Welcome Spring with the Ibrahim Khalil Shihab Quintet

Here's "Spring" by South Africa's Ibrahim Khalil Shihab Quintet feat. saxophone great Winston 'Mankunku' Ngozi. 

Here's the scoop from Matsuli Music...

South Africa’s lost jazz history contains many an overlooked classic. But even within that hidden tradition, there are few albums that suffered such an unlucky fate as Spring, the monumental 1968 debut album by pianist Ibrahim Khalil Shihab, formerly Chris Schilder. 

Though Shihab was only twenty-two when Spring was recorded, he was already a lynchpin of the Cape Town scene, and the album was to be his first major statement as leader and composer. It is a magnum opus gilded by the presence of the upcoming saxophonist Winston ‘Mankunku’ Ngozi, who was soon to find huge acclaim with the hit album Yakhal’ Inkomo. 

Three months of touring southern Africa in 1968 honed the band to the point that this entire album was recorded within the just two hours of allocated studio time. This album was repressed just once before the master tapes were destroyed by an ignorant record company executive. While it has remained out of print since then, the album was ‘kept alive’ as an ‘add-on’ to a 1996 CD of Mankunku’s Yakhal’ Inkomo. As a result, many modern jazz lovers still incorrectly believe these five compositions come from Yakhal’ Inkomo. 

With this edition of Spring, Matsuli Music corrects an historic wrong. This edition of Shihab’s stunning debut, produced with the blessing of the man himself, is the first time it has been properly available in over forty years, and the first time it has ever been available outside South Africa. Restored and presented with new liner notes by Valmont Layne, Spring can now be seen for what it is: a peerless masterwork of Cape Jazz, blessed by the presence of the great Mankunku, but truly animated by the subtle vision and original musical spirit of its creator, Ibrahim Khalil Shihab. 

Get a copy of the reissue of Ibrahim Khalil Shihab Quintet's Spring album right here. Listen to the title track below. 

 

Dudu Pukwana's debut with The Spears being reissued by Matsuli Music

Dudu Pukwana's rare 1968 album with The Spears is being packaged with a previously unreleased 1969 session featuring Richard Thompson & Simon Nicol! 

This just in from Matsuli Music...
In addition to this 1968 Dudu Pukwana And the Spears album (listen below), there was a second record made in 1969, after Dudu had visited South Africa with Joe Boyd. The second recording has never been released, and it has some important musicians featured. Double LP in production. Our research indicates the following personnel for this second unreleased recording:

Unreleased recordings confirmed line-up
Dudu Pukwana – Tenor sax
Richard Thompson – guitar
Simon Nicol – guitar
Harry Miller – bass
Louis Moholo – drums
Mongezi Feza – trumpet
Joe Mogotsi – vocals
Bob Stuckey – organ and bass pedals

Likely
Mamsie (Mthombeni) Gwangwa - vocals
Chris McGregor – piano
Phil Lee – guitar
Teddy Osei – tenor sax

Possible
Jonas Gwangwa – trombone
Remi Kabaka – drums or percussion
Jimmy Scott – percussion
Tunji Oyelana – drums or percussion

R.I.P. Ndikho Xaba, 1934-2019

Legendary South African spiritual jazz pianist/percussionist Ndikho Xaba passed away Wednesday. He'll be greatly missed.  

Batsumi's 1976 Afro-jazz gem "Moving Along" gets deluxe reissue

The long out-of-print Moving Along album by Soweto's Batsumi will be reissued on 180g vinyl July 1.

Sathima Bea Benjamin's 1976 spiritual jazz gem finally gets reissued

Press release

Matsuli Music is proud is announce the re-issue of African Songbird, the spiritual jazz masterpiece from South Africa’s greatest jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin. Originally released in 1976, African Songbird was a debut long overdue. A 1959 recording, which would have been one of South Africa’s first ever jazz LPs, was shelved. Her 1963 recording with Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn was put aside by Reprise’s then head of A&R, Frank Sinatra, for not being commercial enough.

African Songbird is a tour-de-force, and arguably the most dramatic and powerful release on Rashid Vally’s As-shams label. The opener, ‘Africa’, is the album’s fulcrum, a statement of breath-taking musical, personal and political complexity. It is a song of exile, of loss, and of return: a song that is both personal and universal, speaking for a people made homeless in their own land, speaking to those whose ambivalent embrace of exile ached for a homecoming. It speaks too of hope and resolution. 

Africa is a personally powerful declaration from a remarkable African woman: a song of deferred self and dislocated space finally resolved in an emotional homecoming.  It is a song of celebration and mourning – a heartfelt paean to her home that is shot through with the raw sorrow of lament.

Sathima’s voice, wholly unique in jazz singing, gradually sheds its musical supports as the programme develops. From the thickly-layered tumult of Africa, through the characteristic Cape Town swing that informs Music, the instrumentation is quietly reduced, then finally dispensed with. The title track is performed acapella, but for the natural sounds of the sea coast, the gulls and surf of the Cape itself. After many years of silence, two deferred albums, and over a decade of rootless exile from a home that had been made inhospitable by the inhumanity of apartheid, Sathima’s voice is finally heard, alone with her song, naturally, like a bird.


Sathima’s career has been challenged throughout by a struggle to be heard. She never played on her African roots to gain acceptance internationally, and her complete commitment to classic jazz idioms never wavered: as an African artist, this made it difficult for audiences, critics and record companies to understand the nature of her talent. The unique genius and global success of her husband Abdullah Ibrahim (aka Dollar Brand) cast its own shadow, and as the mother of two children, music could not always be her first priority. These challenges were exacerbated by the pressures of political exile, and for Sathima, due recognition was late to arrive.

In recent years Sathima Bea Benjamin’s extraordinary life and unique work have received the critical attention and acclaim they richly deserve. Despite this, African Songbird, her first released record, has remained unavailable and largely unknown. This reissue remedies that situation in restoring and making available again an important keystone in South Africa’s jazz heritage.

Sathima Bea Benjamin currently lives in Cape Town. She continues to perform the material that she first recorded for this disc. In association with Rashid Vally and Sathima Bea Benjamin, Matsuli is proud to present this album in its original form, making it available again for the first time since initial release. A crucial piece of South African and global jazz history, African Songbird is courageous, revelatory music, and Sathima’s unique voice is the bearer of its message. It’s easy to see why Ellington was convinced.  Check it out...


LINKS 
http://matsuli.blogspot.ca/