Figure 1.1

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:

What separates mbaqanga from previous styles is the straight beat. Previously urbanblack music was rhythmically swung in general

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

MbaqangaAllen suggests that the term “mbaqanga”, which refers to the staple maize-meal diet of manyof the working-class musicians who played the music to earn a living wage, stems from “theneed to define and express an independent and valuable black South African urban identity”by renaming what had become generally referred to as African Jazz (Allen 1993, 26).Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably by musicians and musicologists,Allen arguest that the style of mbaqanga developed in the 1960s is markedly different fromAfrican Jazz (Allen 1993, 26). As the name suggests, mbaqanga is viewed as a morecommercially appealing style than African Jazz and has been popularised in South Africa byartists such as Simon ‘Mahlatini’ Nkabinde and internationally by Paul Simon’s heavilymbaqanga influenced Graceland album. The roots of mbaqanga lie in traditional Zulu musicmixed with influences of marabi and kwela. Rhythmically, mbaqanga is, like tsaba tsaba,generally based on a straight-eighth note feel with a driving bass drum on all four downbeatsof the bar. This quarter note bass drum pattern, commonly referred to as “four on the floor”,is complemented by the hands performing various orchestrations of the rhythm below. Thisuniversal rhythm is known as the Charleston in American jazz, the Habanera in Cuban Latinmusic, and the Ghoema in South Africa.Figure 1.2 Charleston/ Habanera/ Ghoema rhythm

This rhythm is typically played with brushes on the snare drum. The first of the three notes is omitted on the snare drum as it is played by the bass drum in the four-note note “four-on-the-floor” pattern. This creates the feel of the groove as a heavyemphasis is placed on the eighth note after beat two and beat four of the bar. An additional snare accent is consistently placed on the last sixteenth note before beat two and beat four of the bar to set up the anticipations before beat three and beat one of each bar. The bass guitar generally phrases around this same three-note rhythmic pattern and plays an important role in defining many of the stylistic features of the music. This will be elaboratedon in the following chapter.

Rhythmically, mbaqanga is, like tsaba tsaba, generally based on a straight-eighth note feel with a driving bass drum on all four downbeats of the bar. This quarter note bass drum pattern, commonly referred to as “four on the floor”, is complemented bythe hands performingvarious orchestrationsof the rhythm below. This universal rhythm is known as the Charleston in American jazz, the Habanerain Cuban Latin music, and the Ghoema in South Africa.Figure 1.2 Charleston/Habanera/Ghoema rhythm

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.