Monday 24 January 2011

The Movers - Bump Jive (1975)





















Thanks to the folks at Electric Jive for inviting me to participate in this fantastic forum. For my first post, I would like to revisit a thread started here in December last year. 

In the liner notes of the CD reissue of Ntemi Piliso’s 70s recordings with the Members, Rob Allingham reveals Lulu Masilela’s dismay at first hearing Abdullah Ibrahims’s (aka Dollar Brand) classic 1974 track Mannenburg. For Masilela this South African anthem sounded more like a slowed down version of Zacks Nkosi’s Jackpot recorded at least 10 years prior.

Perhaps out of protest, Masilela wanted to re-record the tune and credit it to Nkosi. That same year he approached The Movers and they put together their version of Mannenburg featured on the album Repeat After Me. (1974, City Special, CYL 1029) (1976, Generation, GEN 3007) [Dabulamanzi will share this album soon.] Ironically David Thekwane, their producer, refused to let them credit the track to Nkosi, but they did have the pleasure of seeing their version completely outsell Ibrahim’s.

Mannenburg, at almost 14 minutes long, took up the whole side of one disc and introduced to South African audiences a type of extended play common to many albums at that time. (Here I am thinking of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew or Pink Floyd’s Echoes.)

After their success with Mannenburg, Lulu Masilela and the Movers went back into the studio in early 1975 and recorded an even more popular album, Bump Jive, featuring again only two extended jazz-flavoured tracks.

The extended play became as popular as the “bump jive” dance itself and with the introduction of disco, dominated South African jazz and soul music well into the early 80s.

Today Electric Jive features this classic album—Bump Jive—first issued in 1975 on Teal’s City Special label (CYL 1030). The version posted here is from the 1976 US edition on the Generation label (GEN 3006).

For a Movers discography visit the new flatint blog at flatint.blogspot. For additional information on The Movers visit the flatinternational archive of South African audio.


4 comments:

  1. Hi, and welcome aboard this excellent blog site. Thanks for the valuable information and insight into these long-lost sounds. I have a couple of comments about the actual files. First, please encode the files at a more generous 320 bps, like many other electricjive and other blog site offerings. The Movers at 160 are a bit crippled and muted, and speaking personally, when I listen to compressed sounds like these, I appreciate hearing them and knowing they exist, but I cannot listen to them for long. Second, the link leads to a folder where one has to download each song and picture individually. Packaging the folder would fix that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ^ i think that's a little much. we should be grateful for the sharing of such great music no matter the quality. its better than not having it at all.
    thanks for this album!

    ReplyDelete
  3. fromomata you complaint has produced a result!
    A 320 kbps zipped file!
    But also remember to never look a gift horse in the mouth!

    ReplyDelete
  4. These are both great tracks. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

Electric Jive is currently receiving a deluge of spam. Apologies for the additional word verification requirement.