Banana Zorro
THE son of Tanzanian legendary Dance singer Zahir Ali Zorro, Banana Zorro has excelled in the Swahili form of R&B that takes much attention on Spanish flamenco and African Zouk.
It all started when his father had a listen to a freestyle tape whereby one of the tracks caught his ear and asked his son who sung the track and he replied “Masiga and I”. He then asked them to do a recording session in his studio that produced two tracks namely ‘Anakudanganya’ and ‘Big Boss’ and with that gave birth to the group loveM meaning ‘Banana loves Masiga’.
After the massive popularity of ‘Anakudanganya’ and recording a few tracks under BloveM, he decided to do a solo project working with producers and fellow artists to record his own tracks like ‘Nimekuchagua Wewe’, ‘Mama Yangu’ featuring D-Knob, and ‘Hao hao’ featuring Mwanafalsafa produced by Mentor of the UK collective 2Point9. In 2002, he released his first album titled ‘Banana’ consisting of 13 tracks followed by ‘Subra’ in 2006.
Born Zahir Ally Zorro, Banana has won several prizes in music competitions such as the ‘Tanzania Pop Idol’ in 2003, ‘Best Male Artist’ in the 2004 Kilimanjaro Music Awards and his songs have been nominated in several music awards. Also he has been performing live with the Inafrika Band and hooked up with fellow R&B artists Bushoke and Soul n Faith duo to form their unit called “Sayari” [meaning ‘Planet’ in Swahili].
He opened the 2006 Kilimanjaro Music Awards Launch Party alongside the Jamaican group T.O.K. in Dar-es-salaam, made a mini-tour in the UK and recently dropped a track entitled ‘Mama Kumbena’. He formed his own band known as the B- BAND and he is the lead vocalist.
The band has gone ahead and recorded classical music such as NZELA , SUBIRA , BADO KIDOGO all in Swahili language. In the year 2010 during the Tanzanian Musical awards he was nominated and won the award of the best male singer.
www.bongo-kwanza.com