The guitarist’s book, Introduction to South African Guitar Style: Volume One is due to be published at the end of the year.
“It’s like a treasure hunt,” says guitarist Billy Monama. “It’s wonderful. Everyday I discover something new.” Monama’s talking about what’s becoming his lifetime project and passion: mapping the history and features of South African guitar playing. Seven years ago, Monama was writing a textbook on guitar basics. It covered all the bases, but had only his own solid reputation as a performer to distinguish it from the other guitar primers out there.
Yet as somebody with no formal background in musicology, Monama has met mixed responses to his searches. Some scholars and experts — he acknowledges Professor David Coplan, Dr Sazi Dlamini, musician Themba Mkhize and archivist Rob Allingham — have given him priceless support and guidance.
The result is a new, much more ambitious textbook manuscript, split into eras from the birth of popular guitar music here to 1980. Within each era, there are short biographies of players and transcriptions of their playing. Monama himself is still learning too. “I know so much more about South African guitar than when I started. In many of the books, it just talks about the I:IV:V chords. Well, they are there, but they sound different when players of the African Jazz period play them than when popular mbaqanga players do. Sometimes, they’re implied rather than expressed. In many ways, it’s much more a feeling — articulation — rather than just the chord progression that defines our style,” he says.
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