It just can’t hurt for whistle enthusiasts to look beyond the Irish tradition and other Western European folk music to other applications of our belovedly simple instrument.  There is, for example, kwela.

Kwela emerged as a popular phenomenon—one might say “fad” if it weren’t a bit pejorative, in the apartheid-dominated South Africa in the 1950s.   If you have had occasion to listen to African jazz, you’ll know that the signature sound is upbeat, lively, and danceable.  As an adolescent, I remember listening to the first album by an African jazz band called Osibisa.  (Their American releases featured very cool artwork by the great Roger Dean.) The band described their own music as “criss- cross rhythms which explode with happiness.”  So it was with kwela.  The style was centered on the pennywhistle and one can hear the influences of swing, jazz, blues, boogie woogie as well as indigenous African music. 

The whistle craze slowly evolved into township jive.  Players gravitated to saxophones and electric instruments.  Some see this transition as a desire to move past the limitations of the whistle. The principal limitation was volume   - with the arrival of electric bass and guitar, a penny whistle simply couldn’t cut through – and so kwela all but disappeared as its proponents moved on into sax-jive and mbaqanga. 

We in the whistle world tend to hold with the legend that the kwela players were committed to the Hohner whistles.  Hohner stopped making them, destroyed the hardware required to make them, and kwela players were forced to move on to other instruments.  (The destruction of the Hohner molds is sort of the whistleworld equivalent of Brian Wilson destroying the Smile tapes.  But, I’ve collected a few Hohners and, believe me, they weren’t worth the fuss.)

I recently became a fan of a kwela revival band from England called The Positively Testcard.   I missed a good opportunity to become a fan years ago.  Someone sent me an email with a kind of vague reference to the band and I thought it was a kind of musical spam message.   You know, like those “Refinance your penis” spams, except hipper.  I ignored it, to my regret. Anyway, I’m a fan now.   How can you not be a fan of a band with a CD titled “GAS UP MY HOTROD STOKER, THE KWELA GROOVE FRENZY'S HIT TOWN ” and another titled, “THE INDESTRUCTIBLE BEAT OF SOUTH NORWOOD.”  The latter gets my vote as the hippest CD title of all time.  If you don’t know why it’s hip, I can’t help you.

Founded in 1996 by former Billy Bragg trumpeter Dave Woodhead, who had the good sense to switch to whistle, and by guitarist Adam Keelan, the band works, records, and gigs.  Check out their website at:

http://www.positivelytestcard.co.uk

I had the opportunity to interview Dave Woodhead recently in Berlin .   

Dale Wisely:  I would imagine this band started with one of you discovering kwela. How did you discover it and where did it take you?

Dave Woodhead:  The band didn’t start off playing kwela. I’d wanted to do a band to keep my lip in shape (I’m a trumpet player as well) in between doing gigs for Billy Bragg and the like. We did cover covers – Only Ones, Earl Bostic, Basie, Jackson 5 – all the usual suspects.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Jackson 5

As I was doing all trumpet sets with the band, I needed something to give my lip a rest during the course of a gig, so I learnt a couple of Spokes Masheyane tunes on the whistle. Bit by bit the kwela tunes started to dominate the set list. Andy Kershaw (BBC Radio DJ) then asked us for an all kwela set for a session for BBC Radio One and that launched us off down the kwela road good and proper.

Found this Spokes Masheyane CD cover on the web.  If someone has a better graphic, send it!

I’d known of the music and had one or two records. The music suited the band line-up so I ferreted around for more music to listen to. Friends made tapes but there was very little available in the shops – Spokes’ King Kwela and a CD on Earthworks by West Nkosi .

I've had this great photo of West Nkosi, which appears in a couple of places on the web, for sometime.  Still don't have a photo credit.  Great, great photo.

·        So, for you, kwela came first and then the whistle?

I learnt the whistle to play kwela. I wanted to make a noise like Lemmy and Spokes. I’m currently abusing the mandolin and harmonica under similar circumstances.

·        Yours would be a rather narrow market I would think – kwela fans aren’t exactly numerous. How was the band received in the early days?

Narrow market?! ...Wrong continent, wrong decade, wrong colour – but the music was right.

No – there was no market. But when we played it in London pubs people liked it. A few South Africans knew what we were doing but I think kwela was new to most of the people we played to. We didn’t want to play it too straight, too authentic. A lot has come into popular music since the 1950’s, and we wanted to lean on some of that, in the same way that the original guys leant on American black music as well as Marabi and other township music.

·        Uh... are there other kwela revival bands? I mean, we know you’re the best, but are you also the only?

The only other guys I know of doing kwela at the moment are Tobogo Lerole’s outfit Kwela Tebza. Tobogo is Big Voice Jack Lerole’s nephew. Big Voice Jack has just put out a new CD but he’s very ill these days.

Found this also uncredited photo of Big Voice Jack on the web.  How cool is this?  What is that monster he's playing?

·      

•   We can define kwela culturally, I suppose, and we can say it is centered on the whistle as a lead instrument. But are there characteristics of the music in terms of music theory that make it distinctive?

Here goes for a kwela-by-numbers guide.

(i)                 Simple cycle of the three major chords of the key e.g. I,I, IV,V or IV,I,V,I or I,IV,I,V or I,IV,V,I

(ii)               This cycle is over 2 or 4 bars. So you put the most irritatingly catchy 2 or 4 bar tune over the top. Maybe coming up with a secondary tune too

(iii)             Put it all together, sling in a whistle solo in the middle, a guitar solo (a mercifully whistle-free section) and back to the tune. The End.

Note – no middle 8, no drum solo – it’s chorus all the way through.

(iv)             The rhythmic feel is swung quavers (triplet, as in the swing bands, R n’B, blues and R & R of American black culture that black South Africans were picking up on.

(v)               The tune is 2 minutes 30 seconds long.

(vi)             It’s in B flat

Originally this was street corner music – just whistle with guitar or lead whistle with backing whistles and a guitar. The bass (tea chest or string) and drums turn up once the music was being recorded and the kids on the street wanted to recreate the sound of those records.

·        What is the current line-up of the band?

The only line-up change the band’s had is Marcel Stranis replacing Chris Morgan on bass. Adam Keelan still strums and Mario Guarnieri still hits things. I suppose the major change was allowing Mario a bass drum since Hot-Rod stoker was recorded. 

·        Apart from your CD’s, are their definite kwela recordings interested people should try to find?

CD’s to buy:

Big Voice Jack Lerole - Live CD and his new one

Spokes Masheyane – King Kwela

West Nkosi – his whistle CD on Earthworks

That should set you up. There are lots of South African compilations that include one or two kwela tracks. The big omission is that there’s no Lemmy Mabaso available.

·        Dave, tell us about your whistles.

“‘Me and My Whistles’ – every week we ask a celebrity brass instrument repair man to discuss his pipes...”

I’ve settled on Shaws. They’re edgy enough and just nicely out of tune. They’re also tapered which gives you lots of false-fingering potential in the third octave. Also helps with trills/flutters. 

G, A, Bb, C and D cover all our tunes. I use a cheapy plastic topped D because the Shaw is so out of tune.

I’ve tried Overtons but they sound too nice and flutey. Likewise Susatos.

I like music that sounds like it’s being beaten out of the speakers with an old frying pan – Shaws give me that sound. ...There, that should get me an enormous sponsorship deal...

·       

•  Yes, Dave Shaw will be awfully proud.  I’d put you on to Jerry Freeman’s tweaked Shaws except, obviously, they’d end up unacceptably, uh, good to you.   Do you know anything about the Hohner thing? How that became the default whistle for kwela players in Africa ?

There had been South African kids playing whistles since the 1930’s when they were emulating the Scottish pipe bands (Now that’s what I call Afro-Celt music...)

In the 1940’s the swing and R n’B 78’s started flowing in and the kids shifted their influences to American black culture (a sigh of relief from music lovers everywhere). Spotting the whistle-craze take-off in the mid 50’s, in 1958 Hohner started mass-producing a nickel plated brass whistle, based on a prototype supplied by a young South African penny-whistler. Hohner then imported these in to South Africa and cornered the market.

Hohner

·        My understanding is that kwela players had a unique way of blowing the whistle, or holding it in their mouths. What can you tell us about that?

The blowing is very different. “..Assume the position..”

(i)                Hold the whistle normally

(ii)               Lift the right wrist and drop the left wrist. The holes have now shifted from the vertical off the left.

(iii)             Crick your neck towards your right shoulder.

(iv)             Stick the whistle in your mouth with lips above and below the sound hole thing.

(v)              Blow

Dave Woodhead demonstrates the painful kwela blowing style. Photo thanks to Tot

I hope this makes sense. Not recommended by the country’s top osteopaths. It really is a pain in the neck. But it does get the sound. It’s much richer and you can use this technique to bend notes too. ‘It flattens as it fattens...’

·        That’s completely weird.  My neck hurts.  I’m gagging here.  This is making me sick.  I feel like crying.  I do admit, though, that I’ve always believed that there ought to be some way to exploit that pitch-bending thing you get by partially obstructing the air coming out of the window.  What I hadn’t thought was that it would involve tickling my tonsils with the mouthpiece.   What variety of keys was used in the original kwela repertoire?

 Almost exclusively B flat, some C and G, some A (though this might be a flattened Bb. See above) Either B flat dominates because

(a)                it’s suitably fruity, not too shrill and pipey like a D, and with comfortable hole-spacing

(b)               the kid’s whistle that Hohner copied was a Bb

(c)                it matches trumpet, clarinet, tenor sax, trombone – all being Bb instruments. (Even though whistles rarely played with these instruments until much later.)

(d)               None/all of the above. Not a clue.

·        Thanks for doing this interview.  And good luck.  Some day there’s going to be a world-wide second-wave kwela craze and you guys are going to be at the epicenter, or epicentre, and you’ll get filthy rich.  Trust me, it’s going to happen.