My core argument in this chapter is that Nairobi’s new recording industry has taken shape in large part through individual projects that are at once wholly musical and wholly entrepreneurial, involving moves and strategies in musical form geared as much toward generating new business models and organisations as they are toward particular a…[Read more]

This chapter is an updated and newly illustrated version of “Islam, Sound and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship on the Kenyan Coast,” originally published in the volume _Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience_ (2013, ed. Georgina Born, Cambridge University Press).

This paper explores the role of mobile telecommunication and technology firms (MTTs) in the distribution of recorded music in Ghana and Kenya. These countries both have vibrant music markets with weak formal distribution networks. Limited enforcement of copyright regimes and weak market regulation created new entrepreneurial business models. While…[Read more]

An essay written for the catalog for the exhibition, “Benga: Kenyan Kaleidoscope” (Bureau Sepän). French translation by Gabriella Seemann.

From the catalog:
Se référant à une performance musicale à laquelle il a assisté et impliquant l’un des musiciens les plus en vue du Kenya, Dan Aceda, dans cet essai, ce professeur de la New York Univers…[Read more]

Review: Badenya: Manden Jaliya in New York City. From the series: Global Beat of the Boroughs by Tom van Buren; Abou Sylla; Center for Traditional Music and Dance, New York

Review of: Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire by Bob W. White.

Review of: Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, by Louise Meintjes.

Review of Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World by Eric Charry 2012

This report lays out preliminary notes and findings from an on-going investigation intothe ways in which mobile phone commerce, or ‘m-commerce’, is transforming the Kenyan music industry.

BOOK REVIEW
African musics in context: institutions, culture, identity, edited by Thomas Solomon, Kampala, Uganda, Fountain Publishers, 2015, xxvi + 365 pp., £28.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-9-970-25245-9
Ethnomusicology in East Africa: perspectives from Uganda and beyond, edited by Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Thomas Solomon, Kampala, Uganda,…[Read more]

Review of: Hip-Hop Colony. DVD. Michael Wanguhu, director, 2007. Chatsworth, CA: Emerge Media Group.

Employing approaches from ethnomusicology and vocal anthropology, Eisenberg undertakes an interpretive-ethnographic analysis of Indian taarab, a genre of Swahili song on the Kenyan coast that features Swahili words set to Hindi film song melodies performed in a distinctly Indian style. Eisenberg argues that Swahili musicians and audiences derive…[Read more]