmospheric stuff, and some stuff we don’t have the vocabulary to label. That’s actually where we’d like to go, eventually, because all three of us enjoy music that is a bit of an adventure, but we do like our funk and our atmospherics, so we want to put all that into a blender and come up with more tasty treats for y’all.
We do this kind of music because it’s exciting to make it when you don’t know where you’re going to end up, and hopefully people find it exciting to listen to. It’s like when Timbaland and Missy come out with new sounds and there’s all the hype like, “Have you guys HEARD this SONG?!?!?”

JIM: We get this question all the time. We do all kinds of music. We want to set ourselves up in such a way that no one would be surprised if we released a folk album one day and an industrial techno album the next day. There are so many things you can do with music; it would be suffocating to have to stick to one style.

Museke.com: How long did it take you to produce your first album?
BLINKY: When this year began, there were no plans for an album.

JIM: It started as a very small thing. We initially intended it to be an EP with just a few tracks, but after a few weeks of collating all the possible music, we discovered we had more than enough music for an album. After that, it took -

DANIEL: - mere weeks!

JIM: The tunes that ended up on the album had probably been brewing in each of our heads for the longest time. So, technically, it felt like mere weeks, ha, ha – but in reality, years.

Museke.com: Tell us about the Scratch to Reveal album. Why did you use that title and what should a listener expect from the album?
DANIEL: Expect sonic adventure!

JIM: For me, the title is about discovery, learning new things about ourselves. We’ve been a theoretical band for about five years before we sat down and started putting down some music – and in the process we learnt a lot about ourselves and about the people around us.
It’s very hard to describe your music objectively, no? So I have absolutely no idea what a listener would think about our music. This is the album we wish someone would have done, but no one did. So, we made it ourselves.

Museke.com: Congrats on the Kora award nomination. Tell us the story behind the Iwino Piny video. What is Iwinyo Piny and what language is that in?
DANIEL: Thanks, man. We’re really honored to be nominated. Iwinyo Piny roughly means “You Move the World”, it’s Luo (a local language from Kenya). The song has a positive, uplifting vibe, so we tried to translate that into the visuals, in a short story that hopefully puts across a feeling that people can walk out the door and see amazing things happening around them. People read their own stories into the visuals, though, which we like. It makes the whole experience a bit more participatory when the viewer has to jump in and try to connect the dots for themselves. So we try to not strictly pin down the meanings of everything in the video.

JIM: It’s strange how people come and explain to us what meaning they perceived in the video, their interpretations are always better than what we had. By the time we were wrapping it up, we just wanted to finish it and get it out of our computers.

Museke.com: How much work went into the Iwino Piny video?
DANIEL: A lot! It was the first time we tried to do such a thing, and we had a couple of missteps, ahem, which we thankfully got over.

JIM: Meaning we fought a lot about the ideas, the visuals…now I can’t remember what we were fighting about.

DANIEL: We actually made it over a long period of time because we were juggling school and jobs and all sorts of stuff, but I guess it would all add up to a few months’ work. I must add that we have gotten much faster since then. 

JIM: It gets easier each time you do it, you learn more productivity shortcuts.

Museke.com: Someone called your music ‘a pleasant departure from usual Kenyan music’. Are there no other alternative/funk/disco groups in Kenya? How big is funk or disco music in Kenya?
JIM: For the longest time, Kenyan music has been dominated by three main genres; a hip-hop/rap derivative known locally (sometimes pejoratively) as “Boomba”, afro-fusion (which borrows a lot from traditional and world music) and gospel music. Most Kenyan music fit neatly into one of the three genres.

BLINKY: There’s an underground scene that supports different alternative acts. Perhaps what they meant by ‘usual Kenyan music’ was what plays on radio and TV which has been at a plateau of sorts.

JIM: A vast desert, if you ask me…

DANIEL: As far back as 2000, there was a guy called Beach Boy who did one cool track and disappeared. Even Ogopa DJs had techno-flavored stuff on their first album. And we’ve met more people doing dance-y stuff recently but it’s all very underground right now. I guess that with the videos and interviews and so forth that we’ve been doing, we’re a bit more visible than many of the other acts…
JIM: We’re definitely not the first guys to dabble in alternative genres. I guess we were just the first to be obnoxious about it.

DANIEL: Having said that, I don’t think that the funk or disco sound is so far from what people get down to in the clubs, so it’s only a matter of time before people pick up on it.

Museke.com: Have you collaborated with any other musicians?
BLINKY: On Scratch to Reveal, we had a couple of guest artists who helped define the final sound of the album; namely Sarah Mitaru, Blaise, Liz Ogumbo, and Diana ‘Dee’ Nduba.

DANIEL: We like making music with our talented friends. We’ve also done some remixes for people; they were our training ground, of sorts.

JIM: The nice thing about those guest artists is that they are people who are always around the house anyway, so there wasn’t any pressure on them. We’d give them ice-cream then ask them if they wanted to sing. It always works; ice-cream. Maybe someone should tell those foreign diplomat types to try it instead of bombing each other.

Museke.com: Which musicians would you like to work with?
BLINKY: It would be nice to work with some artist from down South, and from West Africa. All the musicians I’d mentioned earlier would be cool to work with.

DANIEL: I’d be down to work with anyone who has a stack of ideas and a positive attitude (It’s mad how much of an effect that has on the work). It would be cool to do remixes for people like Bjork and Tinariwen…

Museke.com: Are you on a record label and how is that going?
BLINKY: We are on Rauka music, an independent record label that we also run. It’s been cool because we determine the direction that we want to go towards, it would be much nicer if the record label had lots of cash. 

JIM: We’re fiercely independent – unless someone wants to throw money at us. Then we’d do a Craig David and start churning out bland pop. Ha! For my part, I have very little faith in the structure of the music industry in Kenya, and the music industry worldwide is undergoing some upheaval. I think the idea of a record label is either going to change drastically in the days to come, or will be totally obliterated. We’re coming into an age where everyone can produce content, and so the value we place on that content has changed – which changes everything, from an industry/structure viewpoint. But I’m a pessimist, so I could be horribly wrong. I usually am.

Museke.com: Have you been approached by foreign labels?
DANIEL: Once, Rough Trade gave us a call, but then I woke up….

JIM: No, we haven’t. But if you ever hear loud screaming in the distance, that would be us on the day that a label actually approaches us. When I think about it, though, I’m not sure it would be the best thing because we can do all sorts of things the way we are now. Being signed to a label would probably change things. If we were on a label, I’d hope it would be a cool one like Astralwerks. That’s such a cool name!

Museke.com: What is the ‘Two countries’ project?
DANIEL: That’s a short animation project that I’m doing with some friends of mine, contributors to the blog kenyanimation.blogspot.com. That’s where updates about that project go. Just a Band will hopefully score the film, which would be fun; we get requests to use our tracks in other people’s films, so it would be nice to actually make music specifically for film.
The band seems to keep getting mistaken for musical animators, which we’re not, actually. One of us uses animation techniques in his work, and another one of us uses them to pay the bills.

JIM: And the other guy wouldn’t know animation if it burst into the room in pink tights…

Museke.com: What challenges do you face in the Kenyan music industry (piracy, payola, etc)?
BLINKY: The music industry is growing and that has to be applauded, but there’s a need for technical expertise particularly with regards to live sound, and sound engineering in the studio, in order to attract a lot more international concerts to Kenya. Distribution is also an area that could be improved, because not many urban artists have access to rural markets - regardless of whether they can or cannot buy the music - theoretically that’s an untapped market.

JIM: Things like piracy are a challenge for any musician in any country, so I take them as a given. If you’d asked me this question a few weeks ago, I’d have said that being a bit alternative is hard because the industry doesn’t know what to do with you. But in the past few weeks, there’s been the award nominations and general positive vibes, so I think we’ve been very lucky so far.

Museke.com: How can Kenyan music expand and sell internationally?
BLINKY: When the quality of the music improves and the quality of the live shows improve, the world will have no choice but to stop and listen.

DANIEL: With time and effort, hopefully we’ll come up with a sound that captures the imagination of the local audience and also appeals to international listeners. I think that before you start talking about making industry inroads and so forth, you have to look at whether there’s anything interesting going on in the first place. If there is, people tend to find you, rather than you having to force your work down people’s throats.

JIM: Being available for sale internationally would be a great start. It’s surprised us how easy it was to get the album onto iTunes. Recently I’ve been wondering whether our music would be interesting to people outside Kenya. Hmmmm…

Museke.com: What is the future of your music?
BLINKY: It would be nice to do a tour, when we are ready for it. The future seems scary sometimes, because things change so suddenly. Last year at a time like this, we didn’t know we’d do what we’ve done this year. On my front, I choose to watch it unravel without any preconceived notions. May seem presumptuous, but it works for me. 

DANIEL: We are working on a mad live show. We are also making new music, stay tuned for announcements about that. We’re trying to evolve the sound.
JIM: We’ve been playing around in the studio, and I like the new sounds; they’re more self-assured.

Museke.com: Have you guys worked on any animation projects for the television, movie or gaming industries? If not, do you have plans to do so?
DANIEL: My day job is animating on a kids’ show that’s being produced by a local company, it’ll start airing in January of 2009. I do intend to maintain some kind of involvement in the animation scene, hopefully help develop things locally and make some headway internationally. That’s what the Kenyanimation blog is all about, actually; the industry here is very, very small but it’s exciting to be involved in building something new, you know? We have artistic influences from America, Japan and all points in between, and when you brew all that in an African pot, you’re bound to come up with some amazing new stuff, whichever medium it ends up going out in.

Museke.com: Do you have any present engagements and works other than music?
BLINKY: For now music occupies most of my time. Hopefully next year, I’ll venture into some untested avenues.

DANIEL: Just the day job, and animation projects that are updated on the blog.

JIM: In my other life, I’m a photographer. Sometimes the two areas co-exist peacefully, sometimes they compete for my attention and things get crazy.

Museke.com: What are your hobbies and pastimes?
BLINKY: Football; I love football. I get beaten mercilessly on the PlayStation though. I also enjoy movies and cooking, that’s a new hobby.

JIM: His cooking is hard on us guys who have to eat the results, though.

DANIEL: It’s funny you ask, because I am currently engaged in a titanic struggle to get a life outside of work.  A lot of stuff that I’d do for fun, like movies and books, feel like work because I’m looking at them with that eye that you develop when you’re writing/drawing/working on a song. So I think I’ll take up some physical activity. Once I free up some time…

JIM: I just met a guy from South Africa who told me that left-handed people worldwide are forming a global political coalition that will eventually take over world power and subject all right-handed people to a life of forced labor. Did you know that over 2,500 left-handed people are killed every year from using products made for right-handed people? So, recently, my friends and I have been hunting down left-handed people and putting them away (in a humane fashion). When I’m not doing that, I sky-dive and dismantle bombs for fun. And I was kidding about Blinky’s cooking, it’s quite good.

Museke.com: Do you have a website?
DANIEL: Our website is www.just-a-band.com, where we fill folks in on what’s going on with the band.

JIM: The website is one of our primary ways of getting in touch with our audience. It’s been really helpful.

Museke.com: Give us your Parthian shot – last words.
BLINKY: The dog that chases its tail, will be dizzy.

JIM: Dizzy dog actually sounds like a nice title for something. A tee-shirt company or something.

DANIEL: If you meant, like, wise words, then yo, Daniel say, “Hold on to Reality with Light Grip.” 

JIM: Has anyone checked whether Obama is left-handed? I know your secret, you evil lefties!

Pictures are from Just A Band's website.