Shangaan Electro LP
New Wave Dance Music From South Africa
My name is Richard, my stage name is Nozinja, from Nozinja Music Productions. I’m from Giyani in Limpopo.
I’m an engineer, I’m a producer, I’m a composer. It’s my record label. I’m the marketing manager. I transport them — I’ve got a micro-bus. I do everything on my own. I’ve got manufacturing. I buy CDs, I will silk-screen myself. I sing, too.
I’m a scout for talent. When you look at the person, you must see the artist. He or she must be able to dance. If you can dance, you can sell. Shangaan dancers, they dance, they can go on for almost an hour with that speed, without getting tired. When you see them dance you feel like they have got no bones. It’s similar to the Zulus, but faster and we put a lot of style inside. There’s disco in there, we use Pantsula moves.
We don’t use the sounds of the hip-hop guys, or the afro-pop, or whatever, we’re using Shangaan sounds. The traditional Shangaan music is fast. You play it slow, they won’t dance.
Firstly it was played with bass and lead guitar. I’m the one revolutionized it, because when I came I didn’t use any guitar or any bass, I just used marimba and the organs. We are not using the live bass, we are using the marimba bass which is played from the organ. A small sample of voices, that’s what I specialize in. We use them in English. Those are the new aspects they never had before. At first people thought I was mad, and now it’s the in-thing. You can play that music with bass, that’s the old-timer music.
Shangaan is fast. While others play at 110, we are at 180, 182, 183. And when you hear those marimba beats and that live guitar through the keyboard, you know it’s Shangaan. You hear those toms, then you know, this is Shangaan music.
Shangaans don’t typically love Joburg. They work in Joburg, but their heart is in Limpopo. People want to go back to the country and to their families. Limpopo is rural. It’s hot, very hot and vibey. Shangaan music is about love. It’s about a wife and a husband. We are family-oriented musicians.
Now Shangaan music is both, rural and urban. We jumped the boundaries by changing that bass into playing with the marimba, that’s when we touched the nerves, and now it’s all over.
(To Wills Glasspiegel, January 2010.)
Honest Jons
DER Platten Laden überhaupt am Ende der Portobello Road Londons. Egal ob spektakuläre Reissues oder super aktuelle und grossartige elektronische Musik - Honest Jon's hat die Finger im Spiel. "Informal University for music lovers" - wird der Laden liebevoll genannt und ist seit 1974 das Herz der Londoner Musik Community. Das Label Honest Jon's wird unter anderem von Notting Hill local Damon Albarn mitbetrieben. Seit 2008 veröffentlicht Honest Jon's immer wieder Leckerbissen aus den 150 000 78 - rpm Aufnahmen aus den klimakontrollierten archivräumen der EMI archives in Hayes England.
Erhältlich bei: Kitchener Bern
www.honestjons.com
EN: Honest Jon's is an independent record shop based on Portobello Road in Ladbroke Grove, London, operating since 1974. The shop is owned and run by Mark Ainley and Alan Scholefield, who took over from one of the original proprietors, "Honest" Jon Clare. Their record label of the same name is run in conjunction with Damon Albarn, who has been quoted as saying: "I don't really like the term world music. Wherever it comes from, it's all just music, isn't it? Hopefully that's what Honest Jon's is about - to open a few minds to what's out there."[1] The shop sells a multitude of genres of music on vinyl and CD, specializing in jazz, blues, reggae, dance, soul, folk and outernational. It runs a mail-order business from www.honestjons.com. Formed in 2002, the label has released compilation albums such as its London Is The Place For Me series, excavating the music of young Black London, in the years after World War II ("a fascinating archive of material from the 1950s and 60s, chronicling a time when diasporic rhythms were more or less the sole preserve of the small communities responsible for bringing them to these shores");[2] also collections of British folk, Port-of-Spain soca, Afro-Cuban jazz from the Bronx, Jamaican dancehall; and retrospectives of artists including Moondog, Maki Asakawa, Bettye Swann and Cedric "Im" Brooks & The Light of Saba. It has released original music by Candi Staton, Actress, T++, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Mark Ernestus, Trembling Bells, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, Simone White, Shackleton, Michael Hurley, Terry Hall, and the Moritz Von Oswald Trio. It recorded the chaabi orchestra of Abdel Hadi Halo on location in Algiers; Lobi Traore and Kokanko Sata Doumbia in Bamako; and Tony Allen in Lagos. In 2008, Honest Jon's began a run of compilations of early recordings — mostly drawn from the EMI Archive in Hayes, Hillingdon — stretching back to the start of the twentieth century, covering all corners of the world: from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire more than a hundred years ago, to 1950s Beirut, to late-1920s Baghdad, to 1930s East Africa. wikipedia