With a sizeable club, we played with Negunya at the 4dayswalk Alkmaar on 18 June 2022. Having already played at the Tuintonenfestival in Watergang earlier this month, we now went to Alkmaar to play for a day. Both the Djembé/Doundoun section and the balafon section were well represented. Moreover, Youssouf Keita (who was in the Netherlands at this time) was there all day. He was a clear source of inspiration for us, and the quality of our performance was naturally much higher because of his input! Youssouf himself is also singing more and more (he didn’t consider himself a singer before, but he likes it too much not to.

At the end of the afternoon, Ali Keita, his brother from Berlin, arrived in Alkmaar to visit his brother for a few days while he is in the Netherlands. He also briefly joined in with the last songs we played.

A day like this is great fun to do, but also always a good exercise to play songs for a long time, look for the patterns you know and play together with your balafon buddies.

A fun day of music with Yvonne, Winnie, Hans, Rik, Meghan, Ellen, Dirk, Joep, Robert, and Robert, Marcin, Youssouf, Ali and myself. Below you can catch part of our day during Negunya at the 4dayswalk Alkmaar through some (quite long) videos made by Arno.