Marabi - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Marabi is an indigenous music that evolved in South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

over the last century.

The early part of the 20th century saw the increasing urbanisation of black South Africans in mining centres such as the gold mining area around Johannesburg

Johannesburg

Johannesburg also known as Jozi, Jo'burg or Egoli, is the largest city in South Africa, by population. Johannesburg is the provincial capital of Gauteng, the wealthiest province in South Africa, having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa...

- the Witwatersrand

Witwatersrand

The Witwatersrand is a low, sedimentary range of hills, at an elevation of 1700–1800 metres above sea-level, which runs in an east-west direction through Gauteng in South Africa. The word in Afrikaans means "the ridge of white waters". Geologically it is complex, but the principal formations...

. This led to the development of township slums or ghettos, and out of this hardship came forth new forms of music, marabi and kwela

Kwela

Kwela is a happy, often pennywhistle-based, street music from southern Africa with jazzy underpinnings and a distinctive, skiffle-like beat. It evolved from the marabi sound and brought South African music to international prominence in the 1950s....

amongst others .

Marabi was the name given to a keyboard

Keyboard instrument

A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument which is played using a musical keyboard. The most common of these is the piano. Other widely used keyboard instruments include organs of various types as well as other mechanical, electromechanical and electronic instruments...

style (often using cheap pedal organs) that had a musical link to American jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

, ragtime

Ragtime

Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...

and blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

, with roots deep in the African tradition. Early marabi musicians were part of an underground musical culture and were typically not recorded. Indeed, as with early jazz in the USA, the music incurred the displeasure of the establishment. Nonetheless, as with early jazz, the lilting melodies and catchy rhythms of marabi found their way into the sounds of popular dance bands with a distinctively South African style .

The sound of marabi was intended to draw people into local bars or "Shebeens" (where illicit drinks like skokiaan

Skokiaan

"Skokiaan" is a popular tune originally written by Rhodesian musician August Musarurwa in the tsaba-tsaba big band style that succeeded marabi...

were sold), and to get them dancing. "Shebeens" resemble the American speakeasies of the prohibition era where American Jazz was very popular.

Marabi is characterised by a few simple chords repeated in varying vamping patterns that could go on for a long time; repetitive harmonic patterns being typical of traditional African musics . This was the case so people could dance for extended periods of time without having to know the songs well. People were able to pick up the feel and rhythm of the song after a few times through the progression .

The most famous of marabi’s venues were the shebeens, and the weekend-long slumyard parties. For almost everyone outside ghetto life, however, marabi and its subculture were shunned. Associated with illegality, police raids, sex and a desperately impoverished working class, marabi was thought of as a corrupting menace and for this reason, it is no surprise that no early marabi musicians were recorded .

A reflection of this music can be heard in the music of such Cape Jazz performers as Basil Coetzee or Abdullah Ibrahim. 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.

Such bands produced the first generation of professional black musicians in South Africa. Over the years, marabi developed into early mbaqanga

Mbaqanga

Mbaqanga is a style of South African music with rural Zulu roots that continues to influence musicians worldwide today. The style originated in the early 1960s.-History:...

, arguably the most distinctive form of South African music. This has which has influenced South African music since then, from the jazz performers of the post-war years to the more populist township forms of the 1980s and onwards. With the infusion of more traditional influences, marabi has lost much of its links to the styles jazz roots and is now part of the African music culture as opposed to South African Jazz.

One of the most notable musical pieces that contain a hint of Marabi is Paul Simon's 1986 epic, Graceland. The Garland Encyclopedia of Music says, "Fundamental to much of the musical mix (of Graceland) was the influence of the African-American jazz, introduced into South Africa by transnational record-distribution networks in the 1920's. Most South African jazz musicians could not read scores, so they developed their own jazz flavor, mixing american swing with african melodies. The dynamic blend of african-american structure and african style became the basis for early south african township jazz known as marabi" .

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