Jiti musician Baba Harare has paid tribute to the late sungura music legend System Tazvida in a new song.
Recorded as part of Clive "Mono" Mukundu's Add Your Voice Challenge, the song is well coined, mimicking Tazvida's hoarse vocals, witty lyrical composition and word play, while the sound is very similar to that of the late "Vaforomani" hit-maker.
It follows the ironic social commentary messaging popular with Tazvida, as the "Hombe" hit maker talks of how God can "break walls using eggs just to mock the hammer".
Baba Harare said he grew up listening to Tazvida.
"We grew up listening to System and he came from my same home area, Masvingo," he said. "His sungura was different both in sound, lyrics and word play, making it uniquely different from that of other artiste, thus he was my favourite among musicians of his generation."
Add Your Voice Challenge is an initiative by veteran producer Mukundu, who creates instrumentals inspired by various unique sounds be it beat-boxing or any unfamiliar music instrument and challenges his legion of social media followers to sing on the beat.
In this particular challenge, Mukundu said he created an instrumental in the style previously used by Tazvida.
"I did not take any instrumentation from System Tazvida's song, but simply created an instrumental in his style," he said. "It's a skill which is possessed by session musicians that we can imitate an artiste's style of play which we then use when that particular artiste invites you to play with them.
"This is the same skill I used to create something that is similar to that of System Tazvida."
Mukundu said the Tazvida tribute challenge had over 20 participants.
"More than 20 artistes took part in the challenge, but what I did was trim the number down to 10, the reason being that some were not so good at singing, while some fail to follow instructions," he said.
"The instructions are that you record a Whatsapp voice-note at the same time recording a video, while the instrument is playing low in the background, but in some of the submissions, the instruments where too high making it hard to mix.
"Some would send voice notes without a video, while others would send a video without voice note, and some sent in their submissions after deadline. Baba Harare missed the deadline, but we included him because this is a big artiste trying to encourage the young artistes who normally participate in the challenges."
Mukundu said the Add Your Voice Challenge has been instrumental in discovering new artistes.
"The reception has been great thus we have already discovered a number of new artistes," he said. "I'm always telling emerging artistes to use the initiative to look for sponsorship. This is one of my reasons to have this initiative as at many times I'm approached by musicians who are failing to raise money to record their music.
"I always tell them that you cannot say I can sing with no proof, but show a sponsor what you can do. When you enter the challenge you will have a video and audio proof which I would have mastered."
Mukundu said three artistes had already landed sponsorship through the challenge.
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"So far three artistes have landed sponsorship using that channel, and they are due to record their songs this month," he said. "It's a challenge that I started to help those trying to get into the music industry for them to look for support. It's proving to be very popular and helpful."
Mukundu said many people have come up with ideas to enhance the challenge, but lack of sponsorship remains his biggest challenge.
"Many people have come up with ideas on how we can develop the initiative into a full album, or live music concert or even grow it into a television show but the challenge is getting reliable sponsorship", he said. "In many instances sponsorship is promised only to be disappointed on the last minute."
