She is King, she is Queen and her wealth is her voice. She is currently ruling the Kingdom of House music vocals, her songs are pure royalty carved with her rich golden voice, and she is truly deserving of her status. Yamikani Janet Banda popularly known as Lady Zamar to the masses – needs no introduction and is no stranger to the throne. We invited this sexy sensational vocalist and had a chat with her about her journey.
When did your journey in music start?
My officially public journey started about 3 years ago. It was just that thing of I’d been recording for so long, just playing around in studio and then one
of the songs that I had been playing on just became really popular in Pretoria. Fast forward a year later, we dropped another song with Junior Taurus called ‘Mamelodi’ and that was it and I
had never predicted it would go this far but it did.
How did you and Junior Taurus hook up?
Around 2011 I was in some freestyle session with some guys rapping and we were doing this thing where we were throwing words into the cypher and you would just sing to whatever they said. So, one of the guys there who was Junior Taurus’ friend came up to me and he was like “listen I know this guy who’s a producer and I really want you to meet him cause I think you got such a beautiful voice”, obviously you don’t believe someone like that but I just waited and then Saturday came and they came to pick me up, we went to the studio and recorded our first song. The song came out great, though we never released it. You guys then dropped a Due album together, was it always the plan to go your separate ways after that? Yes, because it was never the plan to be a duo in the first place, we were just producer and vocalist. I was never sure whose career we were going to focus on and I always assumed we would concentrate on Junior’s career because at that time I wasn’t that interested in doing a lot of performances. One day he just mentioned to me that maybe we should do this together and I was like cool, we then talked about it a couple of days before we dropped the
album. We had the conversation because I was at a place where I was not interested in having a duo anymore and he was like let’s just do this and see it through and then we can go our separateways, we had decided on one or 2 albums and it happened over the first one.
Now you got an album out titled ‘King Zamar’, tell us more about that.
‘King Zamar’ came about after not being sure what I wanted to do, I was sure I wanted to continue doing music but I just wasn’t sure whether I was gonna do it for someone else. Being a featured Artist you kind of develop this thing where you feel like maybe you’ll always be a ‘featured Artist’, but my team at that time told me that maybe you should try and do something else and be yourself. Like you give people these great songs all the time, how about you have your own collection of work. So, I started recording the album in the beginning of 2016, the album was scrapped like 5 times because of certain problems and people with their emotions. By the third try, that’s whenwe started finally getting it right and by then I had already decided on the ‘King Zamar’.
Why King Zamar?
Well King because, first of being a female in the music industry I’ve seen so many females call themselves the “Queen of this and that” and I’m just like this is so Boring *lol* I don’t wanna be no “Queen of this”. I want to solidify my position in the music industry, I want to solidify it to myself, to my fans, I want my counterparts… my male counterparts to understand that I’m not here for games, I’m not here for their pleasure but I’m here to compete with the best of the best. Another thing is that I’ve slowly come to the realisation that my music is different from what everybody else does, I
have then dubbed my Kingdom the ‘Zamartian Kingdom’ and I felt like as the ‘Zamartian’ leader I should then be a King. There’s also the fact that ‘Zamar’ means praising God in music and I just want to be the King of that too.
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