Word: gospeleers
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...expect that winning two Grammies would mean you could give up the day job. But when I meet the Soweto Gospel Choir's co-founder, David Mulovhedzi, at his home outside Johannesburg - two weeks after the choir won Best Traditional World Music Album for the second year running - he apologizes for rushing me. "I have to get back to work," he explains. Work, it turns out, is a job as a finance clerk in a cement wholesale business. "There are 10 people in my family," says Mulovhedzi, 60. "If I don't go to work, they'll starve...
...everyone in the Soweto Gospel Choir, success and struggle have been inseparable. In 2002, a concert promoter asked Johannesburg-based events producer Beverly Bryer to put together a South African choir to fill in for a Welsh one that had pulled out of a tour of Australia and New Zealand. She called Mulovhedzi, who ran a choir she often booked. Within a month, they auditioned hundreds of singers from Soweto, picked 32 and recorded an album to accompany the tour. It topped the Billboard world-music chart in a matter of days. Then came sold-out tours...
...story of the Soweto Gospel Choir is not just one of musical excellence. It is also a tale of the reinvention of a township once known as a hotbed of rebellion, then as a cauldron of crime, and now emerging as the muscle that drives Africa's biggest economy. At the start of the 20th century, Soweto was a collection of shanty towns on the outskirts of Johannesburg where the British colonial authorities housed the black and colored laborers working the city's gold mines. The apartheid regime formalized this divide, allowing blacks and coloreds into the city...
Under apartheid, large gatherings were forbidden. Church became the only place where blacks and coloreds could meet in numbers. Gospel music, with its themes of hope, strength and redemption, became their only legal form of protest and their only means of escape. "We sang to keep going," says Lucas Bok, the choir's musical director. "Singing was the only way to express yourself." That need spurred the creation of hundreds of gospel choirs in Soweto - the massive talent pool from which Mulovhedzi drew his recruits...
...Although the songs were in a foreign language, the emotion in the soloists’ voices enveloped the audience in the universality of music.A similar contagion spread during the performance of the Kuumba Singers, a large-scale choir that explores the musical tradition of African folk songs, spirituals, and gospel. Their performance featured three distinct vocal groups, whose juxtaposed parts harmonized perfectly.Throughout the evening, Hancock shared a diverse array of personal anecdotes about everything from his wife, whom he met in Asia, to his Irish American roots, “where,” the musician joked...