How the Kenyan Coast Shaped the Music of Reuben Odanga’s ‘Tides’

Reuben Odanga knew the movie he was working on needed music.

It was early 2022. The Kenyan filmmaker behind Selina, Nafsi and Mo-Faya was developing a new feature — a romance drama set on the Kenyan coast  — and could feel there were places the story needed to go that dialogue alone could not reach.

The film follows Salma (Sarah Hassan) and Biko (Brian Kabugi), a musician couple whose relationship comes under increasing strain as gigs dry up and their daughter becomes seriously ill. For Odanga, who wrote and directed the film, music offered another way into what the couple was going through.

But it was Silayio who convinced him the film needed music of its own.

The Kenyan singer-songwriter and actor already had a connection to Odanga, having appeared in his film Nafsi. She also brought more than two decades of experience as a musician. Odanga gave her considerable freedom to build the film’s musical world.

That collaboration became Tides, which opened in Kenyan cinemas in early August to sold-out screenings. By then, what began as an idea to create original music for the film had grown into 13 tracks, composed and music-directed by Silayio and released as an album under her name.

Tides joins a small but growing group of Kenyan screen projects using original music as part of the storytelling. Full original soundtracks remain relatively uncommon. MTV Shuga Mashariki, for example, showed the possibilities with their 12-track  Mashariki 25Flow soundtrack.

Tides takes that idea somewhere particularly specific: the Kenyan coast.

Musically, the Kenyan coast can sit in a different orbit from Nairobi, with Tanzanian music enjoying a particularly strong presence. Bongo Flava crosses the border easily, while Taarab forms part of an older Swahili musical tradition shared across coastal Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanzania. Tides draws from both, alongside Chakacha and Bango, as well as reggae and Seben. Odanga says they also paid particular attention to Swahili poetry, or mashairi.

For a film about musicians living at the coast, that world had to be seen and heard.

Writing the Coast

Silayio felt the weight of getting it right. “I remember feeling the pressure,” she says. “How do I honor and stay true to the story and sound of the coast while infusing the best of what I have to offer?”

Doing that meant writing herself into a musical space she did not usually occupy. Earlier in her career, Silayio won Best Female Artist in Eastern Africa at the 2005 Kora Awards and later finished seventh on season eight of The Voice of Holland. But writing in new genres was new territory.

“I am not a Taraab or Bongo artist,” she explains. “This is Salma’s world.”

Her experience as an actor helped her get there. Writing for herself, she says, tends to be instinctive. Writing for fictional musicians felt closer to inhabiting a character.

“You stop, you step out of yourself, apply your gift within the storytelling,” she says.

That approach extended to the screen. Silayio had to imagine not simply what Salma and Biko would sing, but what their music might reveal about two artists struggling to hold onto their ambitions while work dries up, money gets tighter, and their family comes under pressure. She imagined how the songs would look and feel as performances while writing them, then worked with Hassan, Kabugi and the cast from rehearsals through the shooting of every musical scene. By the time filming began, the songs had already been recorded and mixed.

The genres were new to her as a songwriter, but many of their artists were not.

Growing up as an East African millennial, she says Tanzanian artists Lady Jay Dee, TID and Ali Kiba, along with Kenyan coastal singer Nyota Ndogo (whose song “Watu na Viatu” is covered by Silayio on the album), were already “in my psyche.” For Tides, she returned to them while also listening to a younger generation of Tanzanian stars including Zuchu and Mbosso. She dug further back into Taarab through Siti binti Saad, one of the genre’s pioneering recording stars, and Bi Kidude, one of Zanzibar’s most celebrated voices.

She was listening across generations and across the Kenya-Tanzania border, paying attention to how Swahili-speaking artists told stories and how Bongo Flava musicians folded coastal rhythms into contemporary sounds.

What struck her was how much story they could fit into a song.

“Two verses and [a] hook and you could write a movie,” she says.

A team of musicians helped her turn those references into the sound of Tides, including drummer Amani Baya, who is from the coast and whom Silayio credits with helping keep their ideas connected to the film’s setting.

When the Music Carries the Story

That mattered to Odanga too.

“We were intentional with the depth and beauty of writing,” he says. “We wanted to anchor the music to our culture as we promote and preserve it at the same time.”

The story is now reaching audiences on the coast that inspired its musical world. After opening in Nairobi, Tides expanded to Mombasa, the largest city on the Kenyan coast.

But Odanga never wanted the songs simply to establish where Salma and Biko lived. Tides moves through love, poverty, desire, ambition and survival, as the couple confronts choices that put increasing pressure on their relationship. The film’s wider cast includes familiar faces like South Africa’s Dumisani Mbebe and Kenya’s Minne Kariuki.

For Odanga, music offered a way to get at those tensions without having his characters explain everything. A song could introduce an issue, question it, or even bring it to a conclusion.

For Silayio, the songs also showed audiences a version of the characters beyond the crisis surrounding them.

“The music allowed us to see their dreams and hopes,” she says. “Through the kind of music offered, we can deduce that they have ambitions that go far beyond their current position.”