The new Kansas City music group selling out shows: A church choir singing in Swahili
Like any good church choir, the Salvation Choir is busy on Sundays.
First, the group’s members perform at a weekly service in Independence. Then they head to Kansas City’s Northeast area, where they rehearse their songs in a dark, barn-shaped garage, still wearing their Sunday best.
The space is just barely large enough to accommodate the Congolese refugees who make up the band. On a recent Sunday, 21 members were crammed higgledy-piggledy inside. Pastor John Wilondja, a 54-year-old gentleman in a teal linen suit and Malcolm X glasses, led the group through a frenzied set of rumba, a style of African dance music with Cuban undertones. The drummer banged his kit while seated in a padded swivel chair of the kind you might find in a doctor’s office. A woman on the couch cradled a baby in one hand and held a microphone in the other.
The Salvation Choir’s songs, sung in Swahili, are religious in nature. But over the past year this sprawling group of immigrant singers and dancers has been winning over secular audiences who’ve encountered them in unlikely local venues: at the Boulevardia beer-and-music festival, at a rally for the renters’-rights group KC Tenants and most recently at the Salvation Choir’s sold-out December show at The Ship.
“It seems like more people want to know us, more people are inspired by our music,” said Albertina Wilondja, the 17-year-old daughter of Pastor John. “We’re very blessed. That was our dream two years ago and now that it’s happening it feels like a miracle.”
Pastor John and his family — he has nine children — are refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They fled that war-torn country for Tanzania, then were able to relocate to Florida. But it was tough finding work in the Sunshine State, and he had some relatives in Kansas City. The family moved here in 2018, and Pastor John eventually found work at Aspen Products, a local paper factory.
He also started a Swahili ministry called Light World Mission of Hope, which holds services in a gymnasium at Messiah Lutheran Church in Independence.
The choir came soon after. Pastor John had been a conductor in Africa, he told The Star, with Albertina translating. He started writing songs when he was 10, playing in villages and some cities in Congo.
“When we came here (to Kansas City), in the beginning, it was just me and my children singing and performing in our house,” he said. “Then people saw and heard us, and more started to join. And there’s more that keep coming.”
The choir’s membership is fluid, with somewhere between 20 and 35 members, depending on the day. Most are related in some way or another: aunties, uncles, nieces and nephews. The Wilondjas live in Independence now, but they previously lived in the Northeast area, and several members of the Salvation Choir still live in that neighborhood.
That’s where Phil Dickey, a former member of the indie-rock act Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, first encountered the group.
“The Wilondjas were our next-door neighbors,” Dickey said. “I’d hear music over there sometimes, but I didn’t actually realize what was going on until the choir came over one summer evening in 2020 while I was playing music in our front yard with our kid. They came out and played their songs for us and it blew my mind. It was so uplifting and contagious. I was like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’”
Dickey told the group he had some music-industry experience — Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin had toured internationally, and Dickey and his wife are commercial music composers. He asked if they’d be interested in performing outside of church. For the last few years, he’s been serving as the Salvation Choir’s “voluntary temporary manager,” helping them book shows.
The group played its first secular show at the 2021 Plaza Art Fair.
“When they started, there was about five people watching,” Dickey said. “Forty-five minutes later, a couple hundred people were dancing. The whole block stopped to watch them.”
That performance led to the Salvation Choir being booked for Boulevardia 2022. Then came a club show at the Replay Lounge in Lawrence. In the fall, KC Tenants invited the group to perform at a rally at Ilus W. Davis Park, across from City Hall.
“It’s impossible not to love them,” said Tara Raghuveer, founding director of KC Tenants. “They represent the best of Kansas City — scrappy, spirited and soulful. I think they are the best band in the world.”
In December, the Salvation Choir’s show at The Ship sold out.
“The bands I’ve played in, it took us years and years of winning over a couple of people at a time to get to the point where we could sell out a show,” Dickey said. “So to see them do it in less than a year is pretty wild. People are just drawn to them. After shows, everybody wants to take pictures with them and ask about their story. There’s this really beautiful culture exchange that happens.”
The next Salvation Choir public show is March 26 at the Replay Lounge, with another April 30 at RecordBar. Other plans for 2023 include a set at Boulevardia and recording an EP of original music.
“We have two or three songs on YouTube,” said Pierre Kungu, the 23-year-old president of the choir, who sings and plays guitar. “But we have a lot more songs that we need to record.”
“We also want to find a studio for ourselves,” Pastor John said. “We want our own TV channel to spread our gospel and songs and sometimes preaching. We want more people to hear our music and be inspired and blessed with the word of God.”
They’d also like to find a way to help those they left back home.
“In an African village, it’s very hard to shoot and record songs,” Pastor John said. “It costs a lot of money to get out of the village and go to a city. So we’d like to help make a studio in Tanzania somewhere for musicians. If I was born in a place like Kansas City, instead of a village, we could have been in a higher place by now.”
This story was originally published February 8, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
