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In the early years of the 20th century, the
increasing urbanisation of black South Africans in
mining centres such as the gold mining area around
Johannesburg - the so-called Witwatersrand - led to
the development of township slums or ghettos, and
out of this hardship came forth new forms of music,
marabi and kwela
amongst others.
The sound of marabi was intended to draw people
into the shebeens (unlicensed bars selling homemade liquor).
It used a few simple chords repeated in vamp
patterns that could go on all night - a reflection
of this music can be heard in the music of Basil
Coetzee or
Abdullah Ibrahim.
Associated with the illegal liquor dens and with
vices such as prostitution, the early marabi
musicians formed a kind of underground musical
culture and were not recorded. Both the white
authorities and more sophisticated black listeners
frowned upon it, much as jazz was denigrated as a temptation to vice in its early
years in the United States.
But the lilting melodies and loping rhythms of
marabi found their way into the sounds
of the bigger dance bands, modelled on American
swing groups, which began to appear in the 1920s; it
added to their distinctively South African style.
Such bands, which produced the first generation
of professional black musicians in South Africa,
achieved considerable popularity in the 1930s and
1940s: star groups such as The Jazz Maniacs, The
Merry Blackbirds and the Jazz Revellers rose to
fame, winning huge audiences among both blacks and
whites.
Lekker Links
 Source:
SouthAfrica.info
The all-in-one official guide and web portal to South Africa.
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So successful were some of these bands,
in fact, that some jealous white musicians used
the regulations against racial mixing and
the liquor laws (which restricted black
access to "white" liquor) to hamper their
progress.
Over the succeeding decades, the
marabi-swing style developed into early
mbaqanga, the most distinctive form of
South
African jazz, which has given its flavour to
much South African music since then, from
the jazz performers of the post-war years to
the more populist township forms of the
1980s.
The beginnings of broadcast radio
intended for black listeners and the growth
of an indigenous recording industry helped
propel such sounds to immense popularity
from the 1930s onward.
Travelling variety shows, vaudeville
troupes and dance concerts boosted the
impact of black music, and schools began to
arise teaching the various jazzy styles
available, among them pianist-composer
Wilfred Sentso's influential "School of
Modern Piano Syncopation", which taught
"classical music, jazz syncopation,
saxophone and trumpet blowing", as well as
"crooning, tap dancing and ragging".
A truly indigenous musical language was
coming into being.
The derivation of the term marabi is
unclear. It is perhaps derived from Marabastad, an area
in Pretoria where domestic servants lived in
the 1880s; or from the
Sotho word “marabi,”
meaning gangster.
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