Mango Groove
Mango Groove is an 11-piece South African Afropop band whose music fuses pop and township music—especially marabi and kwela.
[2] Three of the four founding members—John Leyden, Andy Craggs, and Bertrand Mouton—were bandmates in a "white middle-class punk band" called Pett Frog, while they were students at the University of the Witwatersrand.
In 1984 the three young men met kwela musician "Big Voice" Jack Lerole at the Gallo Records building in Johannesburg.
[6] For most of the band's history, it has comprised four vocalists, lead and bass guitar, a brass section, drums, keyboards, and the penny whistle.
(The penny whistle is the central instrument in kwela music—a Southern African style that has strongly influenced Mango Groove's sound.)
Lead singer Claire Johnston's soprano is complemented by backing vocalists Beulah Hashe, Marilyn Nokwe, and Phumzile Ntuli.
He, John Leyden, Kevin Botha, Jack Lerole, and Simon "Mahlathini" Nkabinde co-wrote "Dance Some More", which was the first song Mango Groove recorded.
After a month with no word from the band, Johnston received a phone call from Leyden who asked if she could rehearse for a show booked two nights later.
[7][13] Some of the band's other former members are drummer Peter Cohen, trumpeter Banza Kgasoane, composer/keyboardist Alan Lazar, penny whistler Kelly Petlane, keyboardist Les Blumberg, and trombonist Mickey Vilakazi.
Before his stint with Mango Groove, Cohen co-founded the South African pop rock band Bright Blue;[14] he later joined Freshlyground (est.
In the mid-1990s he started producing scores for film and television, and won a scholarship from the United States' Fulbright Foreign Student Program.
[17] After earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from the USC School of Cinema-Television in 1997, he settled in the US and continued his career in the Greater Los Angeles Area.
[21][22][23] At the funeral service in Alexandra, Claire Johnston, John Leyden, and other musicians joined Kgasoane's son Moshe on-stage to perform a tribute to Banza.
[25][26] On 21 December, South Africa's Minister of Arts and Culture Nathi Mthethwa memorialised Kgasoane in a press statement issued by the Department.
[32] Sax and penny whistle player Mduduzi "Duzi" Magwaza also released an album, Boerekwela (2005), and accompanied the Soweto String Quartet on their world tour.[11][35][when?]
[citation needed] For the band's first seven years, the National Party was in power, and apartheid was an official policy of the government of South Africa.
For a band with white and black members, the government's policies of enforced racial segregation made accommodations, booking, and travel more difficult, if not dangerous.
[38] In the 1980s and early 1990s, near the end of the apartheid era, Mango Groove and Juluka were the only major South African music groups with both black and white band-members.
[38] When Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison on 11 February 1990 after 27 years of imprisonment, the US news program Nightline used "We Are Waiting" as a musical score for the event.
In a 2015 interview, John Leyden expressed a need to limit the number of live shows Mango Groove per year in order to avoid overexposure in a small country like South Africa.
Prior to the release of their third album, 1993's Another Country, they played an open-air concert with the National Symphony Orchestra of South Africa at Kloofendal Nature Reserve in Johannesburg.
[43]{cite musician in orchestra} Mango performed at the Innibos music festival in July 2009,[39][44] and released their fifth studio album, Bang the Drum, the following September.
[47][45] On 17 April they appeared at the Emmarentia Dam and Johannesburg Botanical Gardens, accompanied by supporting acts Josie Field and Wrestlerish.
)[56][57] The Walvis Bay integration concert was the first time Mango Groove performed "Let Your Heart Speak" to a live audience.
On 20 April 1992, they performed, via live satellite uplink from South Africa, for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in London, to a television audience estimated at one billion people.
[66][67] Originally, the tour was to include six shows from 21 February to 4 March, beginning with Red Hill Auditorium in Perth; then on to the Forum Theatre in Melbourne; Bruce Mason Centre in Auckland; Big Top Sydney at Luna Park Sydney; Eatons Hill Hotel in Brisbane; and concluding at Norwood Concert Hall in Adelaide.
At the second annual South African Music Awards in 1996, the album Eat a Mango won a SAMA in the category "Best Adult Contemporary Performance: English".
[74] Other nominees in the Adult Contemporary Album category that year were Elvis Blue's Optics, Majozi's Fire, and Msaki's Zaneliza: How the Water Moves.
