This all happened on Sunday 3 August 2003

Our highly nutty and extremely amateur groovy music group just got a quasi-funky name. After contemplating all morning when I stunk up the toilet and meandering around the house driving Rani's lovely cousins (Nana and Ria) confused during their 4-day long visit, I chose to name our group as "Kelompok KARIB Gembira"; well, take it or leave it, we don't have much ideas other than utilizing the spirit our Indonesian bureaucratic abbreviation euphoria and that's how the name came into existence. The name makes a good sense because we have Jeng Kiki on saxophone, Askar on vocal, Rani on piano, me on conga/trumpet and Budiman on djembe. During the audition session at Indonesian Embassy for a Panggung Gembira in Singapore, we managed to "express" our apparent "spontaneity" to a board of jury, mainly comprised of NTU and NUS students who are highly capable of organizing this marvelous event. Our composition is based on a common people's music, a famous latin American song titled Moliendo Cafe (also became famous in Indonesia as Kopi Dangdut) and we created this musical performance with a nice blend of salsa/mambo rhythm transitioning into semi-dangdut ambiance. The music began with a potent "call of the hand-drums" followed by a solid foundation on salsa/mambo rhythm based on sax and piano harmony with hand-drums in the background, which then opened up a new aura with a tacet by Askar's tenor voice driving encompassing his love of the latin and dangdut grooves. In the middle we inserted a solo drumming by Budiman on djembe followed by a crisp and quick harmony of sax and trumpet (it was a hard transition from slapping the skin to kissing the mouthpiece with an embouchre). If you were there, you would have danced just like those girls in jilbab/hijab who suddenly became crazy of Askar's Sundanese-Latino charm. Kiki, as usual, was very calm and capable of delivering such a rich and melodious output on her Selmer sax! Honestly, not only did we smoke it big time but we also made the jury believe that we should be givent he best points among other groups of highly capable Indonesian musicians in town. Without further ado, let me present "Kelompok KARIB Gembira"on 9 September 2003 at Victoria Theatre! See you there !