Some of the world's most inventive bass playing can be found in Africa’s modern pop music. While some players have gotten a share of the international
spotlight, most of the continent’s great bassists have remained unsung heroes.
Over several issues, we’ll focus on four of Africa’s most bass-obsessed countries—South
Africa, Cameroon, Congo, and Zimbabwe—and find out how Africans have been taking
the instrument to new places.
“There’s no good music without bass,” says
Bakithi Kumalo, the South African bass
guru, matter-of-factly. “Especially if you’re
gonna play African music. The drums
might be the heart of African music, but
the bass is its body. The bass surrounds
the music.”
Home to over one billion people, over
50 countries, and over 1,000 local languages,
the immense diversity found within
Africa makes it difficult to generalize about
the continent and its music. But there is
little doubt that Kumalo is right: There is
a special place for the low end in Africa.
African bassists are rarely content to sit back, lock in with the kick drum, and outline
the harmonies. The bass plays a more
active melodic and rhythmic role in African
music, often dancing around the beat in
counterpoint to the rest of the band and
leaping around the neck to execute slippery
16th-note licks. And African bass is
usually pushed way up to the front of the
mix for all to appreciate.
For the most part, bass instruments were
not a part of traditional African ensembles
before colonization. There wasn’t any need
for them; the bottom-end support of harmonic
movement was a fundamentally
European musical concept. One exception
is the ground-bow, known as the kalinga
in Southern Africa. It was made by tying a
long gut string to a tree sapling on one end
and anchoring the other in the ground,
using the earth itself as a resonator. The
player adjusted the pitch by pulling on the
sapling and changing the string tension, a
design that reappeared in the Mississippi
Delta in the form of the washtub bass.
Musical ideas may have flowed from
Africa to the Americas during the slave
trade, but they went back the other way in
the 20th century as Black American sounds
came to Africa on LPs and over airwaves
to influence music in the motherland. In
the 1950s, a variant on the washtub bass
sprung up in the sprawling townships of
apartheid South Africa: the tea-chest bass,
a one-string instrument made from the big
plywood boxes used throughout the former
British Empire to ship tea. The teachest
was used to accompany kwela, a sort
of stripped-down jazz played on pennywhistles
and guitar. A few elite dance
orchestras boasted upright basses, but the
instruments were far too expensive for most
South Africans.
The country’s greatest bass innovator
was also literally the first black man in South
Africa to own an electric bass. In 1962, more
than a decade after Leo Fender rolled out
the first P-Basses, Joseph Makwela bought
a second-hand instrument from a white
South African session player. He soon
became the bassist for the Makhona Tsohle
Band, which backed artists on the Mavuthela
record label, the “South African Motown”
that crafted the soul-inflected, electrified
pop sound known as mbaqanga (see Ex. 1).
Makwela’s style would profoundly affect
future generations of bassists. “When we
started to hear Joseph Makwela, it blew us
away,” says Bakithi Kumalo. “We had no
idea what he was doing. It was incredible.”
Under mid-tempo, four-on-the-floor
drum grooves and sunny I-IV-V progressions,
Makwela would pick heavy, rhythmic
lines full of melodic fragments played
high on the neck, characterized by a trebly,
attack-heavy tone. However, what
stands out most in Makwela’s lines are the
slides: up and down the neck, inflecting
nearly every note and giving the instrument
an almost human voice. According to
Kumalo, voices may have been his inspiration.
“I think Makwela’s lines came from
a capella vocals,” he says, referring to the
all-male choral groups ubiquitous in South
Africa. “He would listen to the guy singing
on the low end, and just grab the part.”
After Makwela, Bakithi Kumalo would
become the country’s most renowned bass
man. Growing up in Johannesburg on a
mbaqanga diet, he would later translate
South African ideas to international rock
on Paul Simon’s Graceland [Warner Bros.,
1988], a classic bass album that prominently
features Kumalo’s meaty fretless Washburn
820. He bought the bass simply because it
was the cheapest one he could find at the
time, but with those big slides engrained in
his musical DNA, it was a perfect fit.
Kumalo seasons his playing with tasty,
finger-busting licks, showing an evolution
of Makwela’s high-register melody concept;
listen to the fills on Paul Simon’s “Diamonds
On the Soles of Her Shoes,” for
example (see October ’07 for a transcription).
For Kumalo, it’s all about playing the
right thing at the right time. “When I play
fills, I don’t think about a lot of notes. I
think about singing the song. It’s like you
are answering and telling them, ‘Hey, I hear
what you say, here’s some of my stuff.’”
You could call it call-and-response—and
that’s one of the oldest African musical
ideas around. —Marlon Bishop