Kenya's Story
People who have come to hear singer-songwriter Kenya Kondo play are sometimes surprised that the Nairobi native’s music isn’t more sonically evocative of the country for which he’s named. If not influenced by benga, soukous or the sounds coming out of Central Africa, Kondo’s impassioned pop songcraft is the undeniable product of the journey that brought him from Africa to Canada and launched him on his present musical course.
“I got started in music by accident,” confesses Kondo, who aspired to a career as an astronomer as a teenager in Kenya. “My mother bought a second-hand guitar from a local carpenter and just had it lying around the house with the intention of learning how to play, because she loved music. I picked it up one day when the radio was on figuring out how to play the melodies by ear.”
From picking out pop vocal melodies on the low E-string of an out-of-tune guitar, Kondo was writing his own songs within a couple of years and, in no time, recruiting his brother and other musicians to perform them at school and church functions, eventually winning a spot in the final five in a national star search competition.
“There is that expectation that anyone from Africa should play that style of music. But that’s not the path I followed in my own growth,” he says of his influences. “My mother was really big into top 40 radio, so every Saturday morning this syndicated show from the US would be playing while I was studying. I started out doing a lot of covers—Simon and Garfunkel, Eagle Eye Cherry, Matchbox 20, Motown—I love the Motown sound. Anything with a great melody, a catchy beat, that’s what gets me going.”
Still fascinated by the sciences when he finished high school, Kondo started looking around the world for his next opportunity, eventually selecting the physics program at the University of Alberta as his gateway to a career in astronomy. The harsh reality of his decision set in when he arrived in Edmonton in the dead of winter to begin his studies.
“The sense of transition from one culture to another, learning to get settled here, and arriving in January for the first time, dealing the literal darkness and the cold, the things I took for granted at home really started hitting me,” he recalls. For better or worse, Kondo found himself flush with lyrical inspiration.
Eventually he found work with the U of A’s international centre researching international mobility and serving as ambassador to newly arrived foreign students. It’s in this capacity Kondo found his way back to the stage, performing his songs at campus functions and taking tentative steps into Edmonton’s storied singer-songwriter scene.
Seeking to enlarge on his solo sound, Kondo rounded up players from diverse background who cohered around his songs, founding the acoustic jam band Kitchen’s Passport, which allowed him to extend his reach onto Edmonton’s louder live music stages. As he went from student to staff at the U of A, Kondo also branched out into writing music for television and independent film, even lending his warm, sonorous tenor to voice work. Kitchen’s Passport disbanded and Kondo took a break from performance to concentrate on a professional career settling into Edmonton with his wife-to-be. But the urge to write and perform music never left him.
“As I begin my 30s, having been a musician for half my life, there’s been a strong desire to have something that says, this is my music,” Kondo says. Undaunted by the inability to find the right musicians to translate his songs in the studio, Kondo hooked up with LA-based musicians for a continent-spanning collaboration: a 10-song album entitled Wait.
“The back-story of Wait is the journey of meeting someone, falling in love, having your heart broken and learning something about yourself at the end of it all,” Kondo says.
He adds that while the difficulties of arriving in Canada stimulated his songwriting at the time, he’s found inspiration in assuming other viewpoints.
“The more I wrote, the more I found that when I was in a low place that’s when things really flowed. Writing for other people, other voices, with other musicians in mind -- that helped me to keep writing without having to go to that low place.”
Kenya returns to his roots as a singer-songwriter with his debut album 'WAIT'.
