In the face of waning popularity, award-winning artist, Alexio Kawara, has made an unexpected decision to quit music.
The musician, who made waves with the song Shaina, said he will mark his exit from active music through his album Tose that will be released in August.
Kawara says he has opted to retreat to less active roles of the local music industry. He is planning to work behind the scenes with other artists as part of a mentoring programme which he recently started.
“It is always better to leave the limelight while you are still wanted instead of when people no longer like you so I’m calling this the end and the most that I might do in the future is make a compilation from the songs I did before,” said Kawara.
He said the mentoring programme which he recently began with three upcoming urban groove artists, Gabriel Mbale, Kudzai Kuveya and Natasha Chihuri, was his way of giving back to the local music industry and try to prepare upcoming artists for challenges in the industry.
Kawara said his programme would include artists in various musical genres as long as they showed potential and willingness.
“The programme seeks to help upcoming artists in areas such as self-realisation, confidence and eventually the ability to perform for an audience and even express themselves through songs,” he said.
Kawara said he had the idea of such a programme for a while because when he was initiated into the music industry he faced so many problems which he felt upcoming artists did not need to go through.
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He said he will seek the assistance of established musicians to impart important knowledge to upcoming artists.
One of Kawara’s partners in the project is Munyaradzi Manwa, an IT consultant who has worked on many local artistes’ websites and social networks.
“The programme has a bright future ahead since Alexio himself through his music and awards could be a great mentor and would be able to help upcoming artists achieve what he achieved as a young successful artist,” said Manwa.
One of the pioneer artists in the programme, Mbale, said it was a great honour for him to be trained by Alexio as he had always wanted to be like him in terms of success.
“I just want to leave a mark before people start disliking me and I must say this decision is not going to ruin my band The Shades of Black, we are still going to do a couple of performances but after the August release I will not be producing music anymore,” said Kawara.
Alexio became popular about 10 years ago while in the group Guess with the song Amai before he became a solo artist who made noise with his hit Chibvugu bvugu which was a major hit on national radio stations.
Since then Alexio has produced popular songs like Kure Kure, Nyaya Yerudo and the award-winning track, Shaina. He was one of the few young artists who managed to form a band at an early age.
