Time for The Peace

And time for me to contribute to our blog. I thought it might be nice to start out with The Peace, an obscure band out of Zambia's Copperbelt. If you visit Ndola these days, it is a rather quiet town, even a bit depressing, and certainly not a place that makes you think of funk or rock, but in the 1970s Ndola (the administrative capital of a once flourishing Copperbelt) must have been a rocking place, with bands like this one or The W.I.T.C.H. (aka We Intend To Cause Havoc - I'll get to them in a later post). Then, the Copperbelt had recording studios and at least one vinyl pressing plant. Edward Khuzwayo owned one of them: he's credited as musical director producer for Black Power, recorded at Malachite Studios in Chingola. I know little about them: someone told me that this was a band from the Zambian Air Force. Who knows?

I found it in Ndola through Khuzwayo's (grand)son and then only after we tracked down one of the former studio engineers (who's now handling truck engineering). It's one of those records I simply got because of the cover and track titles; after finally listening to it, for me, it's become one of those gems from Africa's diverse music scenes in the 1970s.

Hope you enjoy these as much as I did (the sound is raw: I digitize it from vinyl without any restoration)!

The Peace - Black Power (MP3)
The Peace - Peaceful Man (MP3)