Melodica: 47 years of whispering music into Kenyans’ ears

You are walking northwards past Elimu Co-operative House on Tom Mboya Street. A brief scuffle erupts with the sudden swiftness of David Rubadiri's famous poem, 'An African Thunderstorm'. You hurriedly give way. Shoulders and arms brush past you, hawkers fleeing into the small cracks of the city streets sacks on their weary backs. City Council askaris stand dazed by their own loss.

But the askari who pretends to buy time near the ground floor door to Elimu Co-operative House might be doing so for quite a different reason: the timeless Congolese rumba sound filtering saxophone melody onto Tom Mboya Street. That is Melodica Music Stores whose music distribution idea has been feeding Kenyans for 47 years now.

Human body

"World music is as complex and diverse as the human body," says Abdul Karim, the 1962-born proprietor who is following his late father's footsteps.

"My mother and I sell all kinds of music in this shop and we also occasionally give free music on our website. Our competitors wonder if we aren't wasting time. I tell them that music resembles the human body: I lose nothing by pricking my little finger and donating to you just one drop of my red blood. Why should I begrudge you what I can't exhaust even in my entire lifetime?" he says.

His late father Pravinlal Laljibhai Daudia (known to many people simply as PL Daudia), was a man of culture. Music flowed in his blood.

While the family still lived in Eldoret before independence, the father began following his passion by literally walking and selling music. That changed when the family shifted to Nairobi after Kenya's independence.

In Kenya Special (2013), cultural anthropologist Douglas Patterson writes of the Nairobi music production scene of the '60s:

"There were a few Swahili and Congolese rumba recordings from River Road but more often those styles were left to the multinational labels like Polygram, EMI, and CBS or the label proprietors of Europe or East Asian descent".

Melodica was one of the latter.

Having started in 1968, the music production and distribution business was first based at Bonanza, on Luthuli Avenue and only shifted to Co-operative House on Tom Mboya Street in 1971.

It was after the family moved to Nairobi that PL Daudia made contacts with men of culture such as the late Joseph Murumbi and Tom Mboya.

One of the photos in the large music shop shows Daudia and Mzee Jomo Kenyatta shaking hands at a meeting of the Music Copyright Society of Kenya, back in the day. The other photos portray different musicians who visited the music nerve centre in the past: Daudi Kabaka, the Tanzanian Kinyonga Brothers, the Congolese crooner Niboma Mwandido, Luambo Makiadi, Tabu Ley, Babu Kabaselleh, Suzanna Owiyo, and many other world singers of note.

Every singer

The shelves are packed to bursting with the music of nearly every Kenyan benga singer who ever lived, and from the earliest possible period. The reception is very warm. Before you buy, you are urged to sit and listen to what you want to buy.

"What shook us a bit was my father's death in 1981" says Mr Karim. "My mother and I sweated to keep the idea going. But our effort was not helped by the sudden flood of the piracy madness which swallowed the country around that time. We also lacked the experience then, and so we turned to the music distribution aspect in the early '90s. We have never looked back".

Karim says music pirates will one day take Kenyan music to the grave.

"They are clever people. They come here, buy one original CD, and use it as the master copy. They then reproduce thousands of that and sell in the streets. They reap a lot of money at the expense of the musician. It is very unfair. You only wish the Government could come in," he says.

It is a point Doug Patterson makes in Andreas Hansen's Guardian Africa Network. Patterson is quoted as saying: "Kenya has always had one of the most diverse and intoxicating musical cultures in Africa. Yet the immense talent is rarely acknowledged internationally and seldom given the resources it needs to flourish".

For his part in the same article, Kenyan benga singer Daniel Kamau (DK) says:

"The 1970s were really the golden years of Kenyan music. In the 1980s the music piracy increased with introduction of cheap cassettes to the local market. The tapes were copied in Uganda and then sold cheaply in Kenya. We tried lowering our prices but the pirates just decreased theirs even further. We just could not compete with them".

Andreas Hansen writes of how DK and his group of Kenyan singers waged and lost the battle against piracy even in Nigeria, where their music was also being pirated.

"In the 1970s DK and his companions took their fight against piracy to Nigeria. Their mission failed and after a few weeks they had to flee the country as the authorities were threatening to arrest them," he writes.

Musical identity

Karim says selling music online as they do on the Melodica Music Stores website is one way of beating the pirates. Even so, he says, this does not mean he will let Kenyans miss out on the music mood of the 1980s when the much loved record player was in vogue.

"There are Kenyans whose fathers left behind piles and piles of vinyl LPs", he says. "But they do not have the record players to listen to these vinyl records. This group of music lovers will only have to wait for a very short time before I come to their rescue".

Karim says he tbelieves Kenya will find her musical groove again.

He regrets that Kenyans are not good at being proud of themselves and that this has negatively eaten into the country's musical identity.

He says West Africans beat Kenyans because the former are jealously proud of what is theirs.

Karim says his devotion to music is total. He cannot live without world music, and considers it an unnecessary source of boredom for someone to listen to only one genre of music. He says he occasionally shouts on an upper floor of the apartment in which the family lives. This happens every time he comes across a fantastic sound from somewhere in the world. His mother and wife shout back at him, "What's wrong there with you Karim? Please get serious. You will run mad because of that music!"

"Mali, Senegal, and Nigeria stuck to their traditional musical instruments. The Kenyan youth are very talented musically. No guitarist in the world can play the solo guitar the way Katitu Boys Band does. But I advise everybody else to pause and look back at the path historically travelled by their communal music. One way would be to identify any of their communities' traditional instruments, modernise its sound to weave a unique identity, and stick to it no matter what. Let them learn from Suzanna Owiyo and a few other serious Kenyan musicians," Karim opines.