MacKinlay Mutsembi plays a trumpet on January 23, 2025 at Geco Cafe in Nairobi.
Twelve hours on stage. Standing. Tooting a horn. Unbroken.
Most musicians would crumble. But for MacKinlay Mutsembi, he was just warming up. A 12-hour performance last year was a prelude to something bigger.
Come January 31, he will be attempting a Guinness World Record: 24 continuous hours of trumpet playing at a café in Nairobi. His target is to smash a record held by a Nigerian trumpeter with a playing time of 24 hours and 46 minutes.
But does he have the mettle for this feat?
“I had to go back to the gym after many years,” he says. “I’ve been working out, eating carefully, getting my cardio going.”
He is physically and mentally rehearsing for the marathon performance.
“The objective is to take one more step. For me, it’s about playing a bit more, just pushing through. While 24 hours is a long time, I don’t feel it’s that physically exhausting. Most of our struggles and challenges are really in the mind,” says MacKinlay, a professional multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer for over a decade.
Music nit-picked him at 13. Musical tools at the Salvation Army were his lifeline, as he grew up in the drug-ravaged area of Kisauni in Mombasa.
The tuba was his first love, a heavy instrument that demanded commitment before passion. His mother’s intention was clear: to keep her children away from trouble by immersing them in structured musical discipline.
The trumpet would eventually become Mutsembi’s primary voice. At 22, he purchased his first trumpet for approximately $100 (about Sh12,000) — an investment that would transform his entire career.
Before fully embracing music, he followed a conventional path: obtaining a degree in languages and communication and spending six years in the non-governmental organisations sector, helping send over 500 children to school.
MacKinlay Mutsembi during the interview on January 23, 2025 at Geco Cafe in Nairobi.
A four-month European tour in 2012 with the musical production “Out of Africa” became a turning point. Performing six nights a week across different venues, Mutsembi discovered jazz wasn’t just a genre, but a philosophy of spontaneous creation.
“I realised that the fundamental principle of jazz was making up things; adding your things to the music,” he explains.
Coke Studio Africa became his professional launching pad, with five seasons of trumpet performances transitioning him from a part-time musician to a professional. He discovered the trumpet wasn’t merely an instrument but a voice — complex, unpredictable, and wild.
Influenced by legends like Freddie Hubbard and Miles Davis, Mutsembi was drawn to jazz’s complexity and freedom of expression. However, he felt a deep need to infuse the genre with African identity.
“Jazz is Western in origin, but I wanted to make it African,” he says.
This quest led to the creation of the Nairobi Horns Project and the Afrolect brand in 2023. The project became a platform to redefine horn sections in African music.
“Horns add spice to music,” he explains. “They’re the soul of marching bands, the energy of pop songs, and the voice of African big bands.”
Working with artists like Nameless reveals the multidimensional nature of musical creation.
“He’s thinking about dance, groove, dance movement. Maybe I’m thinking of notes, harmonies,” Mutsembi explains. He has also worked with star-studded boy band Sauti Sol and Grammy-winning saxophonist Kebbi Williams, his trumpet enriching various genres.
MacKinlay Mutsembi during the interview on January 23, 2025 at Geco Cafe in Nairobi.
Does the typical Kenyan appreciate the role of a trumpeter or know any kind of trumpet?
“People used to think trumpets are for playing the national anthems, but I am on the forefront debunking the myth by performing with DJs, pop artists, and in marching bands,” he answers.
“My trumpet, which is the most common trumpet in the world, is a B-flat trumpet. Horns are known by how they are pitched. A trumpet is called a B-flat trumpet based on that scale — how high or how low they play. Saxophones, for example, have a lot more variation. The big saxophone people see is a tenor sax. The smaller one is an alto sax. The very tiny one is a soprano sax,” he adds.
Unlike many musicians who live and breathe their art, Mutsembi approaches music with a unique detachment.
“I rarely listen to music,” he admits candidly. “My house has no speakers. If I drive for 10 hours, I will not put music on the car radio. I drive in silence.”
For Mutsembi, music is a technical craft, a language to be decoded rather than passively consumed.
MacKinlay Mutsembi during the interview on January 23, 2025 at Geco Cafe in Nairobi.
“Playing music changed my life,” he says. “I was born in really, really different surroundings. The world I was born in wasn’t the world I live in at the moment. And there’s a big chunk of that to music.”
Afrolect, which he founded 10 years ago, is an initiative designed to provide opportunities he wished he had encountered earlier. The platform encompasses an academy, an international jazz festival, and a jazz club.
“We want to ensure their journey doesn’t need to be as tough as it was for us,” he says.
The Afrolect Academy offers masterclasses to nurture emerging musicians while the festival’s most recent event attracted around 700 attendees.
How did the 24-hour musical marathon project come about? He says the genesis was unexpected.
“During a YouTube creators’ event at Tribe Hotel, the concept emerged spontaneously. I was thinking, ‘what do I do to blow it all out of the water?’” he recalls. “Initially, it wasn’t about a Guinness World Record, but a personal challenge.”
To be considered for the record, there are strict guidelines he has to follow. For instance, the breaks are limited to five minutes every hour or 20 minutes every four hours.
Equally, there should be no song interruption longer than 30 seconds. There should be a full-band accompaniment and a continuous, high-energy performance.
“I’ll just be playing at the front of the band,” he explains.
The performance will feature a full ensemble with drums, bass, keys, and guitars, allowing him to showcase his trumpet skills across different musical styles. He has partnered with various musicians to create a dynamic playlist. He says the feat is an opportunity to push his musical boundaries and demonstrate what he calls the power of mental resilience in music.
On Gecko Café, the outlet he chose for the record attempt, he says it is “Nairobi’s live musical Mecca”, what with its four live concerts weekly and over 500 musicians performing annually.
Mutsembi serenades the artistic ambiance of Gecko Café as we wind up the chat with him and well, a trumpet in Mutsembi’s hands is a staccato storyteller, a bridge between what was and what could be.
