I saw Oliver Mtukudzi perform over the weekend in San Francisco (Yoshi's). I missed a chance to see him perform once and after my friends who attended that concert praised him, I decided not to miss the Tuku man if he came to perform somewhere near me. The jury is out on Tuku, he's great in concert. The man was full of energy, he was great on his guitar and his Black Spirits band backed him up really well.

Oliver Mtukudzi is the best-selling artiste in Zimbabwe and probably its most famous musician. Tuku, as he is affectionately called, was the first African musician to feature on the cover of the TIME AFRICA magazine in April 2003. The central article was entitled 'The People’s Voice?' and talked about how Zimbabwean musicians sing about change amidst all the problems in the country.

The Oliver Mtukudzi song am most familiar with is Neria, which is a nice slow tempo song, not a song for your average African party. He really opened my eyes with this concert, people were dancing all over and enjoying themselves. Oliver performed many songs - including Todii (what shall we do). Todii worked up the crowd pretty well. Am not too familiar with his music so I can't give the names of the songs he performed. Will provide links once I get hold of them.

The band had a lady playing the mbira, another lady on drums and , as well as a guy on the xylophone. This xylophone dude was the life of the party. At some points, he was dominating, with his movements, dancing, ability to dance and play the xylophone at the same time amongst others. There was also the guy on bass guitar and a guy on the drum set.

I believe Oliver is touring around the United States so try to catch him on one of his many stops here and around the world. The guy looks pretty old but he's still a very good entertainer. He's a great singer and amidst the performance, I couldn't help but think of how 'hip' he was. He will assimilate easily into a hip hop crowd.

Most of Oliver's top songs are about social issues and it is remarkable how these same songs are the ones keeping parties across the world jumping. Oliver has lost a few friends in Zimbabwe due to his speaking on social issues and against some political figures. I kept on expecting him to make comments about the situation in Zimbabwe, etc but he never did. He talked about the human spirit and other inspirational things, but I was too busy dancing to remember.

African musicians can send important messages while entertaining us. We don't need them to program the socially conscious songs and leave them at the end of their albums/records whereby they hardly get airplay. Oliver has shown the way, the others must follow.