WAILE by WITCH
Album Design, Illustration
Lusaka - Zambia
Album Design, Illustration
Lusaka - Zambia
Shot, directed, and edited by Gio Arlotta.
Waile is built on a xylophone groove, with feverish bass, storm-cloud fuzz and funk guitars conjured around it. The track marauds through percussive rhythms into guitar solos and heavy snare fills, with powerful female choral refrains shifting the mood from triumph to anguish. Jagari’s lyrics touch on the struggles entwined in the histories of migrants in Zambia, Angola, the Congo and other nearby countries: “there’s a lot of death, sickness, poverty, and misery,” he says. “The song is lamenting that pitiful situation, that’s the Waile — it’s a word in the Lunda and Luvale language.
'Waile' was one of the songs that I brought to the WITCH when I joined in 1978,” continues keys genius Patrick Mwondela. “While it was played live often back in the day, it was never recorded until the new formation of the band picked it up 43 years later during a rehearsal on an island in Kenya, where the band embraced it and made it their own. A few months after that, they gave it a new lease of life by recording it in Lusaka’s legendary dB Studios (site of the original WITCH 70s recordings). Sang in my native language Luvale, the subject matter is a nostalgic wailing for home of ancient African tribes that would eventually settle in Zambia.