Face to Face

The velvet-voiced Sotho folk singer Vusi Mahlasela met the Swedish jazz/soul collective Jive Connection in the early 1990s in an exchange programme between Scandinavian and South African musicians. In 1994, the year that Mahlasela performed at Nelson Mandela's inauguration, they wrote some songs together and recorded a set of demos, with Mahlasela and fellow singer-songwriter Norman Zulu teaching the Swedish musicians to sing the backing vocals in different South African languages. In subsequent years they toured together in both southern Africa and the Nordic countries, but the tapes remained forgotten in the archives of producer Torsten Larsson until he recently rediscovered them and set about remixing them.

The result is a thrilling album, the European musicians showing an impressive empathy with the distinctive township beats and adding dashes of reggae, dub, jazz, Fela Kuti-style funk and post-punk in the style that Damon Albarn would later adopt with Africa Express. It's a tougher, groovier sound than we’ve come to associate with Mahlasela but his songs are as poetic as ever, hymning the struggle for freedom and the need for reconciliation, while ‘Face to Face’ is a setting of words written in 1949 by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer.