The South African Music Graph

Everyone and everything on the map

Genre

• Cape jazz

  The name for jazz as Cape Town plays it, built on the goema beat of the carnival, the marabi groove and the saxophone sound of the langarm dance bands. Martin's view is that the idea of it was probably inspired by Abdullah Ibrahim's reworking of carnival tunes, and that what happened in the 1980s was the systematising of an older habit.

  Cape Town3 connections

• Goema

  Both a drum and a beat. The drum is a single-headed instrument built like a small wine cask, which the Dictionary of South African English traces through Afrikaans to a dialectal Malay word. The beat runs through the carnival, the Malay choirs and the dance bands, and in the 1980s the Genuines took the name for their own music.

  Cape Town2 connections

• Kwaito

  The slowed-down South African house music that came out of Soweto between the late 1980s and early 1990s, with loops, deep bass and township slang over the top. The name comes from the slang word kwaai. Brenda Fassie's Memeza is described as pop and kwaito.

• Kwela

  The pennywhistle music that carried South African sound abroad in the 1950s. South African History Online glosses the name as Zulu for get up, and notes that in township slang it also meant the police van. Basil Coetzee started out on the pennywhistle in 1958.

  2 connections

• Langarm

  The dance band music of coloured Cape Town, built on waltzes, foxtrots and South African steps such as vastrap and ticky-draai. Mason's point about "Mannenberg" is that its saxophone sound is langarm, which is a large part of why Cape Town listeners recognised themselves in it.

  Cape Town2 connections

• Marabi

  The township party music that grew in the slum yards of the mining towns from the end of the nineteenth century, built on a repeating chord pattern. Abdullah Ibrahim grew up playing it, and its groove is what people hear in "Mannenberg", helped by a piano prepared with thumbtacks in the hammers.

  3 connections

• Mbaqanga

  The African jazz that grew out of marabi and kwela from around 1950 and became the popular music of the townships. Zacks Nkosi's "Jackpot" is an mbaqanga tune, and Robbie Jansen counted mbaqanga among the styles a working Cape Town musician simply had to know.

  2 connections