#Ladysmith Black Mambazo

[soulaanadelrey]

Donald sampled the African Alphabet (a song by Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo for Sesame Street) on this song that he's singing with his son and now I'm crying! And also, Don's love for The Muppets and Sesame Street is so beautiful and precise. The fact that I caught the sample shows how much of a nerd I am.

[lamuella]

Sure your last breakup was bad but unless your last breakup caused someone to write one of the greatest albums of the 80s and cement the global careers of Ladysmith Black Mambazo you are not on Carrie Fisher's level.

[musicmags]

[randomberlinchick]

Paul Simon - Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes

o kodwa you zo-nge li-sa namhlange / (A-wa a-wa) si-bona kwenze ka kanjani / (A-wa a-wa) amanto mbazane ayeza

She's a rich girl / She don't try to hide it / Diamonds on the soles of her shoes / He's a poor boy / Empty as a pocket / Empty as a pocket with nothing to lose / Sing ta na na / Ta na na na

[sugarmusicnews]

Shosholoza – Ndluvu Youth Choir

Rise – Ndlovu Youth Choir This list would not be complete with what has been described by some as South Africa’s second national anthem. It somehow has become to South Africa Rugby what ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ is to English Rugby. But ironically it does not have South African origins. The song originated from the Ndebele men in what was then Rhodesia. These men would come and work on the gold…

[clivechip]

Tuesday Tunes 216: Shoes

    I said last week that I would be running a second set of songs about clothes, but with a twist. This week sees the big reveal! When I was compiling that one I realised that many of the songs I knew were about shoes, so many in fact that I felt they deserved a post all to themselves. So, this week the theme is shoes. I wonder how many of them you will know? I’m treading a fairly familiar…

[afrotumble]

LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO February 22, 2024

[shouichinarita]

Ladysmith Black Mambazo - Unomathemba

[audio-luddite]

Frustration.

I was on You Tube and bumped into a really nice Jazz Playlist. One song sounded OK on my computer earbuds, so I wondered if I could find the tune online to listen to on my big system. That is where it became frustrating.

First thing is there was a video of a record spinning and a phono cartridge in the groove, but that is not where the music came from. There was dirt in the video and it did not make a noise. I also noted the TT was not high end and the phono pickup was not square to the disk. Just an empty video to fool people. He pulled this off a stream somewhere. I wish it was a real LP as I would buy it if I could identify the artist. But no track list, no artist noted and tellingly no credit to them. The song was a really nice Jazz arrangement of Elton John with a piano and very little else.

It appeared that this playlist was pirated and the guy just put it out cuz he liked it. He did not like it enough to see the artists paid for the work. I went searching through the comments and up and down the indexes looking for the singer's name at least. No joy. I got to the point where I forgot what song it was, just an Elton John tune. Searching for female singers doing Elton John Covers just kept popping up Diana Krall. I know what she sounds like, twern't her. It is now lost forever in the entropy. Damn!

After dinner I fired up my system and played Apple Music Jazz hoping to get lucky. No joy there. So as the fine Gewurztraminer took me to a nice place I debated playing Diana Krall. I have several LPs of hers. All good ones. But then no I played "Graceland" side one to hear Ladysmith Black Mambazo, then jumped to White Rabbit from George Benson. You know that album is old, simple plain consumer grade LP from the 1980s and sounds fine. I mean FINE. It is a CTI recording and it really stands up.

Cool thing is the song White Rabbit from Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick was about a psychedelic trip thing. It used the melody from Ravel's Bolero and Rodrigo's Aranjuez by way of Miles Davis which has a weird story of its own. So the George Benson tune is more Bolero than Acid Trip, but hey its good music. There is a lot of good music out in the 'verse.

I got sleepy and shut her down. Maybe I will get lucky later.

[sonicziggy]

"Uthando" by Ladysmith Black Mambazo https://ift.tt/xBstnOH

[alice-makes-things]

[Mean Girls Musical Film Adaptation (2024) rant] Probably nobody cares about this except me, but the film version of Stupid With Love is *not* sung by a Cady Heron who truly loves Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

The Broadway cast recording for Mean Girls (2018) is fantastic, and I love the South African Mbaqanga-inspired composition. It's clever, it's funny, and it's in keeping with Cady's character and interests at that point in the story.

2024's version is...lacklustre and boring in comparison. Yes, there's some acapella stuff going on, which does give Ladysmith vibes, but the whole character of the number is off.

Anyway, my whole response is just...

[tryingtounderstandbrainheart]

Ladysmith Black Mambazo - Full Performance (Live on KEXP) - suddenly I feel this... unity with everything. Suddenly I feel how we are a part of the earth, the animals and they just soothed me from within. Amazing. 

[haveyouheardthisband]

[sugarmusicnews]

Nomathemba – Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Zibuyinhlzane – Ladysmith Black Mambazo It looks like ‘Nomathemba’ (no relation to Mama Themba), dates back to Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s 1986 album, ‘Zibuyinhlazane’ which was around the time that the foremost purveyors of isicathamiya singing were also seeing a global rise to fame following their contribution to Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’.Anyone not familiar with isicathamiya style before Paul…

[dagwolf]

��In any event, here's a tasty interview excerpt:

Speaking of doing a lot of different records and working with a lot of amazing songwriters, I own a ton of the records that you've done over the years. One, in particular, I'd like to ask you about is Paul Simon's Graceland. I obsessed over that thing when I was young. Do you have any recollections of working on it?

Oh, I have plenty of recollections of working on that one. I don't know if you heard the stories, but it was not a pleasant deal for us. I mean he [Simon] quite literally — and in no way do I exaggerate when I say — he stole the songs from us.

...

The interviewer's softball question leads to an extended rant that rolls on for over 1500 words. There's no clear way to verify Berlin's claims. But it's interesting to consider his characterization of Los Lobos' “collaboration” with Simon at a moment when the latter artist is being trumpeted as the latest hipster influence, like David Byrne and Gang of Four before him. It must be a heady moment for Simon. New York's much respected Brooklyn Academy of Music is feting him with a sold out month-long residency celebrating his post-Garfunkel career — a tribute fest that finds everyone from Byrne to Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing his songs, a residency whose final week — starting April 23rd — includes one of the top 10 ever most unlikely co-bills: Grizzly Bear, Gillian Welch, Josh Groban, and Olu Dara.

WTF, indeed.

After the jump, Steve Berlin's entire diatribe on Los Lobos' “collaboration” with Simon, including a rare dis of legendary former Warner Bros chief Lenny Waronker.

...

Really…

Yeah. And you know, going into it, I had an enormous amount of respect for the guy. The early records were amazing, I loved his solo records, and I truly thought he was one of the greatest gifts to American music that there was.

At the time, we were high on the musical food chain. Paul had just come off One Trick Pony and was kind of floundering. People forget, before Graceland, he was viewed as a colossal failure. He was low. So when we were approached to do it, I was a way bigger fan than anybody else in the band. We got approached by Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin who ran our record company [Warner Bros.], and this is the way these guys would talk – “It would mean a lot to the family if you guys would do this for us.” And we thought, “Ok well, it's for the family, so we'll do it.” It sounds so unbelievably naïve and ridiculous that that would be enough of a reason to go to the studio with him.

We go into the studio, and he had quite literally nothing. I mean, he had no ideas, no concepts, and said, “Well, let's just jam.” We said, “We don't really do that.” When we jam, we'll switch instruments. Dave will play drums, I'll play something. We don't really jam. Especially in that era. Louie will be the first to tell you this – he was made to play drums. They forced him to play drums. He's not really a drummer by trade. He's never practiced a moment in his life. Not once in his life did he sit down at the drums because of his love for drumming. The other three guys made him play drums in the early days, so he sort of became drummer by default. He hates playing the instrument, I think. Again, you should ask him, but I don't ever ever, ever get the sense that he was one of those dyed-in-the-wool, John Bonham, let's-play-drums-for-three-days-straight kind of guys. So consequently, as the core band was comprised then, we never jammed – never ever. Not by accident, not even at soundcheck. We would always just play a song.

So Paul was like, “Let's just jam,” and we're like, “Oh jeez. Well alright, let's see what we can do.” And it was not good because Louie wasn't comfortable. None of us were comfortable, it wasn't just Louie. It was like this very alien environment to us. Paul was a very strange guy. Paul's engineer was even stranger than Paul, and he just seemed to have no clue – no focus, no design, no real nothing. He had just done a few of the African songs that hadn't become songs yet. Those were literally jams. Or what the world came to know and I don't think really got exposed enough, is that those are actually songs by a lot of those artists that he just approved of. So that's kind of what he was doing. It was very patrician, material sort of viewpoint. Like, because I'm gonna put my stamp on it, they're now my songs. But that's literally how he approached this stuff.

I remember he played me the one he did by John Hart, and I know John Hart, the last song on the record. He goes, “Yeah, I did this in Louisiana with this zy decko guy.” And he kept saying it over and over. And I remember having to tell him, “Paul, it's pronounced zydeco. It's not zy decko, it's zydeco.” I mean that's how incredibly dilettante he was about this stuff. The guy was clueless.

Wow. You're kidding me?

Clue… less about what he was doing. He knew what he wanted to do, but it was not in any way like, “Here's my idea. Here's this great vision I have for this record, come with me.”

About two hours into it, the guys are like, “You gotta call Lenny right now. You gotta get us out of this. We can't do this. This is a joke. This is a waste of time.” And this was like two hours into the session that they wanted me to call Lenny. What am I going to tell Lenny? It was a favor to him. What am I going to say, “Paul's a fucking idiot?”

Somehow or other, we got through the day with nothing. I mean, literally, nothing. We would do stuff like try an idea out and run it around for 45 minutes, and Paul would go “Eh… I don't like it. Let's do something else.” And it was so frustrating. Even when we'd catch a glimpse of something that might turn into something, he would just lose interest. A kitten-and-the-string kinda thing.

So that's day one. We leave there and it's like, “Ok, we're done. We're never coming back.” I called Lenny and said it really wasn't very good. We really didn't get anything you could call a song or even close to a song. I don't think Paul likes us very much. And frankly, I don't think we like him very much. Can we just say, 'Thanks for the memories' and split?” And he was like, “Man, you gotta hang in there. Paul really does respect you. It's just the way he is. I'll talk to him.” And we were like, “Oh man, please Lenny. It's not working.” Meanwhile, we're not getting paid for this. There was no discussion like we're gonna cash in or anything like that. It was very labor-of-love.

Really…?

Yeah. Don't ask me why. God knows it would have made it a lot easier to be there.

And Lenny put you guys together thinking it would be a good match?

Well, “It would be good for the family.” That was it. So we go back in the second day wondering why we're there. It was ridiculous. I think David starts playing “The Myth of the Fingerprints,” or whatever he ended up calling it. That was one of our songs. That year, that was a song we started working on By Light of the Moon. So that was like an existing Lobos sketch of an idea that we had already started doing. I don't think there were any recordings of it, but we had messed around with it. We knew we were gonna do it. It was gonna turn into a song. Paul goes, “Hey, what's that?” We start playing what we have of it, and it is exactly what you hear on the record. So we're like, “Oh, ok. We'll share this song.”

Good way to get out of the studio, though…

Yeah. But it was very clear to us, at the moment, we're thinking he's doing one of our songs. It would be like if he did “Will the Wolf Survive?” Literally. A few months later, the record comes out and says “Words and Music by Paul Simon.” We were like, “What the fuck is this?”

We tried calling him, and we can't find him. Weeks go by and our managers can't find him. We finally track him down and ask him about our song, and he goes, “Sue me. See what happens.”

What?! Come on…

That's what he said. He said, “You don't like it? Sue me. You'll see what happens.” We were floored. We had no idea. The record comes out, and he's a big hit. Retroactively, he had to give songwriting credit to all the African guys he stole from that were working on it and everyone seemed to forget. But that's the kind of person he is. He's the world's biggest prick, basically.

So we go back to Lenny and say, “Hey listen, you stuck us in the studio with this fucking idiot for two days. We tried to get out of it, you made us stay in there, and then he steals our song?! What the hell?!” And Lenny's always a politician. He made us forget about it long enough that it went away. But to this day, I do not believe we have gotten paid for it. We certainly didn't get songwriting credit for it. And it remains an enormous bone that sticks in our craw. Had he even given us a millionth of what the song and the record became, I think we would have been – if nothing else – much richer, but much happier about the whole thing.

Have you guys seen him since then?

No. Never run into him. I'll tell you, if the guys ever did run into him, I wouldn't want to be him, that's for sure.

That's an amazing story. I can't believe I never heard it before.

We had every right and reason to sue him, and Lenny goes, “It's bad for the family.” When we told the story in that era, when this was going down, we were doing interviews and telling the truth. And Lenny goes, “Hey guys, I really need you to stop talking about it. It's bad for the family.”

Amazing. Talk about bad for the family.

I know. Again, it's just so incredible how naïve we were back then. You can't even imagine that era of music when you'd actually listen to your record company president who told you to shut up because “it's bad for the family.” Now, I'd tell him to go fuck himself.