INTRO

Some years ago, in 2005, I found myself browsing through records at a thrift store in Richmond, Virginia and came across the LP, An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba. It was two dollars!

The album dated from 1965, and I was immediately struck by the strong political message in the liner notes, critiquing the then white minority government of South Africa and its racial policies. I began to reflect upon how these mass-produced commodities (LP records), issued all over the world, were a perfect and significant vehicle for spreading an anti-apartheid message.

I set a goal of accumulating as many examples as I could of those messages and in the process discovered some amazing music. The research subsequently developed into an extensive art project documenting the work of Miriam Makeba.

Assembled over multiple years of sifting through internet auctions and receiving thousands of emails, I collected Makeba recordings and ephemera from all over the world. In an effort to map the journey of each record (and by implication Makeba’s voice), I catalogued where each was first recorded and where each was purchased. Numbering over 500 individually acquired items, the collection now includes thirty 78 rpm shellac discs, 266 vinyl LP records, 151 singles, a number of four-track reel-to-reel tapes, eight-track cartridges, cassette tapes, compact discs, DVDs, test records, an acetate demo recording, plus an original 16 mm print of Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 film, Come Back Africa.

I began exploring various visual strategies with this material and in 2009, I presented a number of artwork installations at the Bank Gallery in Durban, South Africa. I photographed every label in the collection, arranged them chronologically in a tight grid, and pinned the images to a black wall. The installation Labels became a visual document of Makeba’s life work but also formed an abstract color field that was for me reminiscent of a kind of craft work in South Africa.

Covers, the second work produced from this archive, assembled in a free-hanging clear plastic curtain, the covers of one example of each of her recordings arranged chronologically, along with each iteration of that issue by country. The installation revealed Makeba’s changing portrait over time and the expanding global reach of her message. The clear curtain also made the rear liner notes accessible allowing the viewer to compare different pressings of identical albums and see how political content had been edited based on country of origin.

It was during this exhibition that Graeme Gilfillan of the ZM Makeba Trust and Siyandisa Music made contact with me. Graeme traveled to Durban to see the work and thus began a conversation around Miriam Makeba, her legacy and the roots of what would eventually become this compact disc.

In the years that followed, I found myself slowly expanding the limits of the collection to include any audio artifact from South Africa—jazz, punk, plays, political speeches, sports commentary, and so on. In 2010 I launched a non-profit, searchable online database as a visual archive for the broader South African collection at flatinternational.org. The following year I began blogging about this research at Electric Jive.


TRACKS LESS TRAVELLED

Over her prolific career, from 1954 until her death in 2008, Makeba issued no less than twenty-nine individual albums along with countless 78s, 45s and EPs, pressed in at least thirty-three countries. In addition, at least twenty-eight compilations of her works had been and continue to be issued on compact disc.

In 2011, I prepared a blogpost for Electric Jive around a small experiment using iTunes as a database. First I transferred every “best of” Makeba CD in my collection into the application. Secondly I loaded at least one copy of each of her albums; as well as digitizing those not available on CD. I then picked through the singles and EPs and digitized tracks not found on albums. The provisional result was 832 songs or two days of listening to comb through. My goal here was to see what songs were more popular and therefore widely issued on multiple pressings, and which were less common. I was also curious to see how many variations of individual songs there were. From that list I then selected tracks or versions of tracks (with one or two exceptions) that seemed to come up only once.

For the most part these were tracks that either had never been reissued on CD or if they were, are seldom, if at all, included on her “best of” compilations. I was surprised to see the number of significant hits and gems remaining scarce or un-reissued, most notably: Into Yam, Qhude, the original studio versions of Oxgam (Click Song No. 2), Malayisha, iBabalazie and my all time favorite, Ndikho Xaba’s Emavungwini, to name a few. Of the albums made by Makeba, there were at least six at the time of writing the article in 2011, that had never been re-issued on CD. (Some have since been reissued.) Of those that have been reissued almost none included the original cover art or liner notes.

From the project I developed a final list of twenty-five of my favorite least-common selections by Miriam Makeba and posted the compilation with detailed notes at Electric Jive in October 2011.

The collection opens with Makeba’s beautiful wordless 1958 interpretation of Duke Ellington’s Rockin’ in Rhythm, originally issued as a 78 rpm shellac disc on Gallo’s New Sound label in South Africa. The track was subsequently issued in the United Kingdom on Decca’s compilation LP, Something New from Africa, probably the first long-playing vinyl record to feature Miriam Makeba.

Into Yam is one of the songs that Makeba sings in Lionel Rogosin’s clandestine, 1959 film Come Back Africa about township life in South Africa. The film premiered at the 1959 Venice Film Festival and it was Rogosin who bribed South African officials to let Makeba come to Italy for the presentation. She would not return to South Africa for the next 30 years. Rogosin along with Harry Belafonte financed Makeba’s travels to the United States and arranged for her to appear on the Steve Allen show in November 1959. The first song she sang on live television in the United States was Into Yam. The version of Into Yam on this compilation as well as Little Boy, both featuring arrangements by Hugh Masekela, can be heard on her third LP The World of Miriam Makeba issued by RCA in 1963.

Some oddities on this compilation include live audience tracks added to what appears to be studio versions of Umqokoza and Love Tastes Like Strawberries issued on a 1964 Kapp compilation, Midnight Hoot. Of course there is always the slim possibility that these may be immaculately tight live recordings! Curiously, Makeba only recorded one full album with Kapp, her second—The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba—in 1962, before returning to RCA for her third. I speculate that this shift may have had something to do with the austere contract restrictions that Gallo had imposed on RCA during the recording or her debut album in 1960.

One of the more unusual finds is a variation of Khawuleza from a 1970 Russian flexi-disc booklet featuring Russian translations of the lyrics superimposed over the actual song. The booklet itself consists of a number of additional tracks by other artists and each song is ring bound as a floppy flexi-disc in the book with extensive text in Russian. To play a song, one must simply go to the page of choice, fold the book completely open and place the entire object on the record player.

The Soviet Union was sympathetic to anti-apartheid causes and supported the ANC in exile with training and shelter. A number of historic ANC albums were recorded and issued in the USSR including those by the Amandla group. Makeba herself had a number of albums issued in the Eastern block during the 1970s, after she became “self-exiled” from the US. The 1974 album A Promise was issued on the East German label Amiga and a compilation album Miriam Makeba was issued in Czechoslovakia on the Supraphon/Reprise label in 1974.

For me the most haunting and rarest track is a demo version of The Ballad of Sad Young Men, most famously featured as the b-side to the classic Pata-Pata single, but here stripped down in a somber, down-beat early take. The final version of the track first appeared on Makeba’s 1967 Mercury album, All About Miriam. The demo acetate features seven tracks, six of which can be found on All About Miriam. Their was a suggestion in the online auction that the demo disc may have come from the estate of Luchi DeJesus, the arranger of many of the tracks on All About Miriam and Pata Pata, but that is difficult to verify. In all cases the final recordings are quite different from these demos but none are as distinct as The Ballad of Sad Young Men.

Another rarity, Jeremy Taylor’s A Piece of Ground, is sourced from Makeba’s rarest LP, Miriam Makeba In Tokyo, recorded in August 1968 and issued as a Japanese-only pressing on the Reprise label. Originally from the musical Wait a Minim, Makeba first recorded this song on her album The Magnificent Miriam Makeba in 1966 and an alternative version is featured on the classic Pata Pata album as well as In Concert! The song sung live gave Makeba the opportunity to subtly introduce the complexity of race relations in South Africa to her audiences. It is interesting to compare her almost identical spoken introductions to the song on both live albums.

The bluesy You Suffer Too is the b-side of La Guinee Guine and comes from a series of eleven rare singles issued on the Editions Syliphone Conakry label in the early 1970s, a period that spanned Makeba’s so-called “Guinea Years”— and which is also the title of a fabulous CD compilation of many of her songs from this period. This track unfortunately does not appear on the compilation. Perhaps its blues inflection did not fit into the more African feel of the CD.

Les Trois Z is a political song from Zaire (now Congo) by Gérard Madiata. The term "Les Trois Z" referred to the “Authenticité” or authenticity campaign of Mobutu Sese Seko in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the late 1960s and early 70s, to “rid the country of the lingering vestiges of colonialism and the continuing influence of Western culture and to create a more centralized and singular national identity.” The campaign included renaming the country, the Congo River and the currency—“Zaire” and referred to them as Les Trois Z — Notre Pays, Notre Fleuve, Notre Monnaie (The Three Zs — Our Country, Our River, Our Money). Makeba’s version of the song was a significant influence on a young Angelique Kidjo who found early success with an adaption of it.

The compilation ends with a live version of Nongqongqo, recorded in Brussels in 1998, from the concert Voices For Peace organized by the International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation. The song speaks about South African leaders—Sobukwe, Luthuli and Mandela—and their role in the struggle against apartheid. The original version, fittingly, had come from the classic album—An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba—the same album that I had found in the Richmond thrift store that gave birth to the project.


FINAL THOUGHTS

In 2010 the Makeba! art project was presented for the first time in the United States in Imaging South Africa, an extensive exhibition of my work curated by Ashley Kistler at the Anderson Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. In 2011 the installation then travelled to the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois for an exhibition curated by Tumelo Mosaka.

In July 2015 Derek Smith at Siyandisa Music contacted me about obtaining copies of the tracks featured in the blogposts at Electric Jive. Along with Graeme Gilfillan, we began the conversation of bringing these rare tracks into the ZM Makeba Trust fold and the possibility of turning the compilations into permanent CD reissues. I would like to thank Graeme Gilfillan, Derek Smith and all at Siyandisa Music for transforming an online investigation into hard-copy reality! Certainly I must also thank Chris Albertyn, Matt Temple and Nick Lotay, my colleagues at Electric Jive, for providing the platform and commitment to documenting South African music online. Moreover, none of this project would have been possible without the incredible assistance and support of my wife, Kendall Buster. Finally of course, I am indebted to Miriam Makeba for all the fantastic music! Who knew that a serendipitous find of a two dollar record in a junk store would mark the beginning of what would become an extensive archive of over 3000 items of South Africa audio history. Mayibuye!

Notes by Siemon Allen, March 2017


For more detailed liner notes about each track visit the Electric Jive website and search for “Tracks Less Travelled”. For more information about the South African Audio Archive project visit flatinternational.org

Business Affairs: Graeme Gilfillan • Special thanks to: Siemon Allen for his dedication and timeless research on the Miriam Makeba history • Also Thanks To: Dumisani Motha (Siyandisa Music), Charles Kühn, Paul de Klerk, Emil Stark, Rob O’ Brien, June Patal & Derek Smith (Next Music). Compilation by: Siemon Allen (flatinternational.org.) • Sleeve design by: Carla Vieira (idDigital Studios) • Digitally remastered by: Deon Janse Van Vuuren (IU Studios)