There is a Mango Groove in Freshly Ground. I swear. If you listen properly right there in the crevices of the groups' contemporised mish mash of southern African sounds, I swear Mango Groove sits smiling cheekily like a child, no, an older sister sort of, with a lollipop under the left cheek feigning innocence. The group that has become the soundtrack to sophisticated and cosmopolitan southern African youth bears an uncanny resemblance to that legendary band that made the sound to not just express but also soothe the Apartheid gloom. Of course, that is metaphorically speaking and metaphors sometimes cloud things. For a fact, Mango Groove drummer Peter Cohen is not with the group any more. Well, he is still banging drums somewhere, with another band called...well Freshly Ground, of course.
The two groups share a distinct history. They are generations apart and it is an understatement to say Mango Groove-era South Africa and Freshly Ground-era South Africa are different. They are worlds apart. The former was fraught with baton-wielding, machine-gun totting, kidnapping-obsessed security infrastructure. In 1983 an eclectic group of musicians from different musical influences came together in Johannesburg. The lead singer, Claire Johnston, is said to have joined the group in her last year of school. Johnston, a South African of European origin, became the face and voice of the group that at the time was the very embodiment of all that was anti-apartheid; multi-culturalism. The group looked and sounded multicultural. That penny whistle of Mduduzi Magwazi and the crystal clear and often not un-seductive voice of Johnston mingling together expressed a South African youth not prepared to be bound by the petty divisions based on the possession, or lack, of melanin. Mango Groove, as their partner-in-crime PJ Powers practised the fusing of all the South African musical influences into one when it was almost illegal let alone en-vogue at the time. Mango Groove, of course, in modern times would look like any other band in the post-apartheid South Africa, but in the South Africa of that time, the very existence of the group was revolutionary and visionary. Their multiculturalism expressed itself in the way the group's music fused marabi, kwela, pop, mbube, and everything else. On their website, the group acknowledges the difficulty this posed for those who wanted to categorise their music into established groups. "Many people have tried to define the Mango Groove sound, and have resorted to a host of adjectives and phrases to do this; Kwela/Marabi, Pop, SA Pop, Bing Band Swing Pop"...arguing that the sound is certainly eclectic. "This eclectism is primarily reflected in the extent to which Mango Groove has drawn on the rich legacy of South African urban music form from the '40s and 50s'.
