Mbaqanga (Zulu pronunciation: [mɓaˈǃáːŋa]) is a style of South African music with rural Zulu roots that continues to influence musicians worldwide today. The style originated in the early 1960s
Stylistic origins : Marabi, Kwela
Cultural origins : Early 1960s, South Africa
The wikipedia entry goes on and attributes Mbaqanga as a evolution of Maskandi popularized by Johnny Clegg. There's another source, Guitar Atlas Africa that dates the evolution of Mbaqanga prior to Johnny Clegg's influence.
Walking Song sample : https://www.alfred.com/guitar-atlas-africa/p/00-20450/ :
ukapkia (maskanda): Zulu Fingerpicking style, with a droning quality - derived from ancestral use of the mouth bow. Players of this style typically tune the high e string to a D and use it as a done.
Mbaqanga : Electric-pop of the townships in the 60's. Was a representation of the jazz-flavoured marabi music of the 50's fused with the american R&B of the 60's. Played usually with a flatpick with lots of double stops. The bass players of this style often use a fretless bass and slides to get a rather groovey feel. Ray Phiri was a renowned Mbaqanga player.
For today's brief spotlight, we'll look a bit at Mbaqanga specifically
Our Ray Phiri spotlight has lots of clips from his Mbaqanga style - click here for that thread
One of the first commercial albums first to introduce this style to the world was The Indestructible Beat of Soweto
From the complication these two tracks stood out to me, for their guitar parts
Nelcy Sedibe - Holotelani. I'd love to know who was the guitarist on this track, they are just ripping it up - The last two minutes of this track is African style shredding, melodic, very rhythmical and relentless!
Amaswazi Emvelo - Indoda Yejazi Elimnyama
Mbaqanga meets Soukous (Ben Badenhorst on a Fanner Uke)
Reddit
From Comix_Corp on the above reddit thread
- You don't need any pedals at all for the basics, just a good, loud, clean sounding amp, but delay and chorus are quite popular (especially the red boss delay pedal - can't remember the name)
- 99.99% of soukous/mbaqanga guitar uses the I-IV-V chords exclusively
- Speed is important
- The guitar playing is generally based around arpeggiated chords and repeating patterns, as well as your basic major scale. Not so much penatonic patterns or anything like that
- Play with intervals. Major fourths are fun.
Youtube
200 African Guitar Tutorials - Licks and riffs Introduction
More African guitar tutorials (Souskous and others) on GuitOp81's youtube channel :
https://www.youtube.com/user/GuitOp81
*Disclaimer: There realllly isn't a lot of accessible info on the internet -likely I've gotten some of this mixed up - please feel free to correct me and develop this thread into something useful!
