Music review – down memory lane: Lowooza Ku Nze – Elly Wamala

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I played at a birthday party for an elderly couple last weekend, and this song was on our repertoire.

I do not think we give this man enough flowers, and I really feel like we should have acknowledged how potent his talent was even more when he was alive.

He simply had an amazing capacity for composing a melody. You really feel this at a technical level as a musician, if you are playing his material.

His songs are such fun to play and will fill a dancefloor in seconds. They are also wonderfully and immensely memorable. I was glad his estate moved to have a firm hold on the music he left behind, otherwise it would have been bandied about.

The vague memories I have of Elly Wamala are pieced together from TV interviews and the occasional sighting I have of him at events. He always wore a wry smile, like he had a delightful joke bubbling at the back of his mind.

He loved working with this sort of groove, a rhumba-esque rhythm that lent a happy-go-lucky feel to his material. Most of Wamala’s material sounds like he was using auto-accompaniment, his rhythm and chord section was that good.

One thing was certain, though: he loved to use the keyboard. The song is dominated by keys, and even the brass section sounds suspiciously synthetic like it was played back off a keyboard. This also makes sense and fits in with his unassuming demeanour.

There’s also a quirky guitar solo on this track, one that fits in seamlessly.

Possibly the thing that stood out about Elly Wamala is how instantly recognizable his style was - he was probably the first pop artiste to deliberately develop his material this way. It helped seal his legacy as a composer and as an artiste, a man whose music we are still playing and jamming to today.