Let's get to Marching with a birthday tribute to a goddess, who came down in human form for a while to entertain and enlighten us.
There aren't too many people who could say they were married to Hugh Masekela and Stokely Carmichael in the same lifetime, but today's birthday girl is one.
From the late 1950s to her death in 2008, she was perhaps the singlemost effective unofficial ambassador of South African culture that will ever live.
She is as responsible as any one person your could name for the end of Apartheid in her country, even Mandela himself.
Exiled for decades, she worked from the outside to topple that ignoble regime, using love and music as her only weapons.
It worked, too. The Afrikaaners fell like diseased trees of bigotry in a forest of inclusion.
Then there's the exquisite music she made. I guess for it to help topple the oppressive regimes of bigoted and genocidal pigs, your music would have to be pretty exquisite, I am just saying.
She'd have been 88 today, had she not passed in 2008 after a lifetime doing right in this world.
Truth be told, every day her fellow Black South Africans live out from under the bootheel of the white minority is a day Miriam Makeba -- born this day in 1932 -- is still alive and among us.
Miriam Makeba featuring Shikisha
Estival Jazz
Piazza Della Riforma
Lugano, Switzerland
7.2.1985
CD1
01 Kulala
02 Kilimanjaro
03 We`ve Got to Make It
04 A Promise
05 Mbube
06 Taximan
07 Umngoma
08 Chameleon
CD2
01 Mister Man
02 African Convention
03 Click Song
04 Hauteng
05 Mina`s Boot Dance
06 Malaika
07 Meet Me At the River
08 Soweto Blues
09 Pata Pata
10 Amampondo incl. band introductions
11 unidentified closing song
Total time: 1:40:25
Miriam Makeba - vocals
Jean-Claude Naimro - keyboards
Stanley Todd - guitar
Toto Nkaké Guillaume - guitar
Al Sanders - bass
Smith Haliar - congas & percussion
Lucien Dobat - drums
with Shikisha:
Julia Mathunjwa, Betty-Boo Hlela & Nomsa Caluza - vocals
1st generation soundboard DAT
retracked and reannotated by EN, March 2020
598 MB FLAC/March 2020 archive link
This gorgeous and incredibly well recorded show captures her at the peak of her awesome and legendary powers, trust me.
I will stroll back by in 48 hours with more octaves for you doctors, unless the authorities take me away for my obvious communist proclivities.
Don't sleep on MM here, though. Her and her all-star band are waiting behind that link to whip a Wednesday sermon on you.--J.
3.4.1932 - 11.9.2008