Bakithi Kumalo brings the ancestors (and a little cool jazz) to the Art Museum May 27
By K. Curtis Lyle
For the St. Louis American
South African music is composed of one part rhythm, one part melody, one part harmony and one part Azanian breath.
The fourth element, the one I’ve labeled “Azanian breath,” is often called “phrasing” by others. Azania is the African name of The Republic of South Africa.
Inside this phrasing, this special form of deep breathing, is the unassailable element of joy. For me, joy is the holy grail, the sacred foundation of this culture as realized through its music.
Bakithi Kumalo – who performs at the Saint Louis Art Museum at 8 p.m. Friday, May 27 to kick off the 14th Annual St. Louis African Arts Festival -is a practitioner of this joyous music and also a guardian.
Bakithi has fed the likes of Gloria Estefan, Herbie Hancock, Bob James, Jonathan Butler, Chaka Khan, Jon Secada, Harry Belafonte, Gerald Albright, Miriam Makeba, Laurie Anderson and Cyndi Lauper with the bass-milk of his music. His incredibly strong fingers were one of the final hammer blows that brought down the wall of apartheid.
The connection between South Africa and black America – the real connection – was first made evident to me in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s when I was living in Los Angeles.
In residence in the city of angels at that time was a contingent of South African exiles who made good song feel and taste better than good food. Letta Mbulu, Caiphas Semenya, Philemon Ho, Jonas Gwangwa and the legendary Hugh Masekela all called L.A. home during this period. Miriam Makeba was a frequent visitor.
The power of their music and the force of their personalities made-up an exhilarating cultural cocktail that made me high every time I encountered it.
Batkithi Kumalo is heir to all this.
His history is his own; yet, it reads like the classic tale of the so many of his elders and peers. He grew up in the celebrated and notorious Soweto township.
“My mother was a singer and my uncle a saxophone player,” he says. “My uncle used to rehearse at home with his musicians every weekend. They drank all the time and played music, and I was like – ‘I love this job! When I grow up, I want to be just like these people!'”
The time moved his life like lightning. At seven he was proficient enough to fill in for his uncle’s bass player. A tour of Zululand followed. Eighteen months later, after playing in numerous venues, the band found themselves stranded. He had been making his bass-way by using his thumb. Then a dream showed him the way.
“I saw somebody playing in a dream. He didn’t have a head, I just saw his body and his fingers,” Bakithi recalls. “I remembered the dream the next day and started to use my fingers.”
He returned to Soweto full of fire. Bakithi already had a monster reputation when American pop star Paul Simon came calling. At that very moment, Bakithi was thinking of giving up music in order to make money to help his ailing mother.
He met Simon and began to play his bass, and Bakithi was asked to travel with Simon to New York to finish the recording that had been started in South Africa. Graceland then gave him the visibility that has made him one of the most sought-after session men in the music business.
Bakithi Kumalo has since settled in Brooklyn. His latest release, This Is Me, has the smooth jazz credential that makes it accessible to an American audience; but, right underneath, it has that Capetown fringe that Abdullah Ibrahim made so popular and so imitated in the West.
As James Brown would say, “Please, Please, Please” check him out.
Bakithi Kumalo performs at the Saint Louis Art Museum at 8 p.m. Friday, May 27 to kick off the 14th Annual St. Louis African Arts Festival. Tickets are $15 or $55 to include the 6:30 p.m. mayor’s reception. Call (314) 935-9676.