Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to play with an orchestra from South Africa, the Limpopo Youth Orchestra. The orchestra was full of amazing musicians from the town of Limpopo in South Africa. My orchestra was teaming up with their orchestra for a concert yesterday. The concert ended up being dedicated to the memory of Nelson Mandela, however this was not a planned dedication and it was a huge privilege to play with this orchestra at such a mournful time.

We played one piece with them, "Kwela, Kwela". Kwela is a type of street music played in many parts of South Africa. Its strong jazzy features and catchy rhythms made it for easy-listening! I must admit that on more than one occasion I was tempted to drop my violin and stand up to dance! Somehow, I resisted. When we were learning this piece in orchestra rehearsals prior to last weekend, we played the notes as written, i.e. quavers as quavers. As classical musicians, this is what we expected to go like, however, something was telling me at the back of my head that we were wrong. I was right! When the South Africans came over on Saturday morning, they played their music in more of a swing style, i.e. two quavers as one dotted quaver and one semiquaver. This was a natural rhythm for them and they seemed to find our classical style of playing strange. I was particularly interested in their conductor. I can't remember his name, but something that I certainly can remember is his dancing and singing as he conducted while still conducting clear enough to keep us going. He also informed us of a style of playing in which you "flick" the bow on the string to make the rhythm easier to play. They called this particular style shoe-shining as the motion is similar to that when shining your shoes.
Below is the original version of this song played by the Soweto String Quartet. Listen to this and then imagine the same song live with at least eight times as many of each instrument here, also, imagine trumpets, saxophones, keyboardists, percussionists, etc. Each and every one of these musicians was able to play the somewhat peculiar rhythms you'll hear in the recording below! Amazing!!!