Combing through a family member’s history following their death is a routine, if sombre and difficult task that falls to many a close relative. Committing to publicly honour that person’s life and work in a tangible way is something else entirely. Over seven years, just such a project has occupied Berlin-based producer Joseph Kamaru, who makes leftfield electronic music as KMRU. His objective was to memorialise and widen awareness outside Africa of his grandfather, also Joseph, a hugely influential figure in Kenya’s music history and a political activist, who died in 2018 aged 79.
Combing through a family member’s history following their death is a routine, if sombre and difficult task that falls to many a close relative. Committing to publicly honour that person’s life and work in a tangible way is something else entirely. Over seven years, just such a project has occupied Berlin-based producer Joseph Kamaru, who makes leftfield electronic music as KMRU. His objective was to memorialise and widen awareness outside Africa of his grandfather, also Joseph, a hugely influential figure in Kenya’s music history and a political activist, who died in 2018 aged 79.
Heavy Combination may be a labour of familial love but like the dozens of his grandfather’s recordings that KMRU has remastered and reissued via Bandcamp since 2019, it’s also a corrective to the flood of shoddy digital uploads that appeared after his death. The double album is a showcase of benga, the style that came to define Kenyan music from the 1960s, and specifically Kamaru’s advancement of it. A blend of lilting, palm-wine guitar and energetic percussion with faint notes of Ghanaian highlife and Congolese rumba, the genre is so innately rhythmic as to make “song” and “dance” all but synonymous.
After taking up guitar in the mid-’60s, Kamaru taught himself to play the accordion and keyboard; he then formed the Kamaru Celina Band, with his sister Catherine Muthoni, and later the City Sound Band, Kamaru Super Stars and Kamaru Supersounds – all but the last appear on this compilation. Along the way he opened two shops, and a recording studio with associated label Kenya United Sounds.
Though its running order ignores chronology, the collection ranges from 1966’s “Njohi Ndirĩ Mwarimũ”, where Kamaru leans on a harvest folk dance to address the issue of alcohol abuse in a fast-developing Kenya, to “Nĩ Kĩrume” (2007), in which he pegs a warning to politicians about the divine nature of leadership to the gĩtiiro, a traditional dance performed by women as part of the dowry ceremony. Both show how strongly rooted Kikuyan language, customs and storytelling are in Kamaru’s songs, as well as illustrate his socio-political outspokenness across a long career. More controversial is 1969’s “Ndari Ya Mwarimũ Pt. 2”. It aimed to redress the balance of Kamaru’s original song, in which he rebuked a (fictional) teacher for having an inappropriate relationship with a student. It triggered the threat of a nationwide teachers’ strike, while the sequel was banned by the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation. Elsewhere Kamaru hits closer to home, counselling on long-distance romantic relationships, civilised breakups and the harm done by gossip.
“Kenya Kũrũngara” (also the title of his 1977 LP, released via RCA), opens the set. A song from Kamaru’s imperial decade and a heartfelt paean to his homeland, it’s also a driving, electric blues-rock number with country twanging and a groovy fadeout. This might surprise anyone expecting back-to-back acoustic benga but like the music scenes of so many African nations in the ’70s, Kenya’s boomed, with psych- and funk-rock bands like Black Savage and Matata enjoying international success. Similarly West-leaning is “Ke Wapendane”, which features lyrics in both Kikuyu and Swahili and consists of little more than choral repetition of the title phrase (translation, “let them love each other”) over a simple, see-sawing guitar melody. So too are the lonesome, countrified “Wa Mwene Nĩ Ũmwe” and 1988’s “Ĩkĩhanda Mũnyũgĩ”, with its strikingly du jour, synthetic drum cracks.
Tracks arguably more in keeping with an artist dubbed “the king of Kikuya benga” – and among the set’s standouts – are a pacey “Karolina” (featuring the Kamaru Super Stars) with its irresistibly sweet, trebly lead guitar work, the surge-retreat dynamic and interlaced ringing guitar that constitute 2007’s epic “Kĩmiiri” and “Mũhiki Wa Mikosi”, where benga’s characteristic rhythmic bounce and pizzicato strings meet high-register, female backing vocals and a totally unexpected “excuse me”. Into the early ’90s, Kamaru was still packing out Nairobi nightclubs with his band but in 1993, he made the shock announcement that he had been “born again” and so renounced secular song in favour of gospel, while working as an evangelist. His profile faded fast and even after his later return to popular music, it never really recovered.
He was by no means the lone standard bearer of Kenyan benga – Collela Mazee, Daniel Owino Misiani and George Ramogi also loom large in its history – but Joseph Kamaru’s prodigious output, strongly socio-political lyrics, promotion of Kikuyan identity and serious commercial success mark him out as an Afro-pop figurehead. The career-spanning Heavy Combination, with its invaluable song-by-song liner notes and insightful essays (one by KMRU), does a fine job of championing his work.
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