People were listening to (Duke Ellington and Count Basie) at home because we felt this is our music and these are our black heroes. The attraction … was that the rhythms were more like our mbaqanga.
So said the late South African jazz trumpeter Johnny Mekoa. He was describing how, in his 1950s childhood, Black South African jazz fans explicitly heard African roots (mbaqanga is a form of South African township jive) in the American jazz they played.
