Zuhura Swaleh

The return of the Zanzibara series: a Deep Taarab masterpiece from legendary singer Zuhura Swaleh, recorded in Nairobi in 1981. Zuhura Swaleh & Party rose to fame on the Mombasa scene in the 1970s with a new fast-paced taarab style based on local ngoma rhythms and its melodies. The group sound was lead by an electrically amplified tashkota (actually a Japanese instrument correctly spelled as taishokoto), its shape best rendered as being a kind of “typewriter banjo”—a trio of strings shorted…