Marabi

Marabi is the piano-led township music that emerged in Johannesburg's slumyards and shebeens in the 1920s and 1930s, the first distinctly urban South African popular style. Built on endlessly cycling three-chord vamps played on cheap pianos and organs, with guitars, banjos and concertinas added as available, it fused Nguni and Sotho song, American ragtime and jazz, and hymn harmony into dance music for illegal beer halls. Almost entirely unrecorded in its prime, marabi survived through its players and became the foundation of later township styles, from kwela to the saxophone-led jive of *Zacks Nkosi* and the *Jazz Maniacs*.