27 May Ladysmith Black Mambazo @BarbicanCentre, London (May 23) | Gig Review
51 years and counting since the group’s inception, the South African institution that is Ladysmith Black Mambazo waxes strong as ever. The still astonishingly spritely founder Joseph Shabalala realised his gift for songwriting through a recurring dream that haunted him for six months. More than five decades later and one million records sold in the UK alone, the world is glad he didn’t ignore his premonitions. He named the group after the South African township where they were formed, adding ‘Mambazo’ or ‘axe’ to denote the powerful impact of their vocals.
Joseph’s band first came to international prominence in the mid-1980’s via Graceland; [yet another] seminal album by Paul Simon. The diminutive New Yorker’s role in bringing the beauty of Ladysmith harmonies to the world’s attention has been met with scepticism by some. It’s as if there’s some cosmic law against cultural cross-pollination between the son of Ashkenazi Jewish émigrés and a Zulu vocal group.
Or perhaps there’s automatically a lot of suspicion when a Caucasian man takes an interest in music of darker skinned peoples. Yet Mr Simon had a long established reputation for musical wanderlust and there was nothing exploitative about his work with Mambazo. The collaboration yielded such classics as ‘Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes’ and ‘Homeless’ and hurtled LSBM into the ‘world’ music stratosphere.