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viewing 1 To 17 of 17 items
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MM 126LP
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"Allen Kwela, the legendary guitarist and composer central to the story of South African jazz, channels Wes Montgomery and overlays home-grown marabi, setting the benchmark for what became known as '70s township jazz. Black Beauty features four tracks composed and led by Kwela with a stellar line-up of musicians including Kippie Moeketsi, Barney Rachabane, Gilbert Matthews, Dennis Mpale, Sipho Gumede, and others. First ever vinyl reissue, a deluxe 180g edition with printed inner sleeve and pressed at Pallas in Germany. Audio mastered and cut for vinyl by Frank Merritt at The Carvery. Liner notes by Kwanele Sosibo, featuring key musician interviews, new insights and unseen photos. The cream of Johannesburg's jazz musicians gathered at state-of-the-art Satbel studios to create Black Beauty for the 'Soweto' label. Led by guitarist extraordinaire Allen Kwela and featuring the godfather of South African jazz Kippie Moeketsi, the album successfully straddles producer pressure to emulate the commercial success of Abdullah Ibrahim's Mannenberg, against the musicians' own impetus to play a jazz they wanted. While the title track 'Black Beauty' nods at Ibrahim's stylings, the magic happens in the three remaining tracks where Kwela and his top-notch band lay down new directions. Producer Patric van Blerk sounded disappointed when asked about the sessions, saying that Kwela was his usual strong-willed self, unwilling to be nudged towards the pop trends of the day. 'He was a monster talent and deserved much more than he got at the time.' Matsuli is proud to restore this special album to its rightful place in the pantheon of South African jazz."
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LP
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MM 127LP
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"Kora's most innovative modern exponent bathes in communion with a re-imagined classical guitar, unveiling a new and previously unsuspected musical universe. In a meeting between instruments, not traditions, these maestros emerge from quite different and distant musical worlds. Ballaké Sissoko's kora tradition and lineage traverse the once powerful West African empire known as Kaabu. South African Derek Gripper's roots are in European classical guitar but infused with a unique jeli music mastery that takes guitar's modern history in a captivating new direction. But these traditions are not in dialogue: these masters meet on the sonic groundings of the kora, instrument of the griots, resonant vessel of the sacred and profane, sound carrier of history and wisdom. Through two decades of commitment and study, it is to this terrain that Gripper brings his guitar to meet its multi-stringed cousin. The two men do not share a spoken language, but if it is true that music speaks universally, then they were already involved in profound dialogue long before they met for the series of London concerts which yielded this recording session -- a session which matches deep communion with sparkling improvisation, which pushes a living tradition into brand new sonic spaces, and opens a live and direct channel of communication between kora and guitar. In the complex web of theme and variations spun by Sissoko's twenty-two strings and Gripper's six, a new African string theory is elaborated. 'Musically we tested each other,' says Sissoko, explaining that the most magical aspect of their encounters are spontaneity. 'We have the mastery of our instruments, the technique and a good ear. Derek is very curious, that's very important.' 'He's just such a good listener,' says Gripper about Sissoko. 'It's not what he plays, it's how he plays it. He's an amazing interpreter, the prime master of timbre.'"
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LP
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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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LP
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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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LP
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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 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 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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LP
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MM 105LP
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CD
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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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