South African musicians are enjoying more hard-earned international exposure than ever. After getting an email from Drake’s camp, DJ Black Coffee was featured on the superstar’s More Life project. A Twitter DM, brought Petite Noir’s magisterial voice to Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. But the actual grind of getting passports, tickets and winning fans through touring is made harder by fluctuating exchanges rates and sheer physical distance.
For the last seven years, the OneBeat fellowship has been offering some redress by bringing talented young musicians, from around the world, to the U.S for residency and performance. Organised by the U.S State Department in collaboration with the Found Sound Nation Collective, it offers emerging professional musicians a period to produce original music and to plan projects in their home countries. This is followed by a national tour, with public performances from small jazz clubs to huge street festivals.
Jeremy Thal, one of the founders, explained the vision behind it as one of communication: ” one of our earliest slogans was ‘ musical collaboration across the world and across the block’. Often the most difficult cultural barriers are not dividing people in Chicago from folks in the Congo, but dividing folks in Chicago and the Congo from their neighbors. Collaborative music-making, when approached with the right spirit, can serve to bridge these divides”. For him, “music is a very visceral and quick way to communicate. And the key elements to bridging these cultural gaps is participation and co-creation”. And so, the fellowship encourages participants to continue engagement in their home countries, with one of the alumni bands performing at next month’s Cape Town Jazz Festival.
The fellowship is open to musicians, aged 19-35, in any genre. Previous years have promoted a rich variety of homegrown talent. An early recipient was Mpumelelo Mcata, the fiercely innovative guitarist of BLK JKS, followed by violinist Kyla-Rose Smith, bassist Benjamin Jephta and folk singer Bongeziwe Mabandla. Most recently, it hosted unique voices Nonku Phiri and Mandla Mlageni.
The applications for this year are open until the 9th of February, 5 PM (Eastern Standard Time, USA). Successful candidates will start with a three week residency at the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, followed by a tour of New York, Baltimore, Charleston SC and Washington DC. More information and applications can be found at 1beat.org.
If you’re tired of going to music festivals with 37 different versions of Shortstraw, or if you’re tired of 40 straight hours of trance being called a music festival, you should check out Zakifo, an actual music festival. Now in it’s third year, Zakifo has found it’s feet and it’s voice as a uniquely curated international buffet of music, held in Durban of all places. If you’re not a Durbanite, you probably haven’t been before, but with Damian “Jr Gong” Marley as this year’s headliner, chances are that might change. While the first 2 editions of the festival provided a broad sonic pallet from around the world, they lacked the support they deserved because they lacked that universally known draw card that helps build critical mass. There aren’t many artists as universally known, and loved, as Bob Marley’s youngest son. It’s a monster booking that has generated hype for the young and ambitious festival, but is not all they have on offer. For those of you making your way to Durban from the 26th to the 28th of May, you’re in for a real treat.
Let me be clear, Zakifo has been a vibe from the start. The first year was a weekend long street party outside the Rivertown Beerhall. It was ambitious in its scope, with 2 stages and a lineup that probably would have drawn better in other cities, but still managed to get most of Durban’s creative community dancing in the streets. We’re talking Mi Casa, Make-Overs, The Soil, Felix Laband, Madala Kunene, Christian Tiger School, Durban acts like The Wolfpack, Veranda Panda and Raheem Kemet (All as they were making names for themselves on radio), and an international lineup that featured artists from France, Reunion Island, Mozambique and my favourite act of the weekend, the enchanting Flaviah Coelho from Brazil. Sounds like a good time, right? It was, you should have been there.
Last year, they scaled up yet again, with 3 stages at the old Natal Command. A music festival on land that used to be a military base feels like a small symbolic victory for the arts. They bumped up the international acts and audiences got more than they bargained for from the likes of Ghanaian-American Blitz The Ambassador, Too Many Zooz from New York, Mali’s Songhoy Blues, Estere from New Zealand, and the SA contingent of Moonchild, Maramza, aKing, Tidal Waves BCUC,Gigi Lamayne… it goes on for a while. The booking for Zakifo has been on point and unlike any other festival in South Africa. You may not recognise all of them, but you don’t see too many of the names on Zakifo’s lineup on other SA festival bills, and therein lies its value. You’re not going to see anything else like it.
Zakifo is an ambitious festival and this looks to be be the year that ambition pays off. While Damien Marley is a superstar booking that has given the festival more visibility, the rest of the lineup is on the level with some of the coolest festivals in the world. Birdy Nam Nam are the 2002 DMC World Team Champs and all around French electro legends, but you probably recognise their name from working with A$AP Rocky and Skrillex on Wild For The Night. Tiggs Da Author’s ‘Run’ will be familiar to FIFA fans, but most notably, the video, which is now on over 2 million views, was shot in South Africa using the talents of local drifters. London’s Nova Twins are bad bitches who play “urban-punk”- bass-laden post-punk that sounds like Guano Apes after listening to Death Grips. The South African contingent this year is also phenomenal, there are the legends in the form of Ray Phiri and Thandiswa Mazwai, the inspiring Bongeziwe Mabandla (who we’ve interviewed before), the phenomenal Petite Noir, and a cappella group The Soil, who hold the honour of being the first act to perform at Zakifo twice.
While the South African music festival has mostly become known for giving international indie and alt-rock acts a pay day once they’ve lost relevancy, festivals like Zakifo (and AfroPunk) are booking acts that are current as fuck and that appeal to more than just the privileged white kid demographic. Things have felt a bit stale on the SA festival circuit for a while now- repetitive lineups of 70% white boys backed by an international headliner just doesn’t really cut it anymore. I don’t doubt that Oppikoppi and Rocking The Daisies teaming up this year is because of “The Rand”, but you have to look at their lineups over the last few years and ask: How does this appeal to most South Africans? I can’t imagine things getting any easier for festivals like Oppi and RTD with more and more viable competition popping up. Competition that offers something unique, whilst they’re sharing headliners. With AfroPunk coming out of the gates swinging, and Zakifo building on its solid foundation, South Africans have more choices where to spend their annual festival budget and more opportunities to experience something different, something that actually feels South African.
5 years after releasing his critically acclaimed debut album Umlilo, Bongeziwe Mabandla is back from touring the world and the SAMA nominated afro-folk musician is eager for you to hear his sophomore offering, Mangaliso. Mangaliso means “marvel” or “miracle” in Xhosa and it’s meant to represent the highs and lows Bongeziwe has experienced since his last release.
Like many South African artists who go against the grain, Bongeziwe has had to venture overseas to find audiences who appreciate his art. Some of his best gigs have been in Canada, Australia, and Japan. I asked him how the love compares at home to overseas. “I find that sometimes there’s a bigger appreciation in other places for the kind of music I do. I mean, it’s kind of refreshing, you know? The difference I find when I play in Joburg or South Africa, I’m always trying to convince people, a lot, about the kind of work I’m doing. Whereas I find that people are more open to the kind of sound that I’m bringing in Canada. It’s such a folk music kind of country.” But being away from home is tough and some of the lowest moments for Bongeziwe were “being away for so long and not having the right opportunity to make new music.”
With Mangaliso, Bongeziwe certainly has had the right opportunity to make new music. Bongeziwe has signed to Universal and teamed up with Tiago, you know, the legend from 340ml and Tumi and The Volume, on production (Spoek Mathambo is the lone feature). For a young musician, an opportunity to work with someone so talented and experienced is a game changer. I enquired about the process and what it was like working with Tiago, “I had these songs written on guitar, very much in a folk type of space, so when I met with Tiago, we wanted to make them more interesting and more to what the world is kind of doing at this point in time. Kind of mixing genres, a very folk sound with a very urban, electro, hip-hop sound. He’s such a creative and hardworking guy and he puts those kinds of aspects in me. Getting to work with him was very exciting. As soon as we started to work on the songs, we knew that there was something special in the studio.”
Growing up being inspired by the likes of Tracy Chapman and Jabu Khanyile, Bongeziwe aims to do the same with his own music. “I guess, you know, the kind of music I listen to has always been inspiration music, and so I wanted to have something like that in my music. Music is about storytelling and very much about figuring life out and understanding life better, so I’ve always wanted to do that with music,” he explains. “As I grow older, I understand life better, I understand myself better and I always try and put those life lessons and what I know about the world into my music.”
Since Bongeziwe wants to inspire others, I asked what inspires him? “I’m inspired by everyday situations. I don’t think inspiration is something specific. Sometimes you’ll hear something, like somebody speaking to another person, so it’s kind of, hard to be specific. But I’m really inspired by hopeful stories, by resilience, and specifically for this album, I was very inspired by people that are able to shift their life directions and change their circumstances.”
While I don’t understand Xhosa, after listening to Bongeziwe’s music, reading translated lyrics and chatting to him, I got the feeling that there are spiritual aspects to his music so I asked him about it, “Yeah, definitely, especially this album. This whole album is very much about the spiritual revival I’ve gone through in the past two years, trying to search within myself and to look for answers in a much deeper way. So definitely that came into the music. It’s what’s really inspired this new album.”
His first single off the new album, Ndokulandela, is a testament to this. “The song is very special and I guess the best way I can explain it is that it’s about starting afresh.” Ndokulandela means “I will follow you”, and the song is written about Bongeziwe’s own life and the kind of direction where he wants to go when starting a new journey.
Bongeziwe starts a new journey on the 5th of May as he releases Mangaliso. The realease will see Bongeziwe touring his new live show with a new band on the festival circuit in Africa and later Europe. Thankfully there are festivals like Sakifo, Bushfire, and Zakifo in Southern Africa that cater to alternative artists like Bongeziwe, and slowly but surely other bookers are catching on, but the industry is still lacking in its support of these artists. I asked Bongeziwe what he’d like to change in the industry and he told me “I think what I find is lacking in South African music is that music is often viewed in one way. That it should always be dancey and loud, but it would be great to understand that there’s different music for different situations. People do not just have one emotion. I think we should be open enough to understand different genres and understand more different styles of music.” I can’t help but agree.
Towards the end of our Skype session, I asked Bongeziwe what he wants people to take from Mangaliso? “The last thing is that the album is really about hope and finding the sense of hope within us that sometimes can disappear. It’s about keeping it alive. That’s the kind of message I want.”
