Thank you everyone for the feed-back. I have been listening to SA music on napster but there is nothing which is truly called K’wela but it is good music nevertheless.
JD
I was looking through my South African CDs to see if I could find some compilations that featured enough kwela to warrant my recommending them. I didn’t come up with much. About three or four compilations are generally available which feature between two and four kwela tracks, often with clarinet rather than whistle and sometimes the same well known tracks. These are great CDs but if you are only interested in pennywhistle jive you will be a bit disappointed. I’ll mention them later probably but I stumbled across something much more interesting. One compilation had a track by a young revivalist called Tebogo. A quick google search turned up the following site.
http://www.oneworld.co.za/SearchResults.asp?uref=&Category=Pennywhistle&OrderID=&AffiliateID=
As you can see, there is much more kwela becoming available than I had realised when I posted earlier. Of course I have the Spokes CD already, as should everybody. But I sense a few new orders coming on as a type right now.
The first CD displayed is an anthology of vintage 50s tracks.
Argghh! Now I wish I had reserved the JessieD username!!!
you just noticed? 
Thanks for the link Wombat! 
Well, I don’t live on the board.
I have found this link which has 1 minute samples of King Kwela by Spokes Mashiyane
http://www.sternsmusic.com/disk_info/CDZAC50
And it looks like Musicmatch has a great selection of Kwela and early SA jazz music! It shows it has 2 albums by spokes too!
Be careful with Spokes records. King Kwela is indeed pennywhistle jive and quite generally available but both he and West Nkosi played pennywhistle early on and sax later. In fact Spokes started both the commercial pennywhistle craze in 1954 although the music had been around for years by then—there’s a movie sighting in 1951—and the sax jive craze in 1958. So the heyday of commercial kwela was really 1954-1958. About 1,000 78s were issued in the style so there’s a lot there if the reissue companies ever decide to dig deep.
Thank you for that information. Even if they are not playing the penny whistle, I think the music will be good!
I probably wont be able to set up a Musicmatch account until next year. Is there anyone here who has a musicmatch account? Do they truly have Spokes Mashiyane albums to download or are they only providing album information?
Thank you.
that’s..um..actually a very good policy.
Well.. I think you had a few people fooled there for awhile :roll: