Mbambisa, Tete
Did You Tell Your Mother
The sound that Mbambisa carved in the '70s was wholly acoustic, and is a style that now is often loosely labelled spiritual jazz, a sound that alludes to deep African textures and rhythms balanced with clear nods to American hard bop and modal jazz, sometimes edging toward free improvisation in echoes of John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders. The music is often centred around a fulcrum of trance like vamps with repeated motifs that allow for extended pieces that create a hypnotic effect. This clearly exemplified on Mbambisa's album 'Did You Tell Your Mother,' originally released in 1979 for The Sun label.