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.
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Abdullah Ibrahim's 1974 tune is spelt with three n's. The Cape Flats township it is named for has two. The published accounts explain the song, but not the extra letter.
Music Manenberg 1974 Cape Town
Source: SAHA Sunday Times Heritage Project: Mannenberg · Africa Is a Country: How Rashid Vally showed us the way
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Abdullah Ibrahim recorded "Mannenberg" in Cape Town in June 1974 with Basil Coetzee, Robbie Jansen, Morris Goldberg and Monty Weber, produced by Rashid Vally for the As-Shams label.
Music Manenberg 1974 Cape Town
Source: SAHA Sunday Times Heritage Project: Mannenberg · Africa Is a Country: How Rashid Vally showed us the way
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The saxophonist on "Mannenberg" was born in District Six in 1944. His family was moved to Manenberg in 1969 under the Group Areas Act, and the township name became his own.
Music District Six 1944–1998 Cape Town
Source: South African History Online: Basil Coetzee · Wikipedia: Basil Coetzee
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Goema is both a barrel-shaped hand drum and the Cape Town music built on its beat. The Dictionary of South African English traces the word probably to a dialectal Malay word related to gong.
Music Cape Town Cape Town
Source: Dictionary of South African English: ghomma · Wikipedia: Cape jazz
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Radio would not play it and the big labels were not interested, so Rashid Vally played "Mannenberg" on speakers outside his Kohinoor record shop. Africa Is a Country reports that he sold 5,000 copies in the first week.
Music 1974 Cape Town
Source: Africa Is a Country: How Rashid Vally showed us the way · SAHA Sunday Times Heritage Project: Mannenberg
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Cape jazz emerged in Cape Town from the late 1950s. Valmont Layne of the University of the Western Cape, who wrote his doctorate on goema, describes it as the rhythmic essence of collective life among the poor and traces its links to Cape jazz.
Music District Six 1959 Cape Town
Source: Denis-Constant Martin: Sounding the Cape (African Minds, 2013), p. 353 · University of the Western Cape: Art activist Layne probes goema music for his doctorate
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Martin writes that the ghoema beat had already infiltrated the drumming of Cape Town jazz drummers before it was explicitly used in fusions and in Cape jazz, and that it is very closely related to the vastrap rhythm of boeremusiek and langarm.
Music Cape Town Cape Town
Source: Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (African Minds, 2013) · University of the Western Cape: Art activist Layne probes goema music for his doctorate
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Mason breaks the tune into familiar local ingredients: a marabi groove, a beat close to ticky-draai or a lazy ghoema, saxophones with a langarm sound, and a jazz aesthetic holding it together.
Music 1974 Cape Town
Source: John Edwin Mason, "Mannenberg": Notes on the Making of an Icon and Anthem, African Studies Quarterly 9(4), 2007 · Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (African Minds, 2013)
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Martin writes that the Genuines, led by Mac McKenzie with Hilton Schilder and often Robbie Jansen, named their music ghoema and recorded Mr Mac and the Genuines for Shifty Records in 1987. The Dictionary of South African English lists that 1980s style as a second sense of the word.
Music 1987 Cape Town
Source: Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (African Minds, 2013) · Dictionary of South African English: ghomma
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