Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba

Born in the US to immigrant parents from Rwanda and Uganda, Somi Kakoma is not only a Grammy-nominated jazz singer but a playwright and actor whose stage musical entitled Dreaming Zenzile about the life of Miriam Makeba opened in St. Louis in 2021 and is due to transfer to Broadway later this year. To accompany the show, and released to mark what would have been Makeba’s 90th birthday this March, she has also recorded this star-studded set of 17 of Mama Africa’s best-known songs. Accompanied by a crack acoustic jazz combo, Somi’s voice is supple and seductive, as gutsy as Nina Simone or as smoothly sultry as Sarah Vaughan, as required.

Seun Kuti and South Africa’s Thandiswa Mazwai add their voices to ‘Milele’ while Ladysmith Black Mambazo lend their uplifting a cappella harmonies to ‘Nonqonqo’. Elsewhere Angélique Kidjo injects her characteristically unquenchable energy into ‘Jike’lemaweni’, the American jazz-soul singer Gregory Porter joins her on ‘Love Tastes Like Strawberries’, evoking Makeba’s duets with Harry Belafonte, and the over-familiar ‘Pata Pata’ is radically reimagined as a haunting, downtempo tribute to Miriam’s indomitable spirit. Let’s hope Somi and her Dreaming Zenzile musical make it across the Atlantic to a British stage.