Kava and music: a musical journey through Fiji
· 5 min read
Bula: the first word you will hear
If you ever find yourself in Fiji, the first thing you will hear is probably Bula. It is the most common local greeting, and the phrase Ni bula, ni bula kece sara, roughly welcome, welcome to you all, best captures the openness and warmth with which islanders greet guests. It is no accident that the same word also appears in the names of many traditional welcome songs. In Fiji, music and hospitality are as tightly interwoven as music and kava, known locally as yaqona.
A ceremony that is also a concert
The authors of Kava: The Pacific Elixir, which covers the ethnobotany, history and chemistry of the plant across the whole Pacific region, stress that kava has served a role far wider than that of a drink for thousands of years. It is social glue, a part of welcome rituals, negotiations and everyday gatherings. In Fiji, the traditional yaqona ceremony follows a set sequence: the root is mixed with water in a wooden vessel called a tanoa, strained through hibiscus bark fibre, and then served in an order that follows the participants' social hierarchy, starting with the guest of honour or the chief. The whole thing is accompanied by rhythmic clapping, called cobo, a mark of respect for the person serving and for the community.
It is in exactly this setting that room for music opens up. A gathering around the tanoa can run long, sometimes for many hours, and communal singing and playing instruments naturally fill the time between rounds of the drink. This is not, then, music performed for an outside audience, but rather a natural extension of conversation that anyone sitting nearby joins in with.
Sigidrigi: singing while drinking
This kind of informal music-making that accompanies drinking kava has its own name in Fiji, and the status of a distinct musical genre: sigidrigi. As the ethnomusicologist Jennifer Cattermole describes in a 2009 article in the journal Transforming Cultures eJournal, the name sigidrigi itself comes from the English sing drink. The genre took particularly strong root on Taveuni, Fiji's third-largest island, where groups of men accompany their yaqona-drinking sessions with multi-part singing, usually to guitar and ukulele.
Cattermole draws attention to something more than just the sound itself: sigidrigi lyrics very often refer to specific places, valleys, villages, rivers, building something like a sonic map of the local community's identity. By singing about a particular place while drinking kava together, participants in effect reaffirm their belonging to it. Music becomes, in this way, a tool for sustaining ties to the land and the community, not just entertainment.
It is worth adding that sigidrigi is an informal phenomenon, usually taking place outside the formal chiefly ceremony and with no fixed rules for repertoire. Participants sit close together, usually on mats, right next to the tanoa, building multi-part harmonies through a call-and-response method, in which one voice starts a phrase and the others pick it up. This is very different from more formalised forms of Fijian ceremonial music, such as meke, the traditional songs and dances performed at important tribal occasions, where the choreography and lyrics are fixed in advance and passed down from generation to generation.
Songs that outlasted island borders
Some songs tied to Pacific tradition have travelled far beyond Fiji. One example is Isa Lei, today regarded as the islands' unofficial farewell anthem, performed when seeing off guests and travellers. Its origin is disputed: some sources, including the Fiji Times, attribute it to Ratu Tevita Uluilakeba, father of Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, the first prime minister of independent Fiji, said to have composed it in the second decade of the twentieth century for a sweetheart visiting the island of Lakeba. Another version points to Tongan roots for the melody, borrowed and reworked by Fijian soldiers. Whichever version is closer to the truth, the dispute itself shows how deeply music is woven into regional identity, and how alive the local stories around it remain.
A tradition that does not end
Fiji's music scene has not stood still at traditional songs. Alongside performers who keep the classic repertoire alive, there are artists blending local sounds with pop, funk or contemporary electronic production, often still drawing on classic melodies and lyrics. Fiji's population today stands at under 900,000, yet the islands' musical heritage is surprisingly rich and varied, from choral church singing, through sigidrigi, to contemporary radio sounds.
What links all these strands is a common denominator: kava as an occasion for gathering, in which music is not an add-on but the natural language of the community.
That same mechanism, sitting together, drinking together and singing together, has meant Pacific music has also started to travel beyond its region of origin. As kava grows more popular outside Oceania, in the form of kava bars in the United States, for instance, recordings and playlists of traditional and contemporary Pacific island music are also reaching Western audiences, often played in the background during communal drinking. It is, in a way, a reversal of the original order: instead of music accompanying a local ritual, we get a ritual exported together with its soundtrack, though rarely with the full social context it carries on its home islands.
For anyone who knows kava only in its simplified Western form, it is worth remembering that at the root of this ritual lies something far more complex than the drink itself: a web of connections between hospitality, social hierarchy, music and collective memory, built together over many generations and still alive on the islands of Fiji. If you want the wider cultural context of this plant, take a look at the article on the history of kava and the piece on how to prepare kava in a way close to the traditional method. You can find more on the plant itself and its cultivars on the page devoted to kava cultivars.