Bulawayo Kwela Calabash, the renowned township band from the City of Kings, will be the opening act for Mokoomba as they perform for the first time after returning home from their maiden tour of the United States of America and Canada.
The show will take place at Alliance Francaise de Harare tonight, Friday August 29, as we roll into the last weekend of August and an outdoor stage has been set up to cater for as many people as possible.
The concert will kick off with a sure-to-be-magical performance by veterans Bulawayo Kwela Calabash whose township sound with the characteristic penny whistle has entertained audiences for decades.
For this concert, Alliance Francaise is setting up an outdoor stage that will ensure more people can come in and enjoy the onset of the summer, dancing to Mokoomba’s afro-fusion beat that has won them fans around the world.
Zimbo Jam caught up with band manager Marcus Gora who spoke more on the tour and how they are driving to get a bigger local audience.
“The tour was insightful as always we enjoyed ourselves and obviously learnt quite a lot and now we have plans of growing a bigger fan base locally.”
“As a band we are doing okay we are getting recognition from the public bit by bit, what should be remembered is that we are a young band and we do not play popular music which is maybe why we do not get as much follows but now we are planning on staging shows at more local venues so that the audience can relate more to our type of music.”
During their United States of America and Canada tour Mokoomba played at Vashon Islands, Montreal Jazz Festival and at the Vancouver Islands Music festival among others.
The opening act, Bulawayo Kwela Calabash, is a project initiated by Albert Nyathi’s Imbongi Arts Productions. Imbongi discovered most of the band members playing music for excited crowds in Bulawayo’s famed beer gardens such as Madlodlo, Manwele, Makhumalo and at the Airport.
The general trend was that one or two of them would start playing a tune, usually something from the 1960s or 70s, to a small crowd, and when they were done, some people in the crowd would donate some money which would go towards the purchase of opaque beer which would be shared.
Requests would be made for particular songs and this would go on, with people getting more and more inebriated and the crowd growing bigger.
Following all this, Imbongi Arts decided to group some of the talented ones together in 2009 and this was the beginning of a whole new journey for the artists.
After an exceptional performance by the group at Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) in 2011 they managed to attract the attention of a French producer who was not even in Zimbabwe at the time.
Antoine Rajon started communicating with Imbongi Arts in 2012, and in April 2013 he flew in with his engineer for a recording with the support of Alliance Francaise.
All this resulted in the outfit getting a booking for an international tour starting 2015.