KeruBo keeps her Kenyan heritage close through music
December 30, 2024 | By Harrison Gaylord | Community News Service
KeruBo, real name Irene Webster, is a familiar face and voice on the summer concert scene in Waterbury. Courtesy photo
When Irene Webster hears her stage name, KeruBo, she remembers her heritage. It’s her middle name, the one her mother gave her, and a reminder of her native Kenya. Performing as KeruBo, the Winooski-based singer also finds a way to push aside a history of European colonialism and reclaim her roots.
KeruBo, 56, plays the kind of African folk music she grew up with in Kenya. Before moving to the U.S. in the mid-2000s, she was a musician in her home country and spent time as a background singer for acts on tour. The songs she performs all spring from the African diaspora, taking influences from traditional music, jazz, blues and samba and singers like Angelique Kidjo.
“The most important thing for an immigrant is retaining their culture in their new home,” she said. “We face so many challenges because we do not have opportunities: Sometimes payment is not as much as it should be, and it is not consistent enough for me to do a second job.”
Sticking with music, she said, transcends those kinds of limitations and keeps her connected.
Through the rotating band she leads, which features her husband Mike Webster on guitar, she “gets a chance to provide insights on African culture,” she said. “I am all about connecting cultures.”
KeruBo and her husband met in Kenya some 20 years ago, and she joined him in the U.S. in the mid-2000s. When he moved to Vermont for work, she followed suit in 2011 and has been here ever since.
When KeruBo got here, she wanted to stay for a simple reason. She heard people walking by one day and speaking in Swahili and decided from there, she wanted to stay.
These were people she recognized and connected with.
The band lineup right now includes Mike Hartigan on keys and Ezra Oklan on drums, with Caleb Bronze sometimes on drums as well.
Hartigan said he and KeruBo met in 2019 at a jazz jam workshop at Light Club Lamp Shop in Burlington. The next year, at a memorial event for the late jazz pianist Peter Krag, each performed.
Amid the Covid lockdowns later that year, Kerubo reached out, and the two performed at the Flynn Theatre on a flatbed truck, a gig they rehearsed nine times for, he said.
He has had a good time playing with KeruBo and enjoys the African music they perform. If not for KeruBo, he said, he probably wouldn’t get to play that kind of music.
Depending on the event, Kerubo and her group switch between English songs and those in Swahili. Sometimes the group performs at political events, like Black Lives Matter rallies or Juneteenth celebrations, where they have played politically charged songs about the African American struggle, covers of the likes of Nina Simone or renditions of the Sam Cooke song “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
When they want to perform music in Swahili, the band tries to pick songs that would cater to a Vermont audience.
Hartigan, a musician for hire for about 20 years who’s working on the score for a TV show, said he “tries to find a balance between what he is doing and what the guitar player is doing.”
“There is an African type of guitar playing that he does really well, and a lot of what I do tries to balance it out,” he said. “Sometimes he plays in a high register, to which I play in a low register.”
He said he’s looking forward to a concert series with Kerubo in the summer.
Oklan, the drummer, has had a similarly positive experience playing music with KeruBo. They met about five years ago, he said, when KeruBo was singing backup vocals for the band Dwight and Nicole, which he plays with.
He did his first drumming gig with her right after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. KeruBo is an enlightened human, he said, and he “does not say that lightly.”
“She is amazing to work with and brings warmth to the stage that goes out to the crowd as well,” said Oklan, a full-time musician of 25 years who owns the VT Music Lab studio in Essex Junction. “She is just very kind and enlightened.”
KeruBo and band play at Waterbury’s Music in the Alley in June 2022. Photo by Gordon Miller
He produced her 2021 song “You Are Enough” and brought her to New York City to record at Studio G Brooklyn, a session that involved both Vermont and New York musicians. Oklan looks forward to “getting the call” and working with KeruBo again.
KeruBo has sung all across Vermont, such as at a festival in Middlebury. When the season changes, KeruBo takes a break and concentrates on other projects. She is currently doing a video for “You Are Enough,” from her album “Haliya Utu,” produced by Charlotte’s Jacob Edgar. Edgar, who works for the label Putumayo World Music, featured KeruBo’s 2023 song “Faraja” on a compilation album this year.
Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship, on assignment for the Winooski News.
Find more about KeruBo online at kerubomusic.com including links to social media pages.