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simba
Junior Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 11
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Alright everyone! Im simba better known as Pauline. I used to live in South Africa for 11 years 5 years ago!
Do you all remember ACE of bace! I remember listening to them when I was about 10. They were cool and still are!
Love simba!
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22nd February 2001 18:44
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dokkie
Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 33
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Where can i listen to some of their music?
I remember the name but can't recall the music.
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22nd February 2001 21:05
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simba
Junior Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 11
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 ace of base
I don't know where you can listen but they sang: "I saw the sign" ; "all that she wants" ; "beautiful day". Any of them ring a bell? They were my childhood band!
So do you live in south africa? I used to! I lived in Alberton an town just outside Jo'burg! I live in Scotland now and it sucks!
Anyway write back!
simba
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26th February 2001 13:38
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dokkie
Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 33
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Yip, i am a resident south african, one of few on this board - have a look at my profile.
Nope, those song titles only ring small and distant bells - maybe u can give me some lyrics of "beautiful day".
Tx
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26th February 2001 20:05
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simba
Junior Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 11
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 alright!
Sorry i don't do singing!
So where in sunny south africa u from? I used to live in Alberton. Heard of it?
I miss South Africa. I'm coming back on holiday next year, hopfully!
Simba
xxx
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28th February 2001 16:06
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dokkie
Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 33
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No singing? I meant the words of the song.
I found their music on musica.co.za, and yes, they were good.
I am from the sunniest place in SA, ever heard of Mpumalanga province? ("Place of the rising sun")
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28th February 2001 20:03
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LillyNomad
Senior Member
Registered: Dec 2000
Posts: 592
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At 75, the jive is very much alive
The history of Gallo Africa, which celebrates its 75th anniversary tomorrow, is inextricably entwined with that of SA popular culture, writes Andrew Donaldson
There's a three-storey poster for Lebo Mathosa's Dream album on the facade of Gallo House with the singer staring out across the traffic on Johannesburg's Jan Smuts Avenue.
It's an effective piece of pop iconography, signifying the aspirations of the kwaito generation - Mathosa's gaze appears to stretch not only beyond the city's western reaches but deep into the 21st century itself. As a commercial statement, the poster says as much of the record company housed in the building on which it is mounted and the hip, urban markets it has targeted.
That company, Gallo Africa, turns 75 tomorrow. It is a milestone - not only for this effective player in the global music industry, but, more importantly, for SA popular culture itself. Gallo, to put it bluntly, gave us the soundtrack of much of our social history. The history of the company and the history of the forces that shaped our recorded music are so inextricably part of one another that, for better or worse, it is impossible to comprehend the one without the other.
Often emotively labelled a white company that cruelly exploited black music, Gallo's first hit was by a white singer - albeit in blackface.
Founder Eric Gallo was just 21 when he opened the Brunswick Gramophone House (Transvaal) Pty Ltd in Pritchard Street, Johannesburg, in February 1926 after securing local rights for a British record company. At first, he struggled to sell gramophones and records, but, with the advent of sound in cinema some years later, Gallo's tiny shop was besieged by thousands of film fans demanding a copy of Al Jolson's Sonny Boy .
Bolstered by this success, Gallo moved into wholesale and then, in 1932, built the first recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa, if not the entire continent. (The studio's first masters were produced in 1933, effectively marking the birth of the SA recording industry.)
Until then, recordings were either clumsy experiments in situ , like on the mines in workers' hostels, with portable equipment, or expensive affairs in which artists were sent to studios in England - like writer and ANC co-founder Sol Plaatje, who, in 1923, sang on the first recorded version of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika .
Later, in 1930, Reuben Caluza, a composer of Zulu choral pieces, and his group recorded work in London for the HMV record company, as did Griffiths Motsieloa, who, in 1938, became the local industry's first talent scout, and Shangaan choral composer Daniel Marivate, for the Decca company, whose franchise was owned by Gallo.
If popular culture can be defined as the consumption of the products of a mechanised culture industry, then South Africa's took root with Gallo's studio and with those that followed, set up by competitors. Within a few years, companies had built up extensive "native" catalogues of popular recording artists. The studios shaped the music in that producers added instruments to pieces usually performed a cappella and rhythm so that records could be sold as dance music.
One performer at the hub of all this creativity and still active in the music scene is 83-year-old Louis Petersen. A former member of the Manhattan Brothers - he left before the group became South Africa's first superstars - he became a broadcasting pioneer in the days before Bantu Radio.
Petersen has personal recollection of the bands that performed in Reef townships in the late 1920s, acts like The Jazz Maniacs, The Darktown Strutters and The Merry Blackbirds, which entertained audiences before and at the dawning of the recording era in dusty venues in, among other places, Doornfontein, Pimville, Vrededorp, Sophiatown and Newclare.
"The Vrededorp Hall," he says, indicating the boardroom at Gallo House, "was a little bigger than this. There was no electricity, just three or four candles on the wall, sand on the floor. That was a concert hall to us. In the corner, a piano and drums, and the band would play marabi . Outside, the women would be cooking stew, a tickey a plate, and, of course, you could get skomfaan and 'kills-me-quick' [skokiaan , or home-brewed liquor]."
As gramophones were relatively expensive items, it was in these same halls, Petersen says, that "social clubs" were established with communal gramophones. "We went there to play our records. That was how our entertainment started."
With American swing's influence, marabi would evolve into African Jazz. At the same time, Zulu migrant workers in Johannesburg began to popularise an a cappella style of music known as isicathamiya , and this genre threw up Gallo's first release to top 100 000 copies in sales, Solomon Linda's Mbube , recorded with his group, the Original Evening Birds, in 1939 and arguably the most famous song to come out of South Africa.
Record production died down during World War Two as shellac was needed for the war effort. By the early 1950s, though, Gallo Africa and a subsidiary, Gramophone Record Company, were producing more than a million discs a year. Competition from Trutone and Teal, both EMI subsidiaries, and Troubadour Records was stiff as a major industry emerged. Adopting Gallo's lead, companies put in place their own black scouts and "producers", who went on to shape African music until well into the 1980s.
It was an effective way to determine what African consumers wanted, and soon this handful of powerful "producers" had - according to historian Rob Allingham, archive manager at Gallo - set up personal fiefdoms within the white-run companies that employed them.
Hamilton Nzimande's influential 30-year career with Gallo, for example, oversaw a broad spectrum of music, including African jazz, the gospel style that made international stars of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the disco-mbaqanga of Sipho Hotstix Mabuse. If anyone matched Nzimande's influence, it was Strikes Vilikazi, who ran Trutone's black division from 1952 to 1970 and whose recording, in 1954, of penny whistler Spokes Mashiyane sparked off the kwela craze that changed the course, once more, of SA music.
Mashiyane became the first African musician to receive royalties when Gallo lured him away from Trutone in 1958. One of Mashiyane's contemporaries, Albert Ralulimi - who recorded for Gallo under the nom de kwela Kid Mawrong Mawrong - is still with the company and has, since 1989, been involved in attempts to redress royalty disputes. "One of the problems we're having," says Ralulimi, 69, "is that artists in those days were offered a choice of a flat fee or royalties. Many chose the flat fee, thinking that their music would never sell."
Like Petersen, Ralulimi has almost perfect recall of postwar music - much to the dismay of younger musicians, who sometimes try to pass off old melodies as their own work. "When I tell them that they didn't write that piece of music, they then tell me it's traditional, that their grandmothers sang it. The only reason the grandmothers sang it is because it was an original composition released by the Woody Woodpeckers and they heard it on the radio."
The issue of royalties remains a thorny one. Gallo, it seems, will forever face criticism that it has ripped off its artists. But Petersen has no time for such talk. "Royalties were a new thing," he says. "We as musicians were ignorant, Gallo was ignorant. But if it wasn't for Gallo, none of us would be known. They recorded so many of us. Gallo donated musical instruments to the Bantu Men's Social Centre, which was our 'Broadway' - if you hadn't played there, well, you weren't a star. Eric Gallo also set up scholarships, he did a lot for us. No-one wants to know that."
Its detractors, instead, regard Gallo as an apartheid ally. Often, though, attacks on the company have little factual basis - much to the anger of Allingham, who feels that the past was bad enough without the exaggerated grandstanding. One "legend", still popular with culture writers, concerns the "dumping" of tapes of the Jazz Epistles' debut album in a basement by Gallo executives who, fearing the threat to apartheid posed by the group's "seditious and subversive" music, hoped they would be lost forever. "This is absolute crap," says Allingham. "If it was so 'dangerous', why'd they release the album in the first place, why'd they even record it?"
Allingham suggests that through takeovers, mergers and buyouts of competitors, Gallo now has under its control about 85% of all local music recorded before 1980. It's an asset of considerable commercial value, but it is also a priceless heritage resource. Much of this music was made at a time of extraordinary repression - and technically well-recorded at that.
In addition to the Skylarks, Gallo's roster includes the African Jazz Pioneers, Bayete, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Lucky Dube, Mahlathini & The Mahotella Queens, Joe Nina, Soul Brothers, Steve Kekana, Stimela, Dark City Sisters, Mbongeni Ngema, Hugh Masekela, West Nkosi . . . The list goes on, the point being that it would be stupid to accuse the company of suppressing black expression. That the music these artists made over the years, in spite of apartheid, is so vibrant is testament to their spirit. Gallo helped us hear it.
__________________
Absence diminishes little passions
And increases great ones,
As wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire. http://members.afanti-tour.com/LillyNomad
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3rd March 2001 00:02
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dokkie
Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 33
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"Sunday Times"
"Insight"
Sunday, February 25 2001
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3rd March 2001 19:55
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simba
Junior Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 11
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 cool!
alright dokkie, how r u? sorry i haven't written in a while, just been busy with college and ****!
So apart from Ace of Base who else are you in to? I listen to Robbie Williams, outkast, stereophonics, limp bizkit, bon jovi, etc!
Write Back!!
simba
xxx
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9th March 2001 17:03
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dokkie
Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 33
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yebo simba
bon jovi is good. Generally i prefer south african and african music - the rhythm is fantastic! Ever heard of ismael lo?
I also like lively gospel.
'bye 4 now
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14th March 2001 20:11
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simba
Junior Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 11
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 alrighty!
I've only heard of Ladysmith Black Mumbassa, (i think thats the name I'm not sure! My dad listens to them! They're quite cool!
How old are you? Tell me about urself!
Simba
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16th March 2001 17:23
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