By Dennis Asiimwe
I may have mentioned this before, but Maurice Kirya’s albums always improve technically, whatever the content on them. His last album, Beyond Myself, combined brilliant production with some of the best music he has written in years.
The technical finesse on The Road to Kirya is almost painful.
Entebbe is the first single he has dropped off this album, and it probably makes sense – he grew up on Entebbe Road, if my memory serves me right.
Ugandans like writing about their towns. Philly Lutaya, Elly Wamala, they all did it at some point in their musical careers.
Uganda’s towns are curious things – they are mostly organic, developing out of necessity, usually first as a trading centre, or a stop-off point on a highway, where the Government decides to install an office of some sort.
Because of this, they tend to be points of intense interaction, whether it is over economic interaction, or cultural interaction.
Singing about them often evokes colourful imagery. However, I doubt anyone has thrown about as much technical ability about a Ugandan town at it as this song does.
It as a lovely big-band-in-session sound. The brass section actually had me sitting up. If anything, this sounds like an organised jam session, a sound I remember Maurice being very envious, when he was watching one and couldn’t be a part of.
Except it’s a jam session where the session players are really in sync. It is almost hard to point out an instrument that stands out, but for me, it would be the percussion, which is simply tight, and keeps all the moving parts of this song in line.
The impression of a jam session is a justifiable one – I have seen an online performance of this song by Maurice, and it sounded almost exactly as the studio cut does, so it was certainly deliberate.
Entebbe is one of those musical experiments which actually work – where the artiste gets to push himself out of his comfort zone, and does so creatively.
