Keleketla! isn’t a group. It’s a studio assemblage of British, South African, Nigerian, American and more musicians that recorded mostly in South Africa and England, produced by the English electronic-music duo Coldcut.
From its beginnings in the 1980s, Coldcut — Matt Black and Jonathan More — has embraced far-reaching sampling and genre-mixing, with an ear for African-diaspora music old and new: soul, funk, reggae, hip-hop, house, acid jazz, techno, jungle and more. Coldcut started the Ninja Tune label in 1990 and has gone on to experiment with ever-evolving audiovisual technology; the duo has produced and remixed music for and with Eric B. and Rakim, Lisa Stansfield, Queen Latifah, Annette Peacock and Steve Reich. Keleketla!’s tracks rely on Coldcut’s fundamental skills as D.J.s and producers: layering multifarious sources to find and sharpen a groove.
The “Keleketla!” album ticks all the boxes that distinguish collaboration from exploitation. Coldcut was invited to record in South Africa by the Keleketla Library, an arts archive, educational workshop and performance space in Johannesburg. (In the Sepedi language, “keleketla” means the “response” in call-and-response). On the album, the African and Black musicians have their voices up front, carrying messages in African languages along with English, and they share the songwriting credits.
Each track finds a different cultural mesh. Coldcut visited Johannesburg for sessions in Soweto in 2017, held more sessions in London in 2018 and 2019 and completed mixing in 2020, consulting with the Keleketla Library via video calls. Coldcut’s electronic expertise surrounds Yugen Blakrok, from South Africa, in “Crystalise” as she raps about solitude, cosmic connections, communal memory and personal strength over a track that draws on both breakbeats and “What’s Going On”; her husky rhymes are answered by the Barbadian-British saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. The album’s core South African musicians — Nono Nkoane and Tubatsi Moloi on vocals, Thabang Tabane on bass, Sibusile Xaba on guitar and Gally Ngoveni on bass — agitate a smooth, scalloped melody with a double-time undercurrent in “5+1,” fused via multitracking with Joe Armon-Jones’s jazzy piano from London.
The album’s masterstroke is a choice of personnel: booking Tony Allen on drums for the album’s sessions in London. Allen, who died in April, was the drummer for Fela Kuti in the Nigerian bands that originated Afrobeat in the 1960s and 1970s, playing beats that merged West African rhythms, funk, jazz and rock. (For good measure the keyboardist Dele Sosimi, who followed Allen as Fela’s musical director, was also at the London sessions.) Allen’s drumming propels five of the album’s nine tracks, spattering syncopated accents, quick little snare-drum rolls and hissing cymbals all around the central beat — and constantly striking sparks.
“Future Toyi Toyi” loops a bar of Allen’s complex drumming behind a drone, jabs of flute and guitar and vocals that are sung and chanted by the South African group Soundz of the South; they’re revolutionary slogans like “forward with the struggle!” Elsewhere, Allen joins the rhythm section with hair-trigger reflexes, constantly knocking out subtle variations that snap a beat to attention. “International Love Affair” and “Papua Merdeka” — which includes the voice of the activist Benny Wenda calling for the independence of West Papua from Indonesia — both invoke the steadfast yet roiling rhythms of Afrobeat.
“Shepherd Song” has a more metronomic pulse, but also hints at Ghanaian highlife and then at jazz. And “Freedom Groove” creates a perpetually tumbling momentum while Father Amde Hamilton, of the long-running California jazz-and-poetry group the Watts Prophets, preaches about freedom and materialism, answered by the horns of the Brooklyn Afrobeat band Antibalas.
Coldcut’s presence is ubiquitous; it was the duo that put all the scattered pieces of Keleketla! together. But the thoroughly hybridized music makes clear that in Africa, Coldcut was ready to listen above all.
Keleketla!
“Keleketla!”
(Ahead of Our Time)
Source: Music - nytimes.com
