Category Archives: Instruments

Shisa Phata Phata

June 19, 2008 – 3:44 pm

Its about time there was some practical, hands-on music around here, and to this end I’ve transcribed|arranged|made-up the short and sweet solo section from Spoke’s Mashiyane’s song called ‘Shisa Phata Phata’ (composed by a ‘R. Msomi’).
Phata Phata was a popular dance “down Jo’burg way” (or sometimes “down Gauteng way“) as Miriam Makeba reminds us in [...]

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More about Donald Kachamba

April 20, 2008 – 10:40 pm

Following on from my last post about the Kachamba Brothers, I decided to try and find out more.
First of all, I found some interesting photographs of Donald and ‘friends’ jamming together. These pictures were taken by Rike and Henrik Bettermann when they visited Chileka in Malawi as part of their 1996/97 tour of West and [...]

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Babatoni, the Kwela Bass

August 4, 2007 – 6:57 pm

Back in June there was a blip in the visitor stats that was the result of a link to the Kwela Project from a post in the Banjoroots Yahoo group. The post was about Africa-American single-stringed instruments, and as well as mentioning the renowned ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik (who happens to play clarinet in Donald [...]

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