How I built a career with 60 drums - VIDEO

The trumpet tears through the atmosphere of titters, its notes in cosy communion with the rhythm of shakers. Both rise in pitch and tempo before dropping to the tuneful beats of Kasiva Mutua’s drum. The night is frosty, the music electrifying and the audience gaga.

Kasiva is part of a trio—with Fadhilee Itulya and Turkish trumpeter Jesse Selengut—performing at a private dinner at Ankole in Kitisuru, Nairobi.

Watching her play, you can only draw one conclusion: Kasiva is made for percussion and they are for her. Except none floats her boat quite as drums do. The percussionist, drummer and composer hauls these wherever she goes.

“I have brought the traditional Kenyan drum to boardrooms. I have also taken them to educational and conservation spaces,” says she with glee that sits permanently on her face.

After 15 years in percussion, Kasiva is arguably Kenya’s most renowned drummer. She has more than 20 drums and has owned more than 60 throughout her career—with about the same number of shakers.

“The only place I can be my absolute sincere self is in front of my drums. It’s the only place I come bare,” she says.

Her childhood had a lot of sounds and, consequently, rhythm. “I would try to replicate the sounds I heard in my environment on my body parts and any household item.”

The Uganda-trained journalist would grow to become a storyteller through the drum, inspired by her grandmother.

“I didn’t drum because I thought I could make an income from it. Drumming just made me happy,” she says.

The first time she was paid for playing, Kasiva could not believe it. “It had never occurred to me that I could actually earn for having fun, because to me, playing the drum was more fun than work.”

We meet for this interview days after the release of Kasiva’s EP (extended play), her debut project, a single, titled “Hakukole.” I ask her what the project is about, what the process has taught her, and why the name.

“Hakukole is Hawaiian. It is an art form (in song) designed to ridicule one in a sarcastic, witty way but also to teach them. The song is about people who travel abroad for a short while and come back Westernised in every sense,” she explains.

Before this project, she had never recorded music before. It took her eight months to complete the single, a journey she says brought out fear mixed with anxiety.

‘‘Dropping new music is like giving a part of your soul away. Overall, the project has made me tougher. But it has also taught me to trust my circle, that is my producer, family, and friends, all who have been there to reassure me.’’

She then starts talking about the business of music. For starters, this professional has been travelling the world extensively in the last 10 years, performing in different countries. She has also been a part of major music projects on the continent, notable among them Coke Studio Africa, The Nile Project, OneBeat and X-Jazz Women.

“Meeting and collaborating with musicians from different cultural backgrounds has built my muscle and expanded my mind and musical ear,’’ she says.

“I’m living off percussion full-time. If you put in the work and the hours, so many opportunities present themselves. What these have taught me is that, ultimately, it’s all about how you relate the drum to people’s everyday lives. Art is everyday life.”

She is, however, quick to clarify that the “core” of her music has stayed even as she has had to perform for other reasons. “The true love for music is constant. But you have to pay bills: rent and put food on the table. You no longer sit in the house and play; you have to write proposals and presentations. Sometimes even walking to boardrooms and pitching your ideas.”

“If some people travel the world giving talks to inspire audiences and earning millions in the process, I can also monetise the inspirational story of how I discovered rhythm by telling it to, say, women-led organisations and youth groups.”

Like many people, Kasiva used to listen only to music in her immediate circumstances, namely Kenyan, Ugandan and Lingala.

“After meeting musicians from Burundi, Morocco, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Iraq and Hawaii, I realised I had been enclosed in a narrow space [musically]. This has now allowed me to be open in ways that I perceive rhythm in music and the stories I tell.”

Kasiva says her open-mindedness has allowed her to take on multicultural projects with ease through collaborations. One moment she is playing with Omutibo music artiste Itulya. Next, she is backing Afro-rock genius Tetu Shani with incredible fluidity.

“I’m always picking up different elements from these different types of music. I believe culture is dynamic, and these elements shape the person I’m becoming.”

Building a career in percussion, though, was not easy. As a student in Uganda, Kasiva would sometimes take a night bus from Kampala to Nairobi to do a night gig. “I would go back tired but very fulfilled.”

After her studies in Uganda, she was not sure about becoming a musician. “My mother was sceptical.”

But being sexualised for being a female drummer was her biggest turn-off. “Men would ask me to sit like a woman. I always wondered how else I was supposed to hold the instrument other than between my legs. While playing, I forget all the judgment.”

I wonder where she is in her musical journey at the moment. Has she, for instance, found her voice? Kasiva sits cross-legged, seemingly rummaging the information safe in her mind. “I’m at a place of a lot of curiosity. When I get an opportunity, I like to travel. During my travels, I collect and bring home different drums and learn to play them, either in their native manner or my way.”

Her musical ear must be difficult to impress, I remark. Kasiva says she is always trying to find texture in different sounds and is attracted first to anything with drums and percussion, then all other types of music.

When I ask her if she could sit through an acapella performance, she explains why even the plainest of sounds have rhythm in them.

“A bird whistle may sound just like that: a whistle. But if you looped those whistles over time, you would realise there is actually some musicality in it.” Jazz, she notes, is the only type of music her ear is yet to figure out.

If you stripped this woman of her history and drums, only darkness and death would remain. “I don’t know anything else without those things. I can’t unlearn who I am. Drumming isn’t something I do. It is who I am.”

Does she have a family? She says she has one, only it is not in humans. “I live with a lot of drums and I consider them my family.”

On what fills her time away from her drums, Kasiva says she loves to cook, with coconut beans and rice topping the list of her favourite foods. “I prefer vegetarian and vegan dishes to meat. But I’m also a bit of a pescatarian.”

She is also picking up new instruments on the go, expanding her creative boundaries, and writing more. “I can’t wait to explore those possibilities and possibly to work on an album.”

To do this, she says she has invested heavily in her art, by acquiring state-of-the-art equipment. “I will go out of my way to get good tech gear that produces the cleanest sounds, videos, and pictures. It all comes down to what makes me stand out. I would rather invest in percussion than in a fancy car, house or nails.”

She always has in her car a Zoom recorder, Bluetooth speaker, laptop and a guitar “that I’m learning to play.”

She also invests in Motra Music, a grassroots group of young female percussion artistes that she co-founded in 2015 with two other drummers.

“We mentor them and teach them rhythm, percussion, and the history of drumming. Some of the girls are still in school and living with their parents. I [facilitate] them to give the push that I never had when I was starting out.”

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