Afro-pop artist Busi Mhlongo died of cancer in 2010 a few months after releasing her folk gospel record, Amakholwa. Bongani Madondo — South Africa’s most original pop writer — wrote an appreciation of that CD which should resonate for readers alive to Black Atlantic traditions. You don’t have to know Mhlongo’s music to feel Madondo’s passion for it.
His tight connections to his favorite diva led him to become one of her care-givers. He touched on this experience in a note he sent to friends shortly before Mhlongo died:
Am here with Neil Comfort, Busi’s on-off-on manager, and his wife Nicola at their house in Dawncliffe, a small, tight, and hilly suburb of Westville eThekwini, South East coast of South Africa…We are emotional wrecks, though we feel like we can walk on water. On the stereo, Busi Mhlongo’s discs, and Ali Farka Toure, pierce through the usually sedate neighborhood. We shoot the breeze on the front porch — N&N’s beautifulest house is pregnant with Busi-narratives and her-stories.
Other than the fact it’s built on a piece of land that used to be a farm of a late O’Connor, a nondescript Irishman who always dreamt of living “up the hill,” it happens to be, today, some kind of a monkeys’ colony. I have seen over 2OO monkeys doing aerobics on the trees since I arrived here three days ago. This place is kind of wedded to nature and nature to it.It’s still a very warm night, after basically a criminally hot day…Out here on the porch, looking up, it is kinda half-moonish, and the moon itself is spoon shaped like a fetus. I shoot a steady stare at the night-sky, and realize ’tis bathed in a soup of lime-greenish clouds; the hue, of course, bequeathed to them by mama moon herself.
Our gathering here is surreal…two white folks — one with Scottish and the other Irish blood passionately coursing through their veins — who have become, thanks to fate and a lil bit of design, capable and loving caregivers and caretakers of Busi in her ever deteriorating health and all her business estate, and this young black man, who sometimes masquerades as critic, often as Busi’s non-official eavesdropper, sometimes as writer-blues stalker, who’s enduring connection to the artist started as an obsession with her voice. She refers to all three of us as “bantwa bam” [her children].
Well, this night has some particular significance: her blood daughter, Mpume, has just arrived from Florida where she’s been based for last two decades. All four of us have been around Busi at her apartment earlier on, before myself, Neil and Nicola drove back late night to come park on this stoop where I’m exhaling this purple haze now. Don’t blame me. (Durban poison doesn’t have its rep for nothing.) [Editor’s note (as per Madondo): Especially taken in privacy with due respect to the law and children.]
I do not particularly dig playing Busi’s songs with people I know are, like me, biased in favor of the artist. Just because it would be the case of the blindly partisan leading the blindly partisan.
But today feels strangely plain and simple: not emotional, not sad, just plain, plain!
I wonder, could it be that we are listening to the dirges too soon in our heads?
No such luck. But Madondo will always have memories of Busi all-the-way-live. And thanks to his witnessing/writing, we do too. Here’s his report from the studio on the making of her last album.
Alchemist at Work
Shhh!
The service, or ritual — depending on which side of your ancestors’ bread your New Testament is buttered — is about to begin.
Today’s recording; the making of her latest album Amakholwa [The Believers] promises an evocation of all four key pillars of epic rituals: water, earth, wind and fire. In short, the studio session today will serve as a space in which to call forth ancestral spirits.
It’s way too early in the morning, but the air is pregnant with some sort of meditative and esoteric feel. Though studio recording of any kind is, by definition an abstract concept as you cannot touch the actual sound, the atmosphere here is the closest you can get to performing public libations on wax.
No wonder.
‘T’is Victoria Busi Mhlongo’s gig. The electro-Zulu rock star and multi-genre vocal stylist and spirit medium, has been on a journey to hell, heaven and back. And on every step of the blue note, her stairway-to-heaven negro spirituals, shrieks and howls; you and I, signed and honorary members of the Busi Mhlongo tribal sect, have been with her. Hooting, screaming singing along all the way to real and imagined rituals.
Oh, don’t remind me; I know. Walking or journeying through her musical and ancestral journeys, off the beaten tracks of her signature maskanda, her blues, and her she-devil Afro-rock ‘n’ roll, to where the demons in her head command her to, is as exhausting as it is exhilarating.
I know, dear. Been there, done that, and got a hanky to wipe off the Queen’s tears whenever “people in her head” — to nod to that other perennial “blue” voiced Lauryn Hill — releases her from the mountaintop so she can descend to where mere mortals live.
Dig:
Busi Mhlongo doesn’t record music; she conducts a “service.” She doesn’t perform music, she carries out “libations,” with all the due diligence and science of a trained alchemist. Just like Fela Kuti, if you ask me. Or Jimi Hendrix in his Axis: Bold As Love and Smashing Of Amps phase.
Like Tina in her tumultuous “Ike & Turner” era, or Igor Stravinsky around the time he created Le Sacre, Busi Mhlongo gets possessed almost on cue. She’s omni-alert: alive to voices and images with which you’d rather not deal, or be visited by.
The Stravinsky parallel scores a more potent note than any Zulu ritualistic imagery we can raid out from the hinterlands and deep valleys of Shaka’s land right now: ”I dreamed of a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death.”
At its premier opening, rioting almost took place. Lights were switched off and catcalls from the back row filled the auditorium. Chaos! Unlike the Russian rebel though, the Zulu goddess’ “riots” are a different kind of madness altogether. Her stage performances demand total devotion, almost a negotiated surrender from her fans.
A top photographer once told me she can’t quite fit Busi in a frame whenever she’s performing.
Why? I asked.
“Cause she turns into a snake, something I can not quite pin down but can feel the storm circulating around it.”
Oh, Lordie.
Busi Mhlongo doesn’t compose music. She dreams in surreal sonic layers. I suspect she also “sees” music through a filter of multiple colors. One that constantly comes to mind listening to her is the “dark blue,” and purple, dashed with bright orange in performance.
Instead of the strict codes of control accompanying composition, she lets go. She doesn’t make a song. She gives birth to countless musical off spring, all shaped by sounds she and whatever band, producer or creative midwife might have been working on.
II
Service’s about to commence.
Much has been covered in the studio the previous week, the artist experiencing with different tonalities, chords, writing lyrics on wrinkly dinner napkins, carrying some in her head till late night, before calling this journalist in the dead of the night to confess: “I am so finished, baby. Let this music come. I just wanna go back home eThekwini.”
It’s Good Friday, winter 2OO9. The earliest winter breeze is kissing our nostrils rather forcefully, but outside the studio — or church/shrine — the famous African sun does what it’s famous for: dances on the sky’s ceiling.
Like countless and scary times before and since 1999’s now world acclaimed classic Urban Zulu, I’ve been invited to witness the making of Busi Mhlongo’s new album Amakholwa, which translates to what the most “incite-ful” lyricist of the novel form Ayi Kwei-Armah, referred to as “The Believers.”
And like you, I’ve been maddeningly frustrated by the hiatus. It’s almost eight years since my Zulu rock star came up with a new album, kwenze njani nah?
Now this.
Today’s session in Midrand, Johannesburg, is called the Busi-MasterMax session, following the Busi-Dyer Tribe sessions at the African Jazz producer Steve Dyer’s digs, some sticks deeper into far North Jozi.
Soon after the arrival of the crew — Queen B, session producer Shaluza Max Mtambo and engineer Gideon Murray — things gets going.
Songs are laid out. Lines are rewritten more for cogency than Tin Pan Alley pop-along effect. Multiple takes of songs, verses, missed lines, reconstructed harmonies, and of course experimentation with the right dose of emotional peaks, and vocal science, starts shaping up the song Noya na?
Here, missed piano intros are rebooted, and leaky emotions released. Some beautiful verses are shafted and re-pasted somewhere along the song’s structure to blend in with the arrangements.
There’s no structure per se. The disciplined yet tangential spirit of the moment is the song’s form. Like Marvin Gaye once sang: “if the spirit moves ya, lemme groove ya, ooohwee. . .”
To be in the studio when artists are working is a big No-No: you’ll never witness an artist more naked and exposed than in the confines of this process.
While the stage is a platform for an artist’s creative nudity and showiness, the studio is his or her shrine. It is from this space that they give their all, in total release, oblivious to how they look or are perceived. There’s little thought for the state of the sheets, or in musical terms, how the “hits” will turn out.
III
The songstress gets rolling. This one takes me to paradise. Well, as close to the Pearly Gates as you can get while sipping Rooibos in a studio. “Please let it boil, no milk please. Thanks.”
Noya na? is an African gospel piece whose tempo, sheer force of will, and quest to peep inside God’s own sacred house is reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s brooding classic Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door from the 1973 soundtrack for the movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Though that’s my inference, not the artist’s intended reprise.
Introduced by a mix of Senegalese [Talla Niang’s chants], Ghanaian [William Ago’s harmonising] and Carlos Santana-esque Santeria drumming, stepping out in a mid-tempo-ish gait, this is a gospel, or a soul music piece, minus the burden of having to attach or label a “god” for your beliefs.
To that extent, soul music has the power to travel to un-chattered, and un-baptized spaces, particularly when un-burdened by religious sectarianisms. Who cares what color or gender your god — if s/he or “it” is open to be praised this way half the challenges for faith is about done, lol.
Still, were you to ascribe an earthly spiritual label, this music feels as if it draws its musical roots from both the Ethiopian and Pentecostal traditions.
Underpinned by Fana Zulu’s masculine but unobtrusive doong-dong-bah-bah! bass riffs, and topped off with Busi’s signature Zulu-Buddha chants, the song bursts into life a meditative tour de force.
Soon Ma Mhlongo, as she’s known to her close-knit-circle, goes barefoot, a giveaway to those who know her. When she bares her soul in song, her shoes are the first to go.
When the engineer plays back the final take, we burst into a trance dance. She screams and shrieks her lungs away. Healers’ Brew!
Strewn on the coffee table are dog-eared copies of various rock magazines. One of them, Mojo, the ultimate white boy’s rock ‘n blues torah — if you appreciate screeds such as “The Genesis of rock started with King Oliver, or Jelly Roll not Elvis” — ran a center spread on the 1970’s Brit-Blues boys, Eric Clapton and mates, Cream.
The article quotes Jimi Hendrix, the Cherokee Indian and African-American mixed breed boy from the hood; the “promised one” who got whitey’s alt-noise, Negroid ballits and Native Indians’ blues on a camped out, and amped out total lockdown, mourning Cream’s demise: “We dig those cats,” Jimi says.
In the studio, as Busi Mhlongo hisses, coos and prays her way through the song-list, I hear a message you’d need some inner African soul-gadget to decipher, just from the timbre of her voice. Like Jimi, she’s saying:
“I dig those cats.”
Unlike Jimi’s “cats,” Mhlongo’s are unheralded ordinary people, folk down by the river not far from her native Inanda, home of Chief Albert Luthuli’s Ohlange Seminar, and the Shembe-Nazareth congregation in Kwa Zulu Natal where she first heeded the calling to step up, and perform for the locals, knowing she had an unrehearsed African mass choir, neighborly girls, at the ready for back up.
For Mhlongo, “music,” as she keeps on reminding me at each and every interview, “is a communal thing. Nothing romantic about it: with music, and in music, we were always in the church long before we went to church.”
If you get them out of the recording industry’s monstrous image-factories , at their rawest artists don’t have the luxury of speaking in clear packagable, Public Relations lines. “We were in the church long before we went to church.”
Go figure.
IV
“We wrote these songs in …1793, or 1872, or 1779,” again Jimi is quoted as saying, introducing his first LP material in his cultural exile in London, to the astonishment of British fans.
Just then I thought aloud: where was I, then? I would have hollered back to him: “Same with Busi, man.”
Her songs (as in the craft) and her voice (as in the medium) particularly in this album, sound as if they were written, cultivated and recorded in antiquity. Whatever it is in her voice, it certainly precedes 1779 by eons, and many moons before.
Listening to the swirl of sounds here, the question I’m asking of those who’ve long waited for this album is: Ni yu ya nah bafowethu? Bo dad’wethu? Will we ever reach heaven?
Hot in the mix there’s Babawethu [Our Father]. Again, here’s a gospel tune blessed with all the funkiness and rock inflections you could ask for this side of Santana’s Caravanserai.
A simple tune at first take, but it’s deceptive. Listen. There’s Lawrence Matshiza daring the devil with his greasy but passionate soloing. There’s soloing, and then there is s-o-l-o-i-n-g…
Tearing the darn thing apart the Stratocaster, that’s for sure — Matshiza’s licks merge with Busi’s vocals, as he steadily peals out artistic layers many have always suspected, but until now never confirmed.
Five minutes later, and with another session player today, Steven Blumer‘s guitar solo and Mhlongo’s vocals add an instrumental dimension on their own. You know that although she passes as a folk singer, Busi’s simply the most under-critiqued, and under-appreciated balladeer and rock interpreter parochial South Africa has ever seen:
Ngig’k nig ’inhliziyo yam [Gave you my heart]Wathi a owanele [Oh, but for your dissatisfaction]
Ngig’ k niga umzimba wam [And I surrendered this…my body]
Ngik’niga i qobo lam’ [I gave you all I had…me, all, yours…]
We don’t get it.
Cesaria Evora, she ain’t!
Midway through this studio birthing process I venture to ask u-MaMhlongo: uhm, so you going the gospel route, huh? Some truth in the notion that when we age, we find there just ain’t a demarcation line between our faith and funk? That God winks at us every step of the way; is that it, Sis Vicky?
“This is not gospel,” she corrects. “It’s more like amahubo.” Amahubo are music expressions drawn from African spiritual traditions and not just Western ideas of Praise The Lord. We praise both the Lord and our three-tiered intermediaries: the unborn ancestors, the physically alive ancestors, and those who have gone before us — o’khokho.
By midday, pregnant with ruffled emotions, I pace around the studio, teeth clinched, uttering to myself: agh, you artists can go all Ben Okri on me; back channeling and re-channeling all these spirits and stuff. Yeah. It’s not like I get you all the time. That it’s not even your purpose; to create art to be “got.”
Nah.
Still, as a critic I wonder: am I not too enamored with this diva — particularly this one, so un-diva-ish in everything — am I not too far gone in her aura? I mean, as a fan, I should be asking: where are the hits here, right?
She can read my face, and un-prompted, un-cued, explains: “listening, you see, happens naturally or unnaturally while ‘hearing’ is a choice. Hearing has nothing to do with the physical, everything to do with the deeper state of alertness: active, open, willing, and ready.”
And that’s the thing with Busi Mhlongo’s art. You have to be ready to hear it, so even when she’s not singing, you can hear her melancholic, sometimes angry, and exasperated songs; a woman scorned, a woman abused, a child given a raw deal, couples in desolation row…often, her music is full of couples on the skid rows.
Thus, when I heard her vocals’ elasticity; the whisper-like chords, the sudden rapture of tenors and sopranos in parallel, all springing from a single source, climbing to octaves worthy of an opera diva amid full orchestration, I get a kick in the solar plexus.
Perhaps with Amakholwa, and on hindsight, with the better part of her discography, Busi Mhlongo is forcing us to rethink the notion of “hits”-based music.
The whole album is one long hit [heat] narrative of a saved soul. Clearly, the prodigal daughter’s done gone home. Liturgy has never sounded so hip, so alive, not since Aretha Franklin took Pauly ’n Arty’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” down to the black temple, and resurrected the notion of sprinkling holy waters on a dejected people.
But then Mhlongo comes from this very contemporary tradition of black, secular hymnody.
Recorded pop, jazz and what have you are rife with sons and daughters who understood this instinctively. And dare I say, simply because they come from that “experience,” the experience of the landless and the dispossessed, sometimes known as the black condition.
“Black” imbued with multiple spiritual characteristics to encompass the landless, the Indian peasants, the Zappas, the extinguished Native Americans, enslaved and escaped African slaves, women, emasculated black men, even white men and women struggling with crop-farming in frontiers where no one dares venture for a vacation.
These are The Blues People.
You hear their pain in Hugh Masekela’s “Bo Masekela,” Johnny Dyani’s “Magwaza,” Johnny Cash’s “Southern Accents,” Ali Farka Toure’s and Ry Cooder’s Talking Timbuktu, Busi Mhlongo’s “Song for Doc [Mthalane],” Cassandra Wilson’s “Last Train to Clarksville,” Wilson Picket’s wicked rhythms and Lou Rawls’ “blues,” Biggie Small’s lispy rhymes, Don Mattera’s pin-pointed verse, and, why not, Princess Magogo’s ingenious body of compositions, without which much Zulu modern choral music would be poorer.
And yet, on another level; that biological-spiritual space from whence come chains of wisdom via the sacred act of giving birth; that unique terrain walked only by those gifted with bringing life to this earth, Busi Mhlongo is way beyond a performer. She’s a symbol.
Insofar as vocal style, pain, beauty and endurance goes, Busi Mhlongo’s healer’s brew runs the full generation gamut of black torch-singers. From Princess Magogo, Thuli Dumakude, the lesser-known Nancy Sedibe, Letta Mbuli, Nainy Diabate, Stella Chiwese, Oumou Sangare, to those on whose vocals the future is yet to be etched: Simphiwe Dana, Zap Mama and Thandiswa Mazwai.
It’s there, you just have to hear it.
V
Or hey, Mr. Tambourine man, mention my name “Black,” and I might direct you to where next Busi Mhlongo will be doing her Black Magic Woman thang.
In the studio, she’s a fascinating raconteur. Between takes, she regales the now crowded studio guest list, including famed playwright Welcome Msomi, with dark-humored anecdotes on light subjects [uhm] such as reincarnation.
In torrents of laughter, she does a quick stand-up comedy thing referencing Tupac Shakur, saying her fans will be — eyes bulging for dramatic effect — “so surprised I’ve recorded this album at all. I mean, aren’t I supposed to be dead?”
Silence. She winks and laughs. And if you’re tuned in, you’ll feel the pump-pump beat of her heart, her total relief that she is, after all, very much alive.
The joke’s not on her but on cancer, the disease that nearly hijacked her just 18 months ago.
Though she’s still dealing with it in many ways, including through medication, Busi Mhlongo has, by and large, really wagged the middle finger at Mr. Cancer’s face.
And this joke, this new lighter self, this pond of ceaseless creativity, this new gospel tinged music, heck this entire album . . .it’s all, in her own words: “My way of conveying appreciation, of thanking those who’ve crossed multiple bridges over troubled waters with me.”
To describe her music, I’d compare it to other profound works of art: Dumile Feni and the Romanian turn o’ the 20th century master, Constantin Brancusi.
Think of Busi in silent prayer, eyes “wide-shut.” Think of the faces of those in Dumile Feni’s etchings. Think of Busi’s sculptured beauty, think Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse.
Hits?
If you’re still hung up on hits, well, pieces like Udlala Ngami have that thing written all over it: hit!
With maskanda’s oh-so feely-feely Zulu man in the big city instrumentation, mashed up with a Bootsy Collins-like bass and blessed with the arrangements of Mnothi Ntuli of the famous Shwi No Mtekhala, tweaking the knobs at the right places, this juncture is where new Gospel baptism meets our now tattooed-in-nostalgia urban Zulu drama queen full throttle.
The results? Gonna make you sweat!
With Amakholwa, Busi Mhlongo has come full circle. The lady’s done gone back home, but also back to the future. Her eyes, certainly, are looking at God.
From February, 2012