Couple this with traditional African rhythms and out came this new breed of sound-beast! What a gorgeous fusion!!! With the rawness of Jimi Hendrix and James Brown, the heavy repetitive riff-based melodies of bands such as Black Sabbath, the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple and Cream, Zamrock had a wealth of influences to draw upon. Now known as Zamrock, this genre of music emerged in Zambia in the 1970’s and is the product of the combined sounds of traditional African music and psych-rock and funk. Throughout the late 60’s/early 70’s when afrobeat and highlife was a staple part of the African music scene, something different was emerging and bubbling away under the surface. Over-ridden fuzz guitars, pop melodies and even a Black Sabbathesque sounding song. A tough rock and roll masterpiece like no other. Listen to the shows live when they air or click on any show below to listen at any time you like in the archives.“It could be argued that this is one of the greatest rock n’ roll records of all time! Straight from Zambia, we have “ My Ancestors”. 1, with a second volume in the wings for June.Ī good portion of what we'll hear on Wednesday comes from these remastered reissues, along with similar efforts by Strawberry Rain and Shadoks, but a number of the tracks we'll hear are from crackly original vinyl shared by bloggers around the world.īodega Pop Live airs Wednesdays from 7:00-10:00 PM Eastern Time on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio Earlier this month they announced the release of Welcome to Zamrock! Vol. Since 2010, working with Ililonga, Chanda and other survivors, Now-Again Records has reissued a number of boxed-set retrospectives and single-album titles from the era, including all five WITCH albums before Chandra left the group. Few playable copies of even the top acts of the era exist not even Chanda and Ililonga, the sole survivors of their respective bands WITCH and Musi-O-Tunya, had copies of all of their records when foreigners started showing up in the aughts looking to reissue some of the defining albums. It is a history that has made preservation of the music difficult. In the 1980s, many of those musicians whose careers hadn't yet been silenced by evaporating record sales faced a much greater horror: the AIDS epidemic devastated the local music industry, taking with it the lives of a disproportionate number of Zambia's artists. And, once pressed, a Zambian record was virtually assured air time.īut the country's economy was dependent on copper and, when the price fell in 1974, Zambia slid into debt and living standards fell. Unable to tune in and get their fix of British and American rock and funk, of Nigerian afrobeat, they had to create more of their own. Heavily influenced by Jimi Hendrix and James Brown (who in 1970 gave culture-shifting performances in Zambia's capital, Lusaka, and in the country's copper mining center, Ndola), participants in Zambia's rock scene may have been further spurred on by an unlikely irritant: President Kenneth Kaunda's decree sometime in the mid- to late-1970s that 95% of music on the radio had to be Zambian. "There was a kind of magic here," Emanuel "Jagari" Chanda, lead singer of the legendary band WITCH, has said of Zambia in the 1970s, when he, along with Rikki Ililonga, Paul Ngozi, Zimbabwean-born Teddy Khuluzwa, Keith Mlevhu and dozens of others recorded some of the greatest rock 'n' roll on the planet. 1972-78.īookmark the page and see you Wednesday night On Wednesday, May 17, from 7-10 PM EDT, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio spins ear-searing tracks from more than three dozen Zambian records released ca.
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