Dar es Salaam is where Tanzania taps its feet

Dar es Salaam generates music tinged with blues, Arab rhythms and poetry.

The Kilimanjaro Band performed at Selander Bridge Club, one of a multitude of music venues in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The concrete lot next to the Hotel Travertine in downtown Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, was full of swaying women in elaborate floor-length gowns trimmed with sequins. Spotlights reflected off bottles of Kilimanjaro beer, and the scent of shisha smoke hung in the air.

It was 11 on a Sunday night in Tanzania’s largest city, and members of Jahazi Modern Taarab, a popular local group, were performing a spirited song about love gone wrong, featuring a male-female call-and-response. Young men, chewing khat leaves and tapping their feet to the music, sat in white plastic chairs next to older women in neon-colored headscarves. For certain songs, the crowd rushed to the dance floor en masse.

Stop by the hotel on any Sunday and you’ll find the band in full swing. Indeed, many bands in this laid-back city on the Indian Ocean have regular gigs at the same venues every weekend, and as many as four concerts at other clubs during the week — all part of a boisterous and exciting music scene that rivals that of any in Eastern Africa.

“Tanzanians, they love music. I think they want music to play every day so they can come,” said Jackie Kazimoto, lead singer of Jagwa Music, one of the city’s most thrilling live acts.

Dar’s soundscape is a riot of genres, from the music on offer that evening, called modern taarab, which mixes a traditional Swahili sung-poetry style with electronic and Arab-influenced rhythms, to mchiriku, the raw, urban sound that Jagwa Music plays, which is generally found at neighborhood block parties. You can also dance to classic rumba or bongo flava, the local brand of hip-hop, on soft white sand at any number of palm-laden beach clubs, while a pink sun sets over the ocean.

At the open-air venue Mango Garden, you can enjoy a tasty chicken pilaf dish while dancers in matching outfits stomp to the catchy Congolese-style rhythms of African Stars Band, whose songs blare from radios across the city. Amid the greenery at the outdoor Triniti Bar, a young crowd mixes hip-hop and soul with poetry slams. At Selander Bridge Club, fans dance in formation to Kilimanjaro Band’s hypnotic grooves under a massive thatched roof.

The scene bleeds into the streets as well. Wander behind a downtown high-rise and you may find locals feasting on roasted goat in a nondescript courtyard that will turn into a bustling music scene later that night. Follow the tinny strains of taarab on a transistor radio to discover members of the city’s South Asian community playing cards and eating Indian street snacks like pani puri on tables set up on the sidewalk.

Leo Mkanyia, a 32-year-old Dar musician, attributes this diversity to the country itself. “We have 125 tribes, and all of them have different tunes, different melodies, different music and even different traditional musical instruments,” he said.

I met Leo at Kibo Bar at the Serena Hotel, where he was performing for guests as the leader of a five-piece band. He shares the stage with his father, Henry, who performed for 15 years in the city’s legendary Mlimani Park Orchestra, but now plays guitar alongside his son in a group that mixes Tanzanian drumming with blues melodies and dansi, an indigenous dance music. Leo calls this style “Swahili Blues.”

He told me about a recent visit to Nairobi, where he met Kenyan musicians. “They were all praising Dar, like ‘I wish I could be in Dar,’ ” he said, adding that such envy is a source of pride in this Tanzanian city. “People here are proud of their music. They love their music, and support it.”