Kutiman’s fourth album ‘Wachaga’ transports you into a world of Spiritual Jazz dreams, ancient folklore, and escapism with percussion spiraling across borrowed rhythm patterns and Chagga chants and bells by the choirs of the Wachaga nation.
People have been living around the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro for millennia. One day in 2014 another jeep pulled up, in a rural neighbourhood where many people from the Wachaga nation live, work and play. This jeep contained Ophir ‘Kutiman’ Kutiel, the producer, multi-instrumentalist, and filmmaker who is get-stopped-in-the-supermarket famous in his home country despite being terminally shy of the spotlight.
Kutiman carried microphones, video recording equipment, and a request for creative collaboration to Tanzania – and he left Wachaga with a set of recordings. Some of these were of everyday sounds and some contained special sounds: school children from the city of Arusha playing drums or the dancers who wore bells to add a percussive element to the movement, like the metal plate in a tap dancer’s shoe.
Returning home from his trip to the self-organised kibbutz community where he lives in the western Negev desert, he began dipping into the recordings to see how he could use them as a starting point for his own musical and visual explorations.
Fast forward six years, and we have ‘Wachaga’, an audiovisual feast which contains nine tracks and nine kaleidoscopic video pieces, named after the 2.4 million Tanzanians who live mostly on the southern and eastern sides of Mount Kilimanjaro.