Nineteen-year-old Tebogo Lerole is bringing the joyful rhythm of the pennywhistle to a new generation. KAREN DAVIS speaks to him –
WHEN Elias and Aaron Lerole were small boys, they were already to be found on the streets and at Johannesburg’s Zoo Lake every Sunday earning a living as pennywhistlers. Now, Elias’s children are carrying on with the tradition. His son Tebogo, 19, (see pic: Tebogo Lerole and his father Elias Lerole) has just released a CD called Kwela Tebza.
The Lerole family are a veritable Jackson clan – they’re all crazy about music and they all play or sing. Elias still plays and teaches, his wife Thembi plays piano, organ, sings, reads music and teaches. Tebogo’s sister Carol, 23, sings on the album and his brothers Mpho, 18, and Tsepho, 15, also play pennywhistle.
Tebogo got to record Kwela Tebza (“Tebza” as in an affectionate shortening of “Tebogo”) through winning the category of Best Solo Performance in the Shell Road To Fame, a category into which his mother entered him by mistake. He was there to enter the dance category with a group of enthusiasts who didn’t get beyond the first rounds. Fortunately though, when his name was called for a solo performance, mum just happened to have a pennywhistle in her bag.
All the songs on the CD were written by Tebogo, with a few co-composed by Kelly Petlane, who also plays pennywhistle on the album. The musicians include three of South Africa’s best – Bakhithi Khumalo and Victor Masondo on bass and Isaac Mtshali on drums.
Tebogo, a quiet, shy boy, is still doing Standard 8 at Cedarwood College in Wynberg. He wants to study music at university, aiming at a doctorate in music, although exactly what aspect of music is not yet clear.
Don’t his young friends think he’s crazy to play this old stuff? “It’s our real music. It’s African music, it’s our roots,” he says. “Some of them think it’s old-fashioned, not all of them. I also like modern music, though. Some call me madala (old man) or Kenny G, all those names. It doesn’t worry me.” He adds later: “My friends don’t mock me. They can see where the gold is hidden.”
Elias, now 58, played with the Alexandra Shamba Boys, Zig Zag Jive Flute and Black Mambazo. Aaron Lerole’s composition, Tom Hark, was a huge hit in the 1950s. In fact, it was even big in the United Kingdom and clarinettist Ted Heath recorded a jazz orchestration of the song. Aaron, who switched to saxophone, may also be remembered for Lion Killer.
There was something joyful and entertaining about those pennywhistle songs, or kwela songs, as they were called. Kwela apparently means “pick-up” and the name comes from a line in the song Tom Hark which goes “Here come the khwela khwela vans”, a reference to police vans.
The song, according to writer Muff Andersson’s Music in the Mix, netted Columbia a quarter of a million rand, of which Elias Lerole saw next to nothing. “We used to get paid five pounds for a session. There were no royalties, we knew nothing about royalties. We had a big fight with the record company when we first found out about royalties.
“We had a lot of hits. Tom Hark was the biggest, another one was We Thula We Mama. I made more than 40 records, 78s and singles.”
He stopped playing as the fad for kwela died out, the musicians got older and some moved on to saxophone and township jazz. “But last year the original Black Mambazo members got together and recorded an album’s worth of material. It’s me, my brother Aaron, Zeph Nkabinde (older brother to Mahlathini), David Ramosa and Piet Khumalo.” Naturally, they recorded kwela. “And it rocks the nation!” pronounces a loyal Tebogo.
Since leaving the groups of his youth, Elias has made a living as a taxi driver, not exactly the country’s safest profession. “Now I’m doing nothing. I was in the taxi business, but they burnt six of my vans at a taxi rank in Meadowlands. Others were stolen. Ai! They stripped me, really, really. I’m trying to start again. I wasn’t insured.”
Says Tebogo of his CD, which has been getting a lot of airplay according to Polygram: “I’m very happy, really, very, very happy.”
Adds his beaming father: “When he started learning, he used to fight, he used to cry.” Didn’t he want to learn? “Oh yes, I wanted to learn,” says Tebogo, “but it was very hard.”
Does Tebogo’s career mean Elias is having a chance to relive his youth? Elias laughs: “I feel very nice when I look at them. It really does something for me.”
Hopefully, Tebogo will find the pot of gold hidden somewhere in the music industry. It would certainly help redress the injustices suffered by his father and uncle in the 1950s.
Tebogo Lerole will be performing live with a 12- person band at an SABC function on September 20 and at a trade exhibition at Nasrec in October