A moving document of Molelekwa's artistic progress, Wa Mpona includes two live tracks recorded in 1994 at a rare session at Cape Town's Baxter Theatre , where he worked with international musicians like Airto Moreira, Byron Walen and Andrew Missingham for the first time. His genius as a jazz improviser shines through the album's closing track, a live version of "Ntate Moholo", of Genes and Spirits fame, performed at the North Sea jazz festival in the Hague with his youthful band, including Moses Khumalo.
The title track "Wa Mpono", has been described as the granddaddy of progressive kwaito. Produced during the recording of his seminal second album, Genes and Spirits, this entirely new composition was considered too advanced and too remote from mainstream jazz tastes to be included on that album. It features the additional rarety of Molelekwa on lead vocal, backed by Lungiswa Plaatjies.
Several of the other compositions on Wa Mpona will be familiar to those who know Genes and Spirits and the other album released during Molelekwa's lifetime, Finding One Self. But, with one exception, they appear in new guises. The cool keyboard and programmed drumming of "Spirits of Tembisa" surfaces, transformed, in a remix by Ashley Beadle, and the other one a tasteful arrangement with additional saxophone parts by Cape Town based Buddy Wells (Tribe). The latino rhythms of "Ntate Mohole" are amplified by the addition of congas and timbales to the piano support of Chucho Valdez. "Sing Along", previously released only on the limited South African edition of Barungwa's album, The Messenger, will be fresh to all but a tiny band of Molelekwa aficionados.
The fact that Molelekwa's voice and fingers have been stilled forever gives special poignancy to these performances. The quality of the musicial inspiration, and the sense of so much promise waiting to be tapped, underline how much has been lost to South African music. . Perhaps more than any other South African musician of the modern period, Molelekwa looked back into the country's past while pointing to its future.
6009637340101
BWSA2281
M.E.L.T. 2000, 2002
South Africa
Good condition
C08
(X)
