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Ladysmith Black Mambazo go for gold
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Mail & Guardian Online, Ladysmith Black Mambazo go for gold >>
Nominated for two Grammy Awards, the voices of South Africa's most famous Zulu group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, are as much in demand today as they were 40 years ago.
Currently in the United States on a gruelling tour with about 60 concerts in more than 20 states, from Hawaii to Florida, their 10 alto, tenor and bass voices can be heard on more than 40 albums.
The Zulu group's latest release, Raise Your Spirit Higher, has been nominated in the best traditional world music and best surround sound categories of the US Grammys, to be awarded on Sunday in Los Angeles.
Raise Your Spirit Higher is an album born of loss, following the unsolved murder of legendary group leader Joseph Shabalala's wife in May 2002.
Instead of the usual upbeat shuffling that has characterised previous albums, the latest release is tinted with sorrow for Nelly Shabalala, who was shot dead at her home by an unknown gunman. Her husband was wounded in the hand when he tried to intervene.
Despite his loss, Shabalala (64) remains with the group, and retains the dreams of perfect harmony that came to him about four decades ago.
He was then the leader of a choir in Ladysmith, an eastern town renowned for the siege of its British defenders during the Anglo-Boer South African War.
"One night when I was sleeping, I heard a soothing melodic sound," he said in an interview in 2002.
"It lasted for seven months. These people were singing between stage and sky and I started to see how to put the dancing and the harmony together.
"I thought, 'this what I want to teach to my guys'."
The tensome exploded onto the international scene in 1986, the year Paul Simon ignored a cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa and visited the country to listen to the Ladysmith sound after hearing them on a pirate cassette.
He cut Graceland with them, an album that attained cult status and is considered the precursor of world music.
But Shabalala's choir, which he had headed for three years, was not ready to follow his quest for the musical grail, so he recruited brothers, cousins and friends, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo was born.
Mambazo, Zulu for "axe", became part of the name to signify their desire to chop up rivals in choral competitions.
The success of Graceland saw the group go into high gear and a year later, in 1987, they won their first and only Grammy for the US-recorded Shaka Zulu album.
They picked up nine further Grammy nominations and recorded with singers as diverse as Dolly Parton and Steve Wonder, as well as composing music for Spike Lee and Walt Disney films, with Shabalala experimenting constantly with barrier-breaking melanges of Zulu and Western music.
Among Ladysmith's early fans was Nelson Mandela, who took the group to Oslo in 1993 as he and South Africa's last white president, FW de Klerk, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
They also performed at Mandela's inauguration as South Africa's first black president the following year.
The group's musical style, known as isicathamiya, is inherited from migrant black labourers at the turn of last century who expressed their hurt and their weariness in long nights of singing in their hostels.
Those mournful songs were quiet and the accompanying dancing was on tip-toe, rather than the traditional Zulu foot-stomping, because they dared not damage the floors or annoy the omnipresent security guards.
Multiple South African groups have flattered Ladysmith by copying their style. The group runs an academy to teach it, and Shabalala lectures occasionally at the University of Natal in South Africa and the University of California, Los Angeles. 02/10/05 >> go there
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