The number of times a seasoned world music critic is still confronted with a virtually unknown music genre, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Fortunately there's still the Crammed Records label and their resident musical explorer Vincent Kenis, who this time travelled to Tanzania where, with the help of Werner Graebner, an expert in the field of Tanzanian music, he discovered mchiriku music. Although immensely popular in the slums of Dar Es Salaam, the Tanzanian upper-class still turn up their noses at the genre and that's just one of the reasons the members of Jagwa Music still hold a (day-) job as "dei-waka" or illegal taxi driver. To play mchiriku one doesn't need all that much: central are the "mini-kinanda", vintage Casio keyboards from the nineteen eighties, complemented with the "misondo", a series of drums made of pieces of plastic pipe strung with a goat skin. The resulting sound is a rhythmic ultra-quick question-and-answer game between percussion and keyboard (somewhat reminiscent of African genres like kuduro or mapouka) larded with lyrics that often deal with the harshness of daily existence.