Kwela
Kwela is a genre of music created in South Africa in the 1950s, and is characterised by an upbeat, jazzy tin whistle lead. Kwela is the only music genre created around the sound of the tin whistle. The low cost of the tin whistle, or jive flute, made it an attractive instrument in the impoverished, apartheid-era townships; the Hohner tin whistle was especially popular in kwela performance. The kwela craze accounted for the sale of more than one million tin whistles.
In the late 1950s, mbaqanga music largely superseded kwela in South Africa, and so it followed that the saxophone surpassed the tin whistle as the township people's wind instrument of choice. Kwela master Aaron "Big Voice Jack" Lerole continued to perform into the 1990s; a few bands, such as The Positively Testcard of London, continue to record kwela music.
Kwela sheet music is rarely published, and many of the recordings of founding kwela artists are out of print. One representative compilation is South African Jazz and Jive (Rhino Entertainment, 2000).
Read more about this topic: Tin Whistle, Repertoire