Bra Sello

Sello Mmutung occupies a distinctive and underappreciated place in the history of South African popular music. Known throughout his career by the affectionate stage name Bra Sello, a term of brotherhood and respect that spoke to the warmth he commanded in the jazz community, he was a saxophonist with one foot planted firmly in jazz and the other in the township groove of mbaqanga — a crossover position that gave his music a quality that neither genre alone could produce.

He came up in the era of shellac 78s as an exponent of the 1960s sax jive sound that brought the swinging rhythm of kwela into the domain of South African jazz. Despite the injection of American rhythm and blues into South African pop in the late 1960s, Bra Sello's first releases on vinyl on the CBS label, backed by the group Abafana Bentuthuko, held firmly to an unapologetic township sound at a time when many of his contemporaries were chasing international influences.

It was his move to the independent Soweto label in the mid-1970s, working under producer Cambridge Matiwane, that produced his most celebrated recordings. Two albums, Butterfly in 1975 and The Battle of Disco in 1977, blended modern American and traditional African elements into joyful, hip-swinging rhythms that documented an era when dance music was performed by bands as extended jams laced with jaw-dropping solos. The title of The Battle of Disco was an ironic call to arms, a defiant response to the territory that group musicians were beginning to cede to synthesisers and DJs as the decade drew to a close. Both records were composed and produced by Mmutung himself and recorded at Satbel Recording Studios.

For decades the recordings remained obscure outside collector circles. In 2023, Afrodelic reissued both albums in limited replica editions using master tape sources from the As-Shams collection, finally bringing Bra Sello's work to the global audience it had always deserved.