Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Last year Chicagoans got a rare chance to hear some benga music, the dominant dance style of Kenya for the last four or five decades, when the band Extra Golden played here during the World Music Festival. The band was started by Ian Eagleson and Alex Minoff of the Washington D.C. indie rock band Golden as a collaboration with some of the benga musicians Eagleson met while pursuing ethnomusicological studies in Kenya. While a few tracks on the band’s debut album, Ok-Oyot System, were tainted by whiffs of white funk-rock, it otherwise conveyed some of the frothy rhythmic joy of benga. Not long after the record was made the key Kenyan participant, Otieno Jagwasi, died from complications related to AIDS. His able replacement for the group’s U.S. tour was Opiyo Bilongo, a dazzling singer and guitarist who’d been a steady presence on the benga scene for more than a decade.
