In the early 1940s, he said, many black bands — among them the newly-formed Harlem Swingsters as well as the veteran Jazz Maniacs — started playing in what he termed an African stomp style: We call it African stomp because there was this heavy bealt... There’s more of the beat of Africa in it... the heavy beat of the African, the Zulu traditional...’ The rhythm of this stomp, as he demonstrated it, is immediately recog- nisable as the typical indlamu rhythm:

Mbaqanga incorporates the instrumentation and musical references of American big band jazzsuch as the use of swing rhythms, multiple brass and/or woodwind instruments (includingarranged parts for brass and woodwind sections), as well as aspects of marabi, mostnoticeably the I-IV-V progression and rhythms from traditional Zulu dances, notably indlamu(see Figure 1.2) (Sepuru, 2019:12; Ballantine, 2012:7, 80). Mbaqanga was also called ‘AfricanJazz’ in colloquial settings, as it contained more identifiable jazz elements than marabi.Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za

Mbaqangaincorporates the instrumentation and musical references of American big band jazzsuch as the use of swing rhythms, multiple brass and/or woodwind instruments (including arranged parts for brass and woodwind sections), as well as aspects of marabi, most noticeably the I-IV-V progression and rhythms from traditional Zulu dances, notablyindlamu(see Figure 1.2) (Sepuru, 2019:12; Ballantine, 2012:7, 80). Mbaqanga was also called ‘African Jazz’ in colloquial settings, as it contained more identifiable jazz elements than marabi.Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za11 Figure 1.2 Indlamu rhythm(Ballantine, 2012:80)In an interview with Ballantine in 1986 (2013:38), the South African jazz pianist Chris McGregor described the dynamics of playing mbaqanga:These (performances) were also my first experiences of building things from riffs. You’d get the mbaqanga chords going, the lead trumpeter or sax player would improvise a melody, and then, in the next eight-bar sequence, out it would come, voiced and all. [...] Out of this would emerge the most amazing complexity of texture, instrumental colour, melodic interactions, the rhythmic interactions of three or four riffs going together, and a soloist in front, improvising. [...] With mbaqanga music, because you’ve simplified the thing and made it circular, you are always confronted with the result: a circuit works itself out, and then you invent very much on formal implications. In contrast, in quite a lot of American jazz you say something and then leave it and do something else. (Ballantine, 2013:37, 39)In other words, the cyclicity of mbaqanga, specifically the repetition of a short harmonic progression, encourages musicians to turn to rhythmic, textural, timbral and melodic interplay among the ensemble members to create interest. Several important elements of mbaqanga survived and characterize South African jazz practices today, such as the use of a rhythmic pattern as a key driver in composition. This has become the basis for South African jazz practice.