Album Review: Thomas Mapfumo - Mr. Music

A review of Mr. Music, Thomas Mapfumo's sixth album, from 1985.

I'm catching up on a few selections from Thomas Mapfumo's sizable discography and will be posting brief reviews now and then.

Thomas Mapfumo's sixth album, Mr. Music, was released in 1985. Like Zimbabwe Mozambique, the album that followed it, and several others from this decade, it only contains an EP's worth of songs. But they're longer than the typical three-minute pop song and total run time is likely on a par with most LPs from this era.

What can you get for four dollars nowadays? How about some old Thomas Mapfumo albums (including this one)? You can find the LP/EP/whatever on Bandcamp, along with a bunch of other Mapfumo albums, courtesy of Global Press Music.

I couldn't find much background on this release, so the music will have to speak for itself. It kicks off with a keeper (at least for my money). "Congress" features a jaunty horn part and the mbira-styled guitars that are par for the course for Mapfumo. It clocks in at more than ten minutes and there's not a dull moment. The horn part alone is worth the price of admission.

On "Kufa Kwangu" the horns drop out and the guitars and a mbira (or perhaps a marimba? - I can't always tell) carry things along while Mapfumo does a kind of call and response thing with the backing vocalists.

"Tondobayana" is a little more laconic. Perhaps even a bit melancholy, though the horns are back. I don't know the Shona language, but if the sources I consulted are correct, the title means something like "we stab each other." It would be interesting to know the context of this, but alas.

The last two songs are apparently named for women, as was the case with "Joyce," from Zimbabwe Mozambique. They're a departure from the other songs on the album and from most of Mapfumo's solo works to this point.

"Juanita" sounds closer to the funky soul that was a thing in the Sixites and Seventies. The guitarist is using effects pedals and Mapfumo's voice barely sounds like Mapfumo's voice. What lyrics there are are in English. "Maria" is another "departure," if you want to call it that. But it fares a little better and grew on me by the time it was all over, in spite of the stylistic departure.

These two songs use mostly the same instruments as the others, but they're employed to completely different ends. In his early years, Mapfumo played in bar bands doing "Western" music and I can't help wonder if these two songs were recorded earlier and pulled from the archive and tacked on to pad the run time.