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viewing 1 To 24 of 24 items
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MM 123LP
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"Interpreting the before and beyond of the South African sonic. Tolika Mtoliki -- literally, interpret Interpreter -- is The Brother Moves On giving new voice to the wisdom of South African musical elders. The first single from the album -- 'You Think You Know Me' -- reworks the original with words and an urgency that calls South Africa's democracy and progress since 1994 into question. TBMO first revisited the works of elders Batsumi and Malombo whilst on tour in Europe during 2018 and 2019. In collaboration with Matsuli Music an idea was seeded to record these works specifically for a vinyl release. With these recordings, TBMO work to re-stitch a torn cloth. These songs are critical shards of a fractured sonic, social and political inheritance. They are the sound-work of the elders -- Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani, the Malopoets, Batsumi, and Philip Tabane, and they come with a blessing from Moses Taiwa Molelekwa. Called into the circle for this session, they speak old wisdom in new voices, and what they have to give is not measured in distance from a so- called original version. TBMO is a South African performance art and music ensemble from Johannesburg formed in 2009 by brothers Nkululelo and Siyabonga Mthembu whilst watching an episode of the US TV-drama The Wire. The name is a misconfiguration of a fictional character, The Brother Mouzone, from The Wire. Since 2009 they have released two albums, A New Myth (2013) and The Golden Wake (2015). Audio mastered and cut for vinyl by Frank Merritt at The Carvery with heavyweight 180 gram vinyl pressed at Pallas in Germany." "Just brilliant" --Gilles Peterson
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2LP
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MM 125LP
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"The Afro Modern Seventies Sounds of Soweto's First Nightclub. Over ten years in the making, this is the first compilation from South African vinyl re-issue specialists Matsuli Music. Ten track double gatefold album journey through jazz, funk, fusion and disco, detailing the incredible story and sounds behind the Soweto nightclub during the height of apartheid. Uniquely South African take on the trans-Atlantic sounds of Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York City. Unseen photographs, and liner notes by Kwanele Sosibo featuring interviews with key musicians, players and a former president of South Africa. A night-time haunt in the backstreets of Soweto run by a well-known bootlegger should have been a prime zone for nefarious underworld activities. Instead, it nurtured an underground of a different kind. Soon after its opening in 1973, Club Pelican became a spot where musicians steeped in the tradition of South African jazz began to cook up experimental sounds inspired by communion, competition and the movements in funk and soul blowing in from the West. Located in an industrial park on the western edge of Orlando East, Soweto, Club Pelican was off the beaten track, among a matrix of railway and industrial infrastructure. In a different time and place, this would have been a prototypical nightclub location, except there was no local precedent to follow. This was Soweto's first night club. In the intervening years, this location has served to heighten the now-defunct spot's legendary status as a singular venue, one that ruled the night in the seventies. Initially called Lucky's and established in 1973, the Pelican's impact on the Soweto cultural landscape was immediate. Lorded over by a charismatic figure known as Lucky Michaels, the club became the jewel in a nondescript collection of family businesses. It boasted a diverse pool of talent in its succession of house bands and an A-list of ghetto-fabulous singers as its cabaret stars. Its VIP section was a veritable who's who of Soweto society and its stage, hosting a mix of the day's pop culture infused with the creativity and individual histories of the musicians, the Pelican filled a live music vacuum. One Night In Pelican captures the halcyon seventies period with a single nightclub embodying an indomitable spirit of its troubadour players. While schooled and rooted in 'standards' and local forms, the music could take any direction, at a moment's notice. This compilation features all the key groups and players of the time: Abacothozi, Almon Memela's Soweto, The Black Pages, Dick Khoza and the Afro Pedlars, The Drive, Ensemble of Rhythm and Art, The Headquarters, Makhona Zonke Band, the Shyannes and Spirits Rejoice. Audio mastered and cut for vinyl by Frank Merritt at The Carvery with heavyweight 180g vinyl pressed at Pallas in Germany."
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MM 124LP
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"Multi award-winning composer Shepherd's seventh album and first on vinyl, with sleeve notes from Percy Mabandu. Compositions explored on this long-awaited release include new articulations of well-liked familiar melodies like 'For Keith', 'Desert Monk', 'Sweet Zim Suite' and 'Cry of the Lonely', along with improvised pieces 'Zikr', and 'Desert Monk'. Mastered and cut for vinyl by Frank Merritt at The Carvery with heavyweight 180 gram vinyl pressed at Pallas in Germany." "Shepherd embodies much of South Africa's piano tradition with visionary clarity. More than his own ingenuity, he holds up an appreciation of the richness of a shared musical inheritance. This must be underscored by an understanding that all pianists, in fact all artists of real commitment, have a wish to be distinctive, along with a real rootedness. The selection of tunes treated here, shores this up about Shepherd. It also points to a deeper, loftier revelation: jazz, and creativity as the ultimate articulations of human hope." --Percy Mabandu, from sleeve notes.
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LP
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MM 122LP
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"Long lost 1968 album from visionary South African jazz composer incorporating traditional African music sources and instruments. Officially licensed from the Nxumalo family and reissued with inner sleeve containing archival photographs and new liner notes by Francis Gooding. Gideon Nxumalo's Gideon Plays might just be the most mythologized and sought-after LP in the whole South African canon. A sophisticated bop excursion with a distinctive African edge, it was only Nxumalo's second LP as leader, despite his crucial place in South African jazz history. Pianist Nxumalo was a visionary jazz composer who had recorded regularly during the 1950s, and his 1962 Jazz Fantasia album was the first South African jazz recording to incorporate traditional African musical sources and instruments. But he was also the country's most significant radio presenter and jazz tastemaker 00 from 1954 onwards, he had worn the nickname 'Mgibe' to introduce 'This Is Bantu Jazz', South African radio's premier jazz show. But in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1961, Nxumalo had been side-lined from radio play, and was eventually sacked for playing records with political meanings. By 1968, he had not been heard on record or airwave for several years. Gideon Plays was a celebrated return to the studio for one of South Africa's best loved and most forward-thinking jazzmen, and it showcases Nxumalo's deep understanding of jazz, his brilliant touch as a composer, and his commitment to bringing South Africa's indigenous sound into the music. However, it was released on the tiny JAS Pride label owned by production impresario Ray Nkwe, and after one pressing in 1968, Gideon Plays fell into the undeserved silence that has obscured so much of the South African jazz discography. It has since become a legend: hardly more than a rumor, it has been bootlegged by the unscrupulous, changed hands for eye-watering sums, and has scarcely been heard outside the circles of the most committed South African jazz devotees. It goes without saying that it has never been released outside South Africa, and even now only a handful of original copies are known to have survived. Over the last ten years, Matsuli Music has been proud to present some of the greatest lost and found jazz recordings in South African history -- but we have never presented a rarer, lesser-known album than the mighty Gideon 'Mgibe' Nxumalo's Gideon Plays."
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MM 121LP
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"At a distance of more than forty years, the radicalism and significance of African Spaces can be seen more clearly. Ambitious, uncompromising, and resolutely progressive, it represents a unique high-water mark in South Africa's long musical engagement with the newest developments in American jazz -- a response to the cosmic call of Return To Forever, and an answer to Miles' On the Corner. Spirits Rejoice drew together some of South Africa's most abundantly talented and forward-thinking jazz players and created a complex and challenging jazz fusion that shifted the terms of South Africa's engagement with jazz towards new music being made by pioneers such as Chick Corea, Weather Report, John McLaughlin, Pat Metheny and others. African Spaces, their debut recording, is one of the key documents in the South African jazz canon. Emerging in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto uprising, and taking its place alongside the crucial mid-1970s music of Malombo, Abdullah Ibrahim, and Batsumi, it is a defining but unsung musical statement of its era."
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LP
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MM 120LP
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"Two classic South African psychedelic afro-rock albums reissued by Matsuli Music The Beaters ? Harari was released in 1975. After changing their name, Harari went into the studio late in 1976 to record their follow-up, Rufaro / Happiness. In 1976 they were voted South Africa's top instrumental group and were in high demand at concert venues across the country. Comprising former schoolmates guitarist and singer Selby Ntuli, bassist Alec Khaoli, lead guitarist Monty Ndimande and drummer Sipho Mabuse, the group had come a long way from playing American-styled instrumental soul in the late sixties to delivering two Afro-rock masterpieces. Before these two albums the Beaters had been disciples of 'Soweto Soul' -- an explosion of township bands drawing on American soul and inspired by the assertive image of Stax and Motown's Black artists. The Beaters supported Percy Sledge on his 1970 South African tour (and later Timmy Thomas, Brook Benton and Wilson Pickett). But their watershed moment was their three month tour of Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) where they were inspired by the strengthening independence struggle and musicians such as Thomas Mapfumo who were turning to African influences. On their return, the neat Nehru jackets that had been the band's earliest stage wear were replaced by dashikis and Afros. 'In Harari we rediscovered our African-ness, the infectious rhythms and music of the continent. We came back home inspired! We were overhauling ourselves into dashiki-clad musicians who were Black Power saluting and so on.' Sipho Hotstix Mabuse, talking of the band's time spent on tour in the (then) Rhodesian township from where they took their name. As well as expressing confident African politics, Alec Khaoli recalled, they pioneered by demonstrating that such messages could also be carried by '...happy music. During apartheid times we made people laugh and dance when things weren't looking good.' The two albums capture the band on the cusp of this transition ... The second album Rufaro pushes the African identity and fusion further, with key tracks 'Oya Kai (Where are you going?)', 'Musikana' and 'Uzulu' whilst the more pop-styled 'Rufaro' and 'Afro-Gas' point to where Harari were headed to in years to come. The popularity and sales generated by these two classic albums saw them signed by Gallo and release just two more albums with the original line-up before the untimely death of Selby Ntuli in 1978. Whilst they went on to greater success, even landing a song in the US Billboard Disco Hot 100 in 1982, it was never the same again."
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LP
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MM 118LP
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"South Africa's lost jazz history contains many an overlooked classic. But even within that hidden tradition, there are few albums that suffered such an unlucky fate as Spring, the monumental 1968 debut album by pianist Ibrahim Khalil Shihab, formerly Chris Schilder. Though Shihab was only twenty-two when Spring was recorded, he was already a lynchpin of the Cape Town scene, and the album was to be his first major statement as leader and composer. It is a magnum opus gilded by the presence of the upcoming saxophonist Winston 'Mankunku' Ngozi, who was soon to find huge acclaim with the hit album Yakhal' Inkomo. Three months of touring southern Africa in 1968 honed the band to the point that this entire album was recorded within the just two hours of allocated studio time. This album was repressed just once before the master tapes were destroyed by an ignorant record company executive. While it has remained out of print since then, the album was 'kept alive' as an 'add-on' to a 1996 CD of Mankunku's Yakhal' Inkomo. As a result, many modern jazz lovers still incorrectly believe these five compositions come from Yakhal' Inkomo. With this edition of Spring, Matsuli Music corrects an historic wrong. This edition of Shihab's stunning debut, produced with the blessing of the man himself, is the first time it has been properly available in over forty years, and the first time it has ever been available outside South Africa. Restored and presented with new liner notes by Valmont Layne, Spring can now be seen for what it is: a peerless masterwork of Cape Jazz, blessed by the presence of the great Mankunku, but truly animated by the subtle vision and original musical spirit of its creator, Ibrahim Khalil Shihab."
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LP
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MM 116LP
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"Zorro Five were a South African studio band comprising Johnny Boshoff (bass), Archie van der Ploeg (guitar), Tony Moore (drums), Johnny Fourie (guitar) and Zane Cronje (keyboard and organ). They won the 'Best Beat Group' at the 1971 South African Recording Industry Award for the album Jump Uptight. The single Reggae Shhh! b/w Reggae Meadowlands was an underground hit in the UK and Italy. Underground Mod Obscurity from South Africa. South African take on the London Beat scene, mixing British beat, R&B, reggae and funk."
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LP
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MM 117LP
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2021 restock. "Urban Zulu changed South Africa's music forever, rewiring Zulu migrant roots music for the 21st Century. Busi Mhlongo's powerful voice and challenging lyrics soar over driving bass lines and glittering guitars of an all-star South African maskanda line-up, backed by a multi-national cast including Lokua Kanza, Brice Wassy, Jacques Djeyim and Will Mowatt. With this album Busi Mhlongo subverted and then claimed Maskanda music's previously patriarchal space, voicing a new social blues narrative. Her songs cut to the essence of simple joys, unrequited love, abuse in the name of love, and month-end money blues. Topping charts in Europe and South Africa, Urban Zulu struck critical and commercial success. Yehlisan'umoya Ma-Afrika 'creates a sensation of being inevitable because the riffs are so organic, it feels like it would be a crime against nature if they fell together any other way' (AllMusic). 'We Baba Omncane' became the sound track for a global Adidas campaign, while a later re-mix became a smash hit for Black Coffee." "Unlike many African music albums produced at the time, Urban Zulu is tight, with every inch of the vocals worked over to powerful, husky perfection. Rarely pretty but exquisitely detailed, Urban Zulu is intense, angry, and bewitching." --Jean Barker
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2LP
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MM 115LP
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"Dudu Pukwana and the Spears recorded in London, but were only ever released in South Africa. The story behind this extraordinary music and the famous names involved are documented in this extended edition of Dudu Pukwana's debut album. In 1964 the Blue Notes left South Africa to play at the Antibes Jazz Festival in France, and more or less stayed away forever after. In January 1969 alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana went home briefly along with producer Joe Boyd who persuaded Johannesburg record company Trutone to license the recordings for release in South Africa. Matsuli Music's discovery of a second unpublished London recording session, following Dudu's South Africa visit, reveals hitherto unknown music, and history. In addition to Richard Thompson (Fairport Convention) and Joe Mogotsi (Manhattan Brothers) putting their own spin on mbaqanga hits like Sibuyile, the Blue Notes' fabled Church Mouse and an early version of Andromeda can also be heard. With Pukwana's explosive style and energy evident throughout, this album fills in an exciting and important lost piece of the Blue Notes' and South Africa's exile jazz story."
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2LP
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MM 114LP
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"Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba's double-bill Lesotho concert was a daring, defiant and ultimately dazzling act. For the first time since its limited release in South Africa in 1981, Matsuli Music is proud to re-issue this gem of a pan-African, funk-infused, extended audio double album with unpublished photographs and new liner notes from Atiyyah Khan. The Christmas-weekend stadium-filled concert deeply challenged and disturbed South Africa's apartheid regime. Makeba and Masekela were banned from entering South Africa, yet tens of thousands of their South African fans invaded Lesotho to party with their musical heroes. Live in Lesotho documents an inspired Hugh Masekela and his stellar New York band putting a new spin on crowd favourites. Another South African jazz gem from Matsuli Music's growing catalogue of essential high-quality reissues. For an artist as prolific and famous as Hugh Masekela, it is a real surprise that this particular recording took so long to resurface."
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2LP
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MM 112LP
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"From the inheritor of John Coltrane's mouthpiece a re-integration of deep South African jazz roots with the Black Atlantic spiritual jazz continuum. Celebration's release trumpeted the emerging dawn of South Africa's epochal changes. Sainted and blessed, Bheki Mseleku appeared as the herald of a new era, a prophet of rebirth and reconnection. This is a work signalling change, a sign of a South African music that was properly reconnected with global currents. Recognizing Bheki as a kindred spirit to her late husband, Alice gave him the saxophone mouthpiece that John Coltrane had used during the recording of A Love Supreme. Coltrane was a permanent touchstone for the pianist, one of the few who Bheki felt had the same esoteric and spiritual focus as himself: 'the only musicians I know of who were deeply into this were Coltrane, and Pharoah and Sun Ra', he told an interviewer in 1992. While the idioms of post-Coltrane spirit jazz are certainly to the fore on Celebration, they are energized by a swift and original musical vision, quite specific to Bheki's music, in which whole musical systems -- the marabi and mbhaqanga jazz of the townships, American jazz, European classical, and more -- are seamlessly mended together by the pianist's quicksilver musical sensibility and legendary technical ability. Celebration was originally released on compact disc and cassette in the middle of 1992 by World Circuit. It was Bheki's first statement under his own name, and the first recorded presentation of his personal musical vision. This vision had been tempered across two decades which had combined intense professional playing with profound personal trials in both the spiritual and earthly domains, all set against the greater backdrop of South African political turmoil and exile in Europe. The band brought together musicians hailing from three signally important points within the interconnected, communicating spaces of the Black Atlantic continuum: North America, post-colonial Britain, and southern Africa. With them, Mseleku created the first major South African-led musical statement to be produced after the sufferance of exile was ended. The ultimate and most egregious remnant of the centuries-long colonial era, apartheid, was finally being dismantled as they played. At this critical point, Mseleku's musical spirit work, channeled from a higher source, spoke of a time to come where all divisions might be transcended by a greater unity."
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2LP
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MM 111LP
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"Genes And Spirits: herald of a new South African jazz. When pianist and composer Moses Taiwa Molelekwa died in February 2001, fans and fellow musicians alike were swept away by grief. He was so young -- not yet 30 -- and had shown such musical promise. Genes And Spirits was his second album, released a year before his death. While the composer's voice and pianist's touch are instantly recognisable from his debut, Finding One's Self, the ideas underlying the music mark a conscious step into the unknown: what he called 'finding a range of rhythmic alternatives,' inspired by the rhythmic complexity he was hearing in both pan-African music and the New Music he had been exploring in Europe; and by the possibilities of electronic club music -- jungle in London, and kwaito in Soweto. Inspired like many of his musical age-mates by the optimism of the post-liberation 1990s in South Africa, Taiwa crafted what he described as ragga with a kalimba groove; Tswana vocals over a programmed drum track; a duet with Chucho Valdez and more, across eleven tracks combining the talents of multiple South African and world musicians, including Valdez, Flora Purim and Cameroonian drummer Brice Wassy. With Genes And Spirits, Molelekwa was stepping into the kind of genre-busting territory we associate today with players such as Robert Glasper, but he was doing it almost a decade earlier: asserting a new jazz identity that was young, popular and African. This re-release also includes one additional track, Wa Mpona, recorded for, but omitted from, the original release. Remastered by Frank Merritt at the Carvery, Genes and Spirits is presented as a deluxe gatefold sleeve including new liner notes by Gwen Ansel."
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LP
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MM 110LP
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2019 repress. "The visionary Turkish percussionist and the great South African bassist were introduced by Don Cherry in 1969, when Dyani moved to Sweden after the break-up of The Blue Notes. They worked together regularly over the next decade, starting out with Cherry in the Eternal Ethnic Music trio. 'Another world,' recalls Temiz. 'At that time I was trying to learn as a big band jazz drummer, and when I met Don Cherry, I said, forget it. We played another kind of music. Indian music, Turkish music, Bulgarian, Chinese, you know... All kinds of music.' 'Every musician,' Dyani said later, 'should realize and acknowledge that folk music is the backbone of every music.' Recorded in Istanbul in 1976; originally released in an edition of one thousand copies only, on the Turkish label Yonca. The first side features Turkish material arranged by Temiz; the second, SA-oriented music put together by Dyani, opening with a stunning interpretation of Cherry's 'Marimba (Goddess Of Music)'. In a handsome gatefold sleeve, with excellent notes and previously unpublished photos."
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LP
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MM 109LP
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"Militant jazz, fusion, funk and soul from mid-seventies Manenberg, outside Cape Town, with a set of roots in club dance traditions like ballroom ('langarm'), Khoisan hop-step and the whirling 'tickey draai' ('spin on a sixpence') of the mine camps; others in jazz-rock and the New Thing, from Santana and Chicago to Shepp and Coltrane."
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MM 108LP
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"Insurgently crossing Philly Soul, Cape Jazz and bump jive in 1976, the same year as the Soweto Uprising; poignantly shot through with Timmy Thomas' 'Why Can't We Live Together.' 'It was so important for us to play a kind of crossover then, to weave in touches of Motown, Philadelphia soul and Teddy Pendergrass that the coloured community appreciated, and Basil's Cape Town sound, and Sipho's sound that was legendary in the black community, and make music that people could all enjoy together? The regime divided us: people classified coloured had identity documents; black people had the dompas. We didn't accept that separation. Sipho, although he was born in KZN, could play any feel. Sometime he'd joke, Does my bass line feel coloured enough?' Another landmark Matsuli. The title track is killer."
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MM 107LP
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"Another unmissable, scorching Matsuli revive! Tete Mbambisa and co, chasing the mbaqanga in Trane. Five originals and Love For Sale, from Johannesburg, 1969. 'Both urban Africans and urban Americans were consciously crafting 'modern' music -- and in South Africa's case, it was a modernism deliberately and defiantly set in opposition to the narrow, backwards-looking parochialism of apartheid, where some white universities did not even permit gender-mixed dancing until the 1970s. The sophisticated, snappily-dressed black players of South Africa's cities in the 1960s were not trying to 'be like' America; rather, they were enacting in their performance, and reaching through their horns for what a new South Africa might sound like.' 180g vinyl with excellent sound; photographs from the Ian Bruce Huntley archive and concert bills; extended notes. Pure worries -- 'inhlupeko' means 'distress' -- very warmly recommended."
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MM 106LP
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"Matsuli Music presents an album of kora interpretations that astonished John Williams into saying he thought it was 'absolutely impossible until I heard Derek Gripper do it.' When Kora maestro Toumani Diabate heard these recordings he disbelievingly asked his host and producer Lucy Duran to confirm that she had actually seen one guitarist play this music on just one guitar. Recorded at an all-night session Gripper's guitar magically conjures anew this centuries-old African musical heritage. One Night on Earth: Music from the Strings of Mali captures Gripper's extraordinary six-string interpretation of Toumani Diabate's 21-string Kora compositions. Gripper's 'guitar has found the Kora-playing spirit, he captures the magic bound up in the way it is played,' says Williams, who has invited Gripper back a second time to collaborate in 'The John Williams Series' at the Globe Theatre, London, in June 2015. For more than ten years Derek Gripper has produced some of South Africa's most extraordinary musical works, fusing the country's disparate creative traditions with styles from around the world. His music draws on European classical traditions, avant-garde Brazilian works, Malian kora works, Cape Town's folk styles such as goema and vastrap, and Indian classical music, all the while synthesising them into a style uniquely his own. Tim Panting writing in the Classical Guitar Magazine describes this as '...one of the most atmospheric recordings of guitar music, of any kind, that I have heard.' And in music journalist Richard Haslop's words 'Anybody wondering why one would want to hear a South African guitarist play this music when the incomparable original recordings are available, need only listen to this album.' Originally only available on CD, Matsuli Music is proud to be releasing this breakthrough album on heavyweight vinyl in a deluxe limited edition with accompanying sleeve-notes from Derek Gripper."
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CD
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MM 105CD
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"Ndikho Xaba was born in 1934 in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, South Africa. For thirty-four years -- 1964 ?1998 -- he lived in exile in the US, Canada and Tanzania. Originally issued by Trilyte Records out of Oakland, California, this 1970 recording is bracing, freewheeling Now Thing, suffused with SA idioms, and focused by a political urgency wiring together US Black Power, Black Aesthetics and the anti-apartheid front-line like nothing else. You can hear Trane from the off -- 'a spiritual offering to my ancestors' -- and plenty of Sun Ra, with whom The Natives several times shared double-bills. (Xaba was to become close with Phil Cohran and the AACM.) Freedom is a gutbucket-soul rendition of the people's anthem; Nomusa is dedicated to Xaba's new wife, a poet and CORE activist from Chicago. The thunderous finale Makhosi features drummer Keita from the West Indies, and Baba Duru, who studied percussion in India, before winding up with Xaba blowing eerily through a horn made from a giant piece of tubular seaweed. Hats off to Matsuli for this outstanding reissue."
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MM 105LP
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MM 104LP
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"Precious SA freedom sounds -- intensely spiritual and engaged -- crossed by bebop, rooted in Malombo Jazz, animated by Biko. From 1976, on the cusp of intensifying apartheid repression, and radio silence."
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MM 103CD
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"Matsuli Music is proud is announce the re-issue of African Songbird, the masterpiece from South Africa's greatest jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin. Originally released in 1976, African Songbird was a debut long overdue. A 1959 recording debut, which would have been South Africa's first ever LP, was shelved. Her 1963 recording with Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn was put aside by Reprise's then head of A&R, Frank Sinatra, for not being commercial enough. African Songbird is a tour-de-force, and arguably the most dramatic and powerful release on Rashid Vally's As-shams label. The opener, 'Africa', is the album's fulcrum, a statement of breath-taking musical, personal and political complexity. It is a song of exile, of loss, and of return: a song that is both personal and universal, speaking for a people made homeless in their own land, speaking to those whose ambivalent embrace of exile ached for a homecoming. It speaks too of hope and resolution. 'Africa' is a personally powerful declaration from a remarkable African woman: a song of deferred self and dislocated space finally resolved in an emotional homecoming. It is a song of celebration and mourning -- a heartfelt paean to her home that is shot through with the raw sorrow of lament. Sathima's voice, wholly unique in jazz singing, gradually sheds its musical supports as the programme develops. From the thickly-layered tumult of 'Africa,' through the characteristic Cape Town swing that informs 'Music,' the instrumentation is quietly reduced, then finally dispensed with. The title track is performed a capella, but for the natural sounds of the sea coast, the gulls and surf of the Cape itself. After many years of silence, two deferred albums, and over a decade of rootless exile from a home that had been made inhospitable by the inhumanity of apartheid, Sathima's voice is finally heard, alone with her song, naturally, like a bird. The CD is housed in a six panel digipak."
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MM 103LP
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"Matsuli Music is proud is announce the re-issue of African Songbird, the masterpiece from South Africa's greatest jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin. Originally released in 1976, African Songbird was a debut long overdue. A 1959 recording debut, which would have been South Africa's first ever LP, was shelved. Her 1963 recording with Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn was put aside by Reprise's then head of A&R, Frank Sinatra, for not being commercial enough. African Songbird is a tour-de-force, and arguably the most dramatic and powerful release on Rashid Vally's As-shams label. The opener, 'Africa', is the album's fulcrum, a statement of breath-taking musical, personal and political complexity. It is a song of exile, of loss, and of return: a song that is both personal and universal, speaking for a people made homeless in their own land, speaking to those whose ambivalent embrace of exile ached for a homecoming. It speaks too of hope and resolution. 'Africa' is a personally powerful declaration from a remarkable African woman: a song of deferred self and dislocated space finally resolved in an emotional homecoming. It is a song of celebration and mourning -- a heartfelt paean to her home that is shot through with the raw sorrow of lament. Sathima's voice, wholly unique in jazz singing, gradually sheds its musical supports as the programme develops. From the thickly-layered tumult of 'Africa,' through the characteristic Cape Town swing that informs 'Music,' the instrumentation is quietly reduced, then finally dispensed with. The title track is performed a capella, but for the natural sounds of the sea coast, the gulls and surf of the Cape itself. After many years of silence, two deferred albums, and over a decade of rootless exile from a home that had been made inhospitable by the inhumanity of apartheid, Sathima's voice is finally heard, alone with her song, naturally, like a bird. The hand numbered LP is pressed on 180 gram vinyl, housed in a gatefold sleeve, with additional notes and photography and including a download code."
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LP
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MM 101LP
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"Legendary long lost South African Afrojazz classic from the vaults of Rashid Vally's As-shams (Sun) record label. Remastered from the original master tapes and reissued for the first time since 1976. Features detailed research, extensive liner notes and unseen photographs. Available in a deluxe limited edition of 500 handnumbered 180g vinyl LPs. First in a series of classic original South African jazz LPs to be reissued by Matsuli Music."
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