Tracks: The Retreat Song//Suliram//The Click Song//Umhome//Olilili
Well, this is a nice album, although I get the feeling they may have included it more because it’s Miriam Makeba’s debut than anything else. Is this an important album in the history of African music? Well, it has “The Click Song” on it, and that was a big hit in the West, so maybe it is. I poke about on the net and no-one ever seems to mention this that much. Miriam Makeba is a big deal, anyway, what with having been a major anti-apartheid and civil rights activist and getting exiled from South Africa during a trip to the USA - so I suppose it warrants inclusion on that point alone.
Of course, saying all that makes it seem as though I don’t think much of this. It’s good, though. Quite good. Frequently, very good, and perhaps at times even great. Makeba does a lot of different things here, and she manages to do most of them well. This suits her background – a South African with a jazz background and strong interest music folk, classical and pop. I guess that makes her a lot like Nina Simone, although Simone would have been less inclined to fill her album with jaunty calypso numbers about naughty fleas wanting a bite of Brigitte Bardot. Ah, but then I don’t actually know if some of these songs are calypso – they sound like calypso, but then where exactly is the line between Afro-Caribbean and straight-up African? I don’t know much about African music, and almost everything I do know is limited to West Africa, with folks like Fela Kuti and Bembeya Jazz National and Konono No.1 and all that jazz (quite literally). Miriam Makeba may have lived in Guinea for a time, but that was all well into the future and there isn’t all that much that’s Guinean about the music here. So, my frame of reference for South African music is limited largely to this, and to Paul Simon’s Graceland. And there isn’t much that sounds like Graceland here, either.
Putting my incoherent rambling aside. The predominant modes here are down-tempo jazz with a light guitar backing, like you might expect to here on a 50s Julie London album, and big boisterous African-style tunes (no I do not know the name of the genre) with lots of call-and-response vocals and deep, chanted rhythms. But, Makeba mixes it up, and the results on both fronts are something curiously quintessential in character. Some of the most revelatory moments are the ones where she just sings a cappella as a lead-in to some of the songs. Her voice really is extraordinary.
There are some very good songs here, and only two that even approach bad. “House of the Rising Sun” is sort of mangled, since Makeba attempts a sort of jazzy deconstruction and doesn’t quite pull it off. Her voice is beautiful – something that holds true for all the songs here – but as a composition it’s a little disjointed. “One More Dance” has immense novelty value, as it is just so incredibly weird. Basically, Miriam duets a rather standard song in the vein of “Baby it’s cold outside”, with the difference being that the song is about her putting off going home to tend to her dying husband, and the man she is dueting with is, throughout the song, in paroxysms of laughter. Actually I don’t know if it’s fair to call the song bad, so much as it is just so extraordinarily weird.
On the flipside, however, we have three songs that are absolutely extraordinary. Firstly, there’s “Mbube”, which is sort of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” except that it is far more complicated and fun and exciting, does not have the wimmuways, and is generally just better all round than the more well-known version. Hell, it's just glorious really. Secondly, there’s “Where Does It Lead”, which is an utterly beautiful folk ballad which is really the main reason I mentioned Nina Simone in the second paragraph. Makeba sings at full force over a sparse, faintly Latin guitar backing, and it’s really just utterly mesmerising stuff. There’s a sort of stiff, classical character to the vocal which gives it an otherworldly air. And then there’s “The Click Song”, which gets its name from the fact that it’s sung in Xhosa, and as a consequence features a quasi-tango rhythm lots of, well, clicks. But then it also features these delightful little growls, and they remind me of an African housemate I used to have who would get angry sometimes, and who I had something of a crush on. So. Lola, if you are reading this – you are pretty.
Between all of this is a lot of other great stuff. “Novema” is a lazy, up-lifting song with wonderful rhythm. Makeba has such a tremendous ability to put joy into her songs. It helps, I suppose, that a lot of them are just overlapping rhythmical interplay seemingly built around the concept of shouting joyously. This is a quite an understated album, really, and mostly just coasts along in a series of cheery, laid-back grooves. I have absolutely no idea what Makeba is singing about, but it sounds great and that’s really enough for me. I mean, “The Retreat Song” sounds happy as hell, so I have no idea what they’re retreating from. Although she may just be happy to run away. Who knows? People who speak the language, and ethno-musicologists, probably.
I have realised at this point that most of what I could say about this album is kind of just repeating myself. It’s really good, anyway. The fact that I don’t understand the lyrics means that I can’t really appreciate it as a particularly deep experience, but the mix of African and Western styles combined with the generally blissful, earthy tone meant that I enjoyed it anyway.
Although it is kind of funny to hear stereotypical late-fifties “oohing” choirs on an album like this. It certainly pushes the gospel aspect forward a bit.
8.5/10
Download: Miriam Makeba - The Click Song Mp3Download: Miriam Makeba - Mbube Mp3
Download: Miriam Makeba - Where Does It Lead? Mp3
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