Mzee Bango

Joseph Ngala (born in 1935), known professionally as Mzee Bango, is a singer, saxophonist and composer, credited with the invention of a popular Kenyan genre, Bango, which combines jazz and Kenyan traditional music, with an easy listening latin feel.

Ngala was born in Mombasa into a musical family, which gave him access to his father’s eclectic record collection. He started a band while still at school using improvised instruments, and composed his first song for his sister’s wedding at the age of twelve. The enthusiasm shown by the young Ngala and his friends resulted in the gift of a number of instruments, from which Ngala focussed first on clarinet, and then on trumpet. After some success performing from 1953 as the Blue Boys Orchestra in the Kisauni neighbourhood of Mombasa, many of the band members, including Ngala, joined the Five Star Band. Ngala was commissioned by the East African Breweries to compose tunes for the band to promote various beers on Kenyan radio. The commercial work continued into the 1960s with contracts for Pepsi and Canada Dry, and around this time Ngala had settled on the saxophone as his main instrument.

Ngala worked with pianist Edmund Silveira’s band at the Nyali Beach Hotel in Mombasa in a residency that lasted until 1972. He recorded his first cassette in a band he called the Bahari Boys Band in 1974. It wasn’t until 1987 that Ngala first performed his song ‘Naitaka Bango’, which became popular enough for him to launch a new band, the Bango Sounds Band, incorporating more traditional rhythms into his style, spawning the genre ‘bango’ and earning him the nickname, Mzee Bango. As technology allowed, the band have recorded several times since the 1990s. Although Ngala has not become well known outside of Kenya, he has been an influential figure, cited by a number of young musicians and bands, including saxophonist Juma Tutu, Afro Simba and the Gogosimo Band, with whom Ngala has performed into his mid-80s.