Meet Tanzanian/Alice Springs musician Katanga Junior
good music and desert beauty
This March I was stoked to score a press pass to WOMADelaide in Adelaide, South Australia. It was a wild heat wave of incredible music from all over the planet. If you want to know all the ins and outs you can read my (free-to-view) review for the Newcastle Herald, but for tonight’s Substack I’m highlighting one of the artists I met through my friend Kodi Twiner. (Kodi is a talented musician and world wanderer who knows what’s good.) Kodi encouraged me to go see her mates’ band, Katanga Junior.
Katanga Junior is a six-piece-band currently based in Alice Springs, (often known to locals by its traditional Aboriginal name, Mparntwe) in the Northern Territory. (Alice Springs is also affectionately called “Alice” in Australia.) Katanga is not only the band name, but also the name of the the lead singer, originally from Tanzania. Through Kodi and the band’s lovely manager Shauna, I was able to catch Katanga for 10 minutes to learn more about him and his music.
Katanga is a guitar player, singer/songwriter, a teacher and a father. He’s been living in Australia for the last five years. He started out in Victoria and four years ago he moved to Alice Springs. Before he sang and played guitar, he was a drummer. He describes his sound as “vibing music,” reggae, hip hop, Afro fusion, afro beats, all those things and “squish them together.”
All the other band members hail from various parts of Australia. The band got started as soon as Katanga arrived in Alice. Keyboardist Darcy Davis and others encouraged him to go to an open mic, and then Darcy eventually became one of his band members.
”He asked me to host the next open mic, and that’s how I take off from that day,” Katanga told me. “I started playing with him. We record my first EP.”
His first EP on Spotify is called “Moto” which means “fire blazing” in Swahili.
He recorded other albums with different producers. His most recent album, released earlier this year is calling “Pamoja” which means “together” in Swahili. On this album he recorded and collaborated with Indigenous artists.
Womadelaide is the biggest festival he’s ever performed at and the furthest away he and his band has ever travelled in order to play. They usually just drive to Darwin and back.
”Now we off the chain,” he says laughing.
He’s performed and enjoyed Nannup Music Festival in Western Australia and he loved playing at Wide Open Space Festival in the Northern Territory as well.
”I want to perform every year. I wish I could get in. It’s really good, like in the middle of nowhere, in the desert,” he says of Wide Open Spaces.
I asked him how music in Tanzania compares to Australia.
“It's not similar, man,” he told me.
The two countries have very different music. Australians like his music, but sometimes they are scared of change and scared of music they don’t usually hear on the radio.
Music alone is not his main income, but he hopes one day it might be. In Alice Springs he works with special needs kids. He brings his guitar to class which the kids love.
He’s happy living in Alice for the time being.
”It’s where I’m happy to be. I’m home,” he says. “Alice Springs is really beautiful. It's red dirt. And it's got hills in the middle of nowhere, you get lost. If your car is broken and you walk off the road, you can die. Make sure you have spare water and everything. Is so beautiful and so many attractive landscape and the hills, the mountains, the deserts, the roses and the flowers, the blossoming like natural and beautiful colorful red. She's tough, Alice Springs. She's tough. She's love. She's mess too.”
Living in Alice has inspired his music and connected him to the land.
”It's like lots of reggae music, lots of Indigenous music, lots of interesting beautiful stories and people connected to the land. The land is everything to them,” he says of the people in Alice Springs.
It was a joy to listen to Katanga Junior and move with the vibe he and his band created at WOMAD. Hopefully they can make it to Newy one day and, who knows, maybe USA as well.
Here are things I’ve been learning about this week:
I got the popcorn out for The NPR Journalist who published a scathing review of what working for NPR has become for The Free Press, and also NPR’s Rebuttal.
I loved this poem “death is smoking my cigars” by Bukowski.
This Guardian article I inhaled but have not fully processed. I was the poster girl for OCD. Then I began to question everything I’d been told about mental illness