Chesaba: a trio devoted to the multilayered textures of South African music are joined by BCUC – fresh from winning the Womex Artist Award 2023 – for an evening of kaleidoscopic Sowetan sounds.
The three musicians of Chesab, Abel Selaocoe, Alan Keary and Sidiki Dembélé, take cello, bass and percussion and add kora, n’goni and voices, singing languages including Bambara, Sotho, Tswana and Zulu. Add to this the whistles, tambourines, horns, bass guitar and vocals of the seven piece Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness – and you have a heady mix. Embracing hip-hop, Afrobeat, funk and indigenous music, BCUC specialises in the uniquely hypnotic sonorities of ‘ancestral trance’, combining big, psychedelic sounds with an empowering message of social justice.
‘Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness represent the roots, trunk and branches of South African traditional music. This is cultural preservation in a way that isn’t frozen in time like a museum, but in a way that is living and breathing and growing and dancing.’ (Womex)