Radio Kalahari Orkes back with a new sound
LAST year was a quiet one for Radio Kalahari Orkes, says the band’s leader, Ian Roberts. This year has started much on the same note but Roberts says they have some big plans for 2017. They’ll be hoping to get the ball rolling on these plans with tonight’s launch of Mamba at Atterbury Theatre in Pretoria, their first album in five years.
It’s taken them this long to produce a new album because they made a point of producing it independently. They raised funds for it using a crowd-funding site called Indiegogo.
After tonight’s launch, the band is planning on touring the album around throughout the year.
This album is unique from their discography in that it takes on a vastly different direction.
“It has songs on it that are a complete departure from what we’ve done before,” says Roberts, who wrote the songs on the album along with Rian Malan, Jaco van der Merwe and his cousin Dan Roberts. “We have some African rhythm that we’ve put into a couple of songs. One is a West African rhythm that my cousin picked up from a kind of
Djembe drum player. It’s got this horn and uses that rhythm as a basis.”
Apart from his work as a musician, Roberts is also an actor who’s played a diversity of roles, including one in the Oscar-winning film, Tsotsi. He sees himself primarily as an actor these days but can also apply himself to roles in directing and scriptwriting. Interestingly, he used to do stand-up comedy, too.
Radio Orkes Kalahari have traditionally played more or less around one theme and sung in Afrikaans. On Mamba, there are some multilingual songs that break from this pattern. One of them,
Kilimanjaro, which features a women’s sultry vocals throughout, is a fun, vibrant ode to the African continent. Kilimanjaro narrates the journey of travelling North of the Zambezi to Kilimanjaro, which Roberts actually did on the show Going Nowhere Slowly. It also relates to his experiences as a soldier in the 70’s.
The shift in the band’s music is largely due to Rian Malan, one of their main writers over the years, who has gone through some major changes and whose writing is very different to what it was before, explains Roberts.
“Encantador, for instance, is a Portuguese Spanish song. That’s our main stock writer who’s gone on a bit of a tangent. And then my cousin, who listens to all kinds of music all the time, went on a tangent as well. Then there’s songs that I wrote which are my own kind of a tangent because I’m half African in my background of music. Where I grew up there were young guys on the farm in the Eastern Cape where we had bands. When I was 11 I was already in a band. We used to play what they called Timitings in the houses around the farm. So my rhythms are completely African.” This is on full view on the song Djy Trap My
Korns and some of the album’s other cuts. Two weeks ago, the band released an entertaining video for Bobbejaanvlei. “My cousin, Dan Roberts, got the idea of using Norman Rockwell’s art. He’s an iconic American people painter who used to paint people in really realistic paintings and in a very specific way… These pictures sort of inspired him to recreate that with a band, the song being the central theme.”
This video builds on the general shift in style that the band has taken on Mamba. The old revivalist rhythms and lyrics they used to employ are absent from this album, with the band instead opting to express the new energy they’re feeling at the moment.