A familiar observation when thinking about the origins of musical styles is the tendency to see in them a reflection of the geographical or socioeconomic conditions of the place they emerged from. By this logic, Black Sabbath had to invent heavy metal in the bombed-out ruins of Birmingham; samba could only have arisen in Brazil; and the landscape around Palm Desert was destined to produce stoner rock. Following the same reasoning, Zimbabwe ought to be an “island in the sun” somewhere in the Caribbean – because the Zig-Zag Band and the Chigiyo style they helped define sound far more like Jamaica than south-east Africa.
You can hear the throbbing basslines of dancehall, the spacey synths and hypnotic repetitions of dub, and the brass-polished, optimistic vocal harmonies of roots reggae and lovers rock. Yet – to return to the starting point – local influences also shape the sound of the Zig-Zag Band: the singing traditions of Shona culture, muchongoyo dance rhythms, and guitar lines inspired by the mbira all leave their mark. It ultimately confirms a different observation: that music – whatever genre label it ends up carrying – always sounds, in some way, like the place it comes from. This compilation, Chigiyo Music Kings, is a discovery, and the extensive liner notes (as always with Analog Africa) offer a fascinating blend of histo
