Simphiwe Dana’s latest album is a meditative cry for freedom haunted by some of the most psychologically bruised African soul-jazz ballads you’ll hear all year
South Africa’s most soul-baring singer is feeling kind of blue. The heaviness is apparent from the moment you pick up her new album. Kulture Noir is a dark package, as dark as Billie Holiday’s heartbroken last will and testament, Lady in Satin. The photography is stark — Simphiwe Dana draped in a black haute Afro-couture ball gown. She’s beautiful, but bruised. This isn’t some swanky celebrity gala event she’s attending. It’s a funeral, her eyes shaded black and blue, about to weep.
“We’ve been through a heavy time over the past three or four years, you know. It’s a very volatile country, right now,” she says.
“There are so many unresolved issues and people are not even aware that they have unresolved issues. They just lash out on a psychological level. No one is taking time to assess where we are as a people, and why we are — people are not ready to deal with all the madness. We just want to forget about it, but it’s not that simple.”
No, it isn’t. South Africans are increasingly seeking oblivion. In the face of overwhelming poverty, crime and violence, people are fighting for the right to party, opting for escapist sounds rather than sociopolitical sermons.
“I like to dance,” she says, shrugging. “But I also want to reflect, I want to cry, I want to be euphoric. I want all of these things. My main responsibility is to comment on societal ills, but also whatever is good. Whatever is bad, speak about it; whatever is good, speak about it — that way I inspire change. I believe that as an artist I’m a mirror of the way society is. I take that very seriously. I don’t think I’d be an artist if I didn’t.”
It is this artistic mirror that Dana holds up to South African society on Kulture Noir. The black culture billing here isn’t a sales pitch for her. It’s a pivotal philosophical quest(ion): “Beautiful Azania, where’s your dignity? And where is our freedom?” she implores on jazzy Afrobeat inventory Azania.
“Actually, I’m not answering that question; I’m asking it,” she says, laughing. “As an artist you don’t have to have the answers. You just have to say, ‘Hey, what’s going on there?’, you know? It’s up to everyone to demand the answers from whomever has them, whether it’s ourselves or government or whoever.
“We’ve got to a point where we are told how to think, what to eat, what to do, where to go. We need to make our own minds up.”
Whereas her previous album, the multiple Sama-winning The One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street (2006), was an ubuntu-fuelled call to celebrate our collective African consciousness, Kulture Noir is a more meditative cry for freedom, haunted by some of the most psychologically bruised African soul-jazz ballads you’ll hear all year.
“I was in a very, very sad space,” she says, “in terms of what I was going through in my life and what’s happening in society. We’re very much a country in denial. Black people are very quiet about it. I am very sad. Obviously, as an artist, you want to inspire hope, but this one was written when I was feeling really down and out.”
Not that the listener is ever swamped by her sadness. Her lyrical message may be meditative, maudlin, even dejected, but her musical medium is bewitchingly smooth.
The first single, Ndim Nawe, is a beatific Afro-jazz ballad that straddles the contemplative and the celebratory. Ilolo, featuring Sama-winning harmonica player Adam Glasser, has a percolated Afrobeat production by Nigerian guitarist Kunle Ayo.
The number rubs shoulders with Thapelo Khomo’s chic cocktail-jazz strings. Then there are Moreira Chonguica’s cosmopolitan supper-club synths on Inkwenkezi and Gordon “Commissioner” Williams’s palatably funky Afro-fusion flavours on Hayi iHambo.
“In this country it’s quite apparent what is pop music and what is not,” says Dana. “Pop is something separate to what I do. Jazz, on the other hand, is a music that is ever-evolving with the times. But even with people who play ‘jazz’, some of it is a regurgitation, so I wouldn’t necessarily call my music jazz.
“Maybe I’m just not into genres. I believe genres should be accommodating of change. I’d call it soul music because it fuses all of these supposedly serious elements and it brings them home to Africa, to their origins.”
It’s this alignment with the beat routes of the African diaspora that fuels Dana’s cultural fire.
“Busi [Mhlongo], Miriam [Makeba] and Dorothy Masuka — that whole era of the 1950s marabi sound has been the biggest influence on me. I grew up in church, in the choir. I fell in love with jazz and then I realised that actually I’m an African. That is the tie that binds me to the marabi sound because I went through the same process: gospel, choral music, jazz — then coming back home.”
“Home” isn’t a place for Dana, it’s a space. It’s where the music is. The 30-year-old songbird may have spent six years in Jo’burg before her recent move to Cape Town, but her musical home remains the traditional a cappella Xhosa calls to consciousness she grew up with in the Transkei. On Kulture Noir she draws strongly on this musical heritage, drafting many of her songs a cappella before adding any orchestration.
“Obviously, I learn from all my surroundings. I bring the music wherever I am. But what I cannot unlearn is where I come from,” she says. “Johannesburg taught me a lot — I went there to just sing. I didn’t know what I was going to sing. I didn’t know who my audience would be. Jo’burg grounded me, helped me find myself and understand my artistry. Kulture Noir was born and written in Jo’burg.”
So what is she learning about life in the Mother City? “Cape Town is sitting heavily on me,” she says. “My kids love being here — it’s the most beautiful city in South Africa. But Cape Town tends to make black people invisible. White people choose not to see you. It can be racist in that way. I don’t like that. I want to be seen, I want to be heard and I want people to look at me and see me. But I’m new here. I’m still rooting myself.
“I don’t know what type of music will come out, but the next album will be influenced by my experiences here.”