Passionate about horns: I found a home in music

Friday Entertainment Pictures from pre-event activities by various Kenyan artists.[Courtesy]

At one time, while working his 8 to 5 job, Nairobi Horns Project founder, MacKinlay Musembi was thinking about his life.

He had just watched Apple founder Steve Jobs say that he lived every day like it was his last.

He had also just watched a close friend die of cancer, and was asking himself, “What if I was told today that I have cancer and six months to live?

“I realised that I would stop the work I was doing and live in a studio until I die. So I asked myself, ‘Why can’t I just do that now? Why do I have to wait until I am told I am going to die? If I feel that strongly about music, why not try it?’”

He felt that while he was a good project manager, he owed a lot of what he had achieved in life to music, and he had had more impact as a musician than with anything else. That was the beginning of his taking the leap fully into music as a career.

We’re seated on the lawn outside the studio that he and his partner opened last year. His trumpet case is placed between us on the bench.

“You know, I grew up carrying this thing around…” he says of the trumpet case, “....so you learn to make everything out of it. Even when you board a matatu, you know that space between seats? You put it there and sit on it. So they’re very versatile.”

He plays a couple of tunes on the trumpet - he is good, easily playing the beginning of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5 in C Minor, but I nearly squeal when he plays the much simpler (in my estimation as someone who has never touched a trumpet) but very familiar “wah wah waaah” sound effect that you always hear in cartoons after a fail or disappointment. It’s also known as the womp womp sound or the sad trombone sound effect.

If it wasn’t for his mother and her faith - her faith in him and her literal faith as a member of the Salvation Army, he might never have known that music was a viable career, especially because as he says, in those days, the arts was not something you chose for a career. Not that his dreams were too lofty either. He grew up in Kisauni, Mombasa, where poverty, drugs and crime were a big problem.

“There were no opportunities, so in primary school my aspiration was to be a matatu conductor. Those were the people who had a better life in our eyes, with a daily wage and all. If you made it big you were a truck driver,” he says.

When he finished primary school, high school was not in his sight and he became a market boy for three months before someone decided to pay school fees for him and he joined Tudor Day Secondary School.

“When I got to high school, my mum said my brother and I had to stay out of trouble, meaning we went to church.”

The church was the Salvation Army, and brass is to the Salvation Army what acapella is to the SDA.

“We grew up in the Salvation Army, playing brass instruments. If you go to the Salvation Army you’ll play a brass instrument. Many people have done it and stopped at some point. It’s like singing in the choir. It’s our thing.

“My entire family plays brass instruments. Extended family. I’m not talking about nuclear. I can have a 30-piece brass choir made up of my family members if I wanted to. Maybe I should do that,” he says.

His mother said that they had to join, so when there was a call for new members she went and registered his and his elder brothers’ names with the bandmaster.

“Of course the first day, I didn’t go, and I got into trouble. She shouted at me and I decided to just go so that she could chill out. So on the second day I went and I was like, ‘Hmm.’ I had just found something that was really natural to me,” he says.

He started with the euphonium, an instrument that is like a tuba, and he says he became obsessed. He was 13 or 14 years old, and by 15, he was leading the brass band.

“I was writing scores, which is not something a lot of people were doing. I remember we used to look forward to national holidays because during Moi’s time the police brass bands would only be in Nairobi. So we used to play for the provincial celebrations and then we would go to State House and eat!” he says with a laugh.

Never saw music as a career

Despite his prowess, he still never considered music a viable career, although it saved him once again, after keeping him out of trouble in his high school days.

“When I finished high school, that was it. That was the end of the plan,” he says, even though he had received a letter of admission to Moi University to study Language and Literary Studies.

“You weren’t planning to go to university?” I ask.

“But how? Who would pay for me?”

No one in his lineage had ever been to university, so it was not something that he thought was in his cards. Music, once again, came to the rescue after he did all sorts of menial jobs.

“I heard of an opportunity to play trumpet in a church - the church was called The Glory Is Here. Yes, the good bishop’s church,” he says, in response to my look of recognition.

He played for three months without pay, until the week before he was due to join university.

Nairobi Horns Project Founder and Managing Director Mackinlay Mutsembi.[Wilberforce Okwiri, Standard]

“I asked them to let the bishop know about me so that I could get paid but I was still being told to wait. That Wednesday I went to the church cafe, sat down and wrote three pages about my life for the bishop - where I had come from, how I got to her church.

“I wrote it and said it would get to the bishop somehow. I photocopied it and put it in every offering box, every suggestion box, the bishop’s box - I said if she didn’t respond I would ambush her at the kesha that Friday night. And she had security! Big guys.

“Somehow, she ended up reading the letter by that Friday, called me and offered me the money. He got Sh15,000. That’s how I joined university. The rest came from Helb (Higher Education Loans Board),” he says.

He had to keep working while in university to stay afloat, struggling at first before finding an income in art, graphics, performance, deejaying, production, assembling computers and other odd jobs.

Discovering jazz

After university, he “tarmacked” before getting a job in 2008 at Kesho Kenya. While in Kilifi, he learned about jazz.

“When I went to Kilifi I found some two white men - Pete and Al. On the board of the job I had, Pete’s wife was the secretary. So she said, ‘Oh my husband plays, come in the evening and hang out and play! Pete and Al were research scientists. Pete was a violin player and Al was a guitarist. So we would just get together in the evening and jam.

“It became a thing. I joined Pete and Al, they were playing jazz - they gave me my first jazz record to listen to. That was how I got introduced to jazz by those guys, in Kilifi. Around 2008.

We would do local gigs in local pubs, call people to come and watch us, but it wasn’t a job. I learned a lot under those people,” he says.

They formed a band called the Barrel Bottom Scrapers, which, with all the people coming in from all over the world to the Kilifi scene, he learned music and also learned management.

In 2012, a group going for tour to Europe was looking for a trumpet player, and his name came up. He ended up touring for four months with big names like Silaiyo, Ameelina, Mayonde, Patricia Kihoro, Anto Neosoul, Daddie Marto and Charles Ouda.

“When I came back, I realised that music could be a job. After five years at the NGO, I also had the itch to get into self-employment.. At that time I was also in the middle of my MBA in Strategy. The pull was very strong, so I said that when my contract ended I would get into it.

“Before the contract ended, I got a phone call from Coke Studio. They needed trumpet players. After Season One, I even changed my thesis. I thought if I was going into the music industry, I’d better understand it. So I did a thesis on music business. Business Models in the Kenyan Music Industry. It helped me to interrogate and understand a lot about the industry.

“During Season Two of Coke Studio is when I got the idea to form a horns section since I have always been in the horns section. The initial plan for Nairobi Horns was: can I have a horns section that could be used by any band?”

He talked to people he had met in the industry and Nairobi Horns Project was born. He moved to Nairobi in 2015 to focus on music. They got recognition in 2016 after curtain-raising for Hugh Masekela at the Safaricom International Jazz Festival, their very first public performance as Nairobi Horns Project.

Today, Nairobi Horns Project, an instrumental band that is led by a horns section, is lauded for helping push instrumental music to the forefront.

“Sometimes people call it jazz, sometimes people call it party music, but what we do is give a different character of the brass and the horns to the music that you are already familiar with.” he says.

While he still wears many hats as a writer, producer, project manager and businessman, he is now truly settled in music.

“I owe a lot to music. It has changed my life. Music has played a huge role at every stage of my life. Music makes me feel good. Forget that it pays or anything. It’s something I genuinely love. I will always be a musician.”