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The Green Arrows

A six-piece Zimbabwean group with a unique three-guitar attack, the Green Arrows were anchored by brothers Zexie Manatsa (bass and business lead vocals) and Stanley Manatsa (business lead acoustic guitar), and by the mid-’70s these were arguably the main music group in South Africa. Shaped in the middle-’60s as the Mambo Jazz Music group, the group specific in playing “ale music” in pubs and resorts, which can be where South African maker and saxophonist Western Nkosi discovered them in the first ’70s. Knowing the band’s substantial potential, Nkosi got them in to the studio room for some singles in 1974 and 1975 and oversaw the documenting from the Green Arrows’ debut recording, 1976’s groundbreaking Chirpo Chiroorwa, which became the 1st LP ever with a Zimbabwean group. Led by Zexie Manatsa’s low, raspy vocals (and effective bass playing), buoyed from the jangly guitars of Stanley Manatsa, Givas Bernard, and Fulton Chikiwati, and anchored by drummer Raphael Mboweni, the Green Arrows got a funky and decidedly electrical sound that offered a template for the chimorenga design that Thomas Mapfumo while others would later on refine and develop. The music group was tremendously well-known in your community through the 1970s in to the early ’80s but steadily went out of vapor following several employees changes, morphing with time in a far more spiritual path as the Gospel Arrows. Alula Information reissued the complete Chirpo Chiroorwa LP with extra material on Compact disc in 2006 as 4-Monitor Recording Program, and it continues to be the best intro to the innovative and thrilling band.

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