JJ Keki is something of a modern Renaissance man, combining roles as a farmer, activist, statesman and Grammy-nominated musician. It is thanks largely to his diverse efforts that the small Jewish Abayudaya community is reemerging in the African nation of Uganda, despite suffering greatly in the 1970s under the military dictatorship of Idi Amin.
Keki will visit the Jewish student group Hillel at UCLA tonight to deliver a presentation about the Abayudaya community and perform his music.
“It’s important to know that there are so many diverse, small Jewish communities around the world, not just in California or in the United States or Europe,” said Perla Karney, artistic director at UCLA Hillel. “Students who are Jewish or even students who aren’t Jewish should know that there are small enclaves of Jews everywhere around the world, including Uganda.”
Keki’s first album, “Shalom Everybody Everywhere!,” was produced in 1997 by Kulanu, Inc., an organization based in New York that reaches out to dispersed and emerging Jewish communities around the world. According to Harriet Bograd, president of Kulanu, the organization is currently involved in roughly twenty different projects in the Abayudaya community, including an elementary school and high school, health education and microfinance. Keki’s music is a way for him to spread the word about his community and about the progress being made there.
“They have taken traditional African rhythms and sounds and harmonies and put them to Jewish liturgy and combined it, part of it in their local language,” Bograd said. “There’s a risk when a community connects with the larger Jewish community that they’ll lose their own culture, but because of the richness of their own music there’s a real sense of the strength of their community and their own traditions.”
In 2005, Keki’s album “Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda” was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Traditional World Music. It was produced for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings by Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, who has a doctorate in ethnomusicology and is the Neubauer executive director of Tufts Hillel and a professor of music at Tufts.
“JJ Keki is an engaging musician who deeply understands the power of music to build community,” Summit said in an e-mail. “His compositions address everything from his love for the Torah to the importance of environmental and economic justice.”
Keki’s awareness of environmental issues had led to one of his largest accomplishments, the creation of the Mirembe Kawomera Coffee Cooperative in 2003, which has brought together over 1,000 Jewish, Christian and Muslim farmers to spread peace and prosperity in their villages. The cooperative has inspired his next collection of music, “Songs of the Coffee Farmers.”
“I know that Jewish audiences react with a real excitement that the Jewish world is so diverse, that people in Africa can be singing the same words that we sing here,” Bograd said. “It makes us feel very connected with this community in Africa. The music is just bouncy and wonderful and engaging and spiritual, it’s just inspiring to hear.”