Thandiswa
What do you say back to a voice that was recorded before you were born? ... Sabela is the Xhosa word for answering when you are called ... and this song is the answer ...
During the shut-in years Thandiswa Mazwai found an archive ... field recordings of Xhosa singers, held at the International Library of African Music at Rhodes University, voices from villages, taken down decades ago and shelved ... She had been one of the voices of South Africa since Bongo Maffin in the nineties, the years right after apartheid, and here were the people before her, singing in her own language on old tape ... "The album was really responding to that archive," she said ... The album is Sankofa, from May 2024 ... the word is Akan, from West Africa, and it means go back and fetch it ...
Sabela opens the record, and it opens it like a prayer ... the old voices are in it, sampled from the archive, and over them she laid the strings of another coast ... kora and ngoni, played by musicians from Senegal, West African harp and lute over Southern African field-recorded song ... the jazz pianist Nduduzo Makhathini and the bassist Meshell Ndegeocello helped her build it, so it moves the way a jazz record moves, patiently, with room ... one continent talking to itself across a few thousand miles and seventy years ...
She was called ... she answered ... the song is the sound of the answering ...