With Next Stop… Soweto, Strut trace some of the amazing music that often only appeared on short run 45s at the time; rare lost gems deftly culled from the ’60s + ’70s South African “township jive sound.” Featuring music recorded primarily for the local market, the album takes the listener far beyond the accepted township jive template into fusions with jazz, gospel, rumba, funk and traditional mining songs. It delves into the golden age of mbaqanga. Jazz had been a fixture in South African music since the ‘50s and jive (or mbaqanga) initially emerged a decade later as a fusion combining elements of rural Zulu music and harmony vocal styles with Western instrumentation. You can hear influences from American R&B and ’60s rock and surf, in the same way ska and rocksteady developed in Jamaica. And if you like desert blues from Sahara, you will also like the fusion of mbaqanga.
The Next Stop… Soweto series is the result of several years of painstaking research and vinyl archaeology in South Africa by compilers Duncan Brooker and Francis Gooding. If you want to know where Vampire Weekend gets their inspiration from, and you want to listen to the real deal, then you know where your next stop is.. It will fit nicely next to your Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba records.
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