Kabza De Small

Kabza De Small is one of the central producers of amapiano, the South African dance music movement that, over the last half-decade, has become one of the most globally influential genres out of the African continent — now rippling into UK garage, US pop, Afrobeats, and the wider dance music ecosystem. The sonic signature is unmistakable and deserves naming. Amapiano is built on a log drum — a woody, pitched low-end element that does the work a kick drum does in house music, but with a melodic character all its own. The tempo sits in the mid-hundreds. The arrangements leave space. The piano lines are often jazzy. The vocals, when present, are often in Zulu, Xhosa, or English, and they sit inside the track rather than on top of it. What is worth saying about the wider movement is that amapiano is one of the clearest cases in recent memory of a regional scene producing a globally dominant genre with essentially zero help from the international music industry. The scene built itself — through WhatsApp, YouTube, Boiler Room sets, township parties, and a diaspora that carried the sound everywhere it moved. By the time American and European labels noticed, the genre was already set. Nonesuch indexes Kabza because the most interesting dance music on the planet is being made outside of the traditional dance capitals, and Kabza is among its most productive architects.