The first request by @tomtick from my unboxing video (see link below) has been fulfilled!
Led by August Musarurwa, who also is featured on alto saxophone, the Chaminuka Jazz Band is an excellent example of Bulawayo Jazz – a style developed in Southern Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe.
Recorded in the early 1950’s for Gallotone, this video contains both sides of GB.1659:
0:00 Side A – Tot System Jive
2:53 Side B – Chaminuka
As I understand it, Bulawayo Jazz was an informal celebratory type of music played by ordinary musicians purely for entertainment after hours. You won’t hear a lot of improvisation – though there is some – and you will hear a rhythm section dominated by the banjo – an instrument long since abandoned by most American jazz performers at this time.
Writing of Musarurwa’s saxophone playing in a review of an SWP Records release of Bulawayo Jazz in 2015, jazz writer Ken Waxman states, “His vibrato is wide enough to ferry across and his tone makes equivalent solos from his Jump Band progenitors like Pete Brown sound as if their solos are as cerebral and forbidding as Anthony Braxton’s work sounds to the uninitiated.”
https://www.jazzword.com/reviews/august-musarurwa/
If you haven’t watched my unboxing video of over 60 African 78 rpm records, take a look and tell me which ones you’d like to hear next!
https://youtu.be/WCwGfTM8hXc
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