allAfrica.com: Zimbabwe: What Does Jeys Call His Music? (Page 1 of 1)

December 6, 2006
Posted to the web December 7, 2006
BULAWAYO-BASED Majahawodwa Jeys Ndlovu is a good musician, but what does he call his music?
Apparently he does not know and when the Zimbabwe Music Awards judges called it marabi he fumed, but when challenged to prove otherwise, he fared no better than the judges.

It is very frustrating, he said.

I have to say the same things time and again. Surely, how could they put me in the same category as Chase (Skhuza) and Big Max?
Actually, it would have made more sense if they had put Chase in the sungura category, although his music has a strong mbaqanga flavour.

It is unfortunate we have to raise the same issues every year.
Fair enough, Jeys had some idea of Chase's music genre, but what about his own music? What does he call it?

Suppose the judges had pushed Chase out of the category, would that have been enough consolation?
What was his problem? Maybe he just did not want to be associated with Big Max or Chase.

Whatever Jeys calls his brand of music, of late it has become quite difficult, if not next to impossible,to categorise some music because like Hosiah Chipanga remarked two years ago when he was awarded the Best Sungura Artiste, if every musician gave a name to their music, we would end up with 1 000 categories.
It was probably because of this that Zimbabwean music was either Afro-pop or Afro-jazz until Thomas Mapfumo decided to call his own brand of music Chimurenga.
Although Oliver Mtukudzi calls his music katekwe, the name has not been well-received as compared to Chimurenga.

Maybe this was because Chimurenga is a national term while katekwe is a type of dance confined to a particular area in the country.
If Mtukudzi wanted, he would have stood up and said exactly the same words as Jeys but then when you play a brand of music whose category you don't know and worse still, you do not allow anybody to christen, how do you expect people to know?
Because musicians are now fusing different music genres, producers and record companies are being forced to devise suitable categories for the sake of selling musical products.

In Zimbabwe, for example, categories such as contemporary traditional had to be devised to embrace music or dance that has both the old and new elements of music.
This is the case with groups such as Iyasa whose dance bridges time by taking elements of Zulu traditional dance and township dance and Tumbuka Dance Company whose style draws heavily from ballet and township styles.
The same applies to Victor Kunonga's music, which is neither jazz nor outright Chimurenga.

Because it has to be called by a name, contemporary traditional was coined after listening to the rhythm that is grounded in traditional music.
Categorising music that has a strong South African influence is not easy because once a Zimbabwean musician takes up the beat, it ceases to be mbaqanga or marabi or even kwela.
Jeys got caught in the same predicament when he suggested that Chase's music fits into the mbaqanga category.

South African music evolved from marabi music that evolved from Doornfontein in Johannesburg in the 1920s and 30s.
It's believed that the name marabi originated from a black township known as Marabastad in Pretoria where marabi dance parties were common.
The music was basically piano-based and people had to pay in order to dance.

When Sophiatown and Alexandra were established in the 1940s and 50s, township people's musical tastes changed with the coming of gramophones that played American swing-jazz.
While black people enjoyed American stuff, some of them experimented with their own beat to create what was called tsaba-tsaba which gave birth to kwela, a fusion of South African beat and elements of American swing jazz.
The word kwela, which means climb, was derived from the way the police behaved when they apprehended Africans on the streets.

Eventually, the police vans, which were used to pick up people who had no passes or offenders were called the kwelas.
Because kwela music, unlike marabi or tsaba-tsaba, was an outdoor form of music, gamblers would post pennywhistle players on each end of the street so that when they saw the kwelas coming, they would start playing as a warning for the gamblers to break up and come dancing.

When the saxophone and piano were added to the pennywhistle, kwela took on a different form and became known as majuba after Ntemi Piliso who lived in Alexandra had recorded a song of the same name.

But then because of its fast pace the music was renamed mbaqanga, which means porridge, cooked in a hurry.
It was from mbaqanga that most South African music genres -- township soul, jive, house, disco, hip-hop and kwaito -- evolved. Jeys' beat is a mixture of marabi, kwela and mbaqanga.

So what does he call it?

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