Letta and Caiphus: Still wate
Letta Mbulu and Caiphus Semenya are finally signing off on a project that’s been in the making for 20 years
The only Letta Mbulu album I own in tangible form is her 1973 opus, Naturally. In its cover image, Mbulu, in profile and almost in silhouette, is dressed in a strap-on number, clutching what may be a jacket that is part of her ensemble. She appears to be heading for the door, perhaps the stars, but she must lay down the law to an unknown, unfortunate sod before she jets off.
Given the tactile nature of the vinyl format, I have looked at that image countless times in what must be close to 20 years. Looking at it now, the image is as important as what is contained therein. Not only was Mbulu the musical embodiment of South Africa’s struggle years, she was also its visual quintessence; defiant but understated, and, as the beaming visage on the rear cover suggests, happy and wilfully free.
The emotional meter of the album resembles the swing of a pendulum, with Mbulu probably lamenting the isolation of exile in Kube, while dishing out assurances to her lover minutes later in Never Leave You.
Naturally, a single snapshot of a prolific career lived out in tandem with her composer-producer husband Caiphus Semenya, like many of their other records, embodies their ethos and aesthetic, codes that have guided their performance careers and lives for well over half a century.
Singing professionally by the age of 13, Mbulu grew up under the spectre of Miriam Makeba, first singing with a group called the Swanky Spots before joining Alfred Herbert’s touring stable of artists, featuring the likes of Makeba, Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuka, Thandi Klaasen, Ben Masinga and Sonny Pillay.
“I used to watch them on stage,” says Mbulu in the lounge of her home in northern Johannesburg. “That’s when I decided ‘I want to do this. I truly want to do this’, because they were so highly professional. I was influenced by all those artists, who were very nurturing, very loving.”
Of them all, it was Masuka’s polyglot style that the singer became interested in. “She was coming from Zambia and her music had a different flavour altogether. The words … She would mix in isiNyanja and use isiZulu, isiXhosa and Setswana. She became a big influence in my singing.”
In the 1950s, Semenya was shipped off to Benoni by his mother to clip his involvement in Alexandra’s gangs. The move thrust him into his extended family’s musical routine, which soon led to more formalised education at Johannesburg’s Dorkay House.
“Benoni was known for music because you had the Woodpeckers, the Harlem Bookies, Ace Buya and the Harmoneers. They had all kinds of groups that were part of the tapestry of the community of Benoni,” he says.
“At school they had choirs like everywhere else, but they also had some extracurricular musical stuff, where they encouraged us to sing songs that were not particularly of the school. The teacher would just say, ‘You and you and you, looks like you could form a group.’ That’s how I became interested in music at school.”
In his early 20s, Semenya would also work with theatre and musical greats Gibson Kente and Theo Bophela, narrating Kente’s Manana, the Jazz Prophet.
In the book Still Grazing, collaborator and fellow exiled musician Hugh Masekela calls Semenya, who was then just developing his songwriting abilities, one of Africa’s greatest composers. Of their early days in the mid1960s United States, Masekela writes: “At that time, his Bo-Masekela was a mainstay of my band’s playlist. It was a beautiful, rhythmic ballad in the harmonic style common to the folk music of the Tsonga, Pedi, Venda and Ndebele people, peppered with blues chordal progressions, a prominent, contrapuntal bassline and a sweet trumpet melody.”
While Mbulu had been imbibing the fusionist style of the greats she was surrounded by, she says it was a Makeba performance at Birdland in New York that solidified the template to her style.
“She was glamorous, she was stately and the stories she was telling about the people of this country … I said, ‘My Gahd. Why am I wasting my time’. And most of the songs were done in African languages. She would maybe take one, two or three songs in English. And the audience was eating that up. I said, ‘Ja … that’s exactly what I want to be about’. And really, that was a turning point in my life.”
Mbulu and Semenya met around the staging of King Kong, the 72-cast musical, which featured Makeba as Joyce. Connecting again in the US, where Semenya had landed after taking part in the Alan Paton-written show Sponono, Mbulu and Semenya discovered their complementary talents, beginning a prolific career as producer and performer.
“I didn’t know Caiphus could write,” says Mbulu of their early days in the US. “He was working on something and he called me over. He said, ‘Do you like it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, It’s okay.’ He said, ‘Well, Miriam Makeba is already recording it.’
“Then he played something called Nomali on the piano. I said, ‘Wow, you really can write … I’m really fortunate you can write’. That’s really when I knew that everything I was about as an artist had to take a different turn altogether.
“I said, ‘You know what; you write and, if I don’t like it, I’ll tell you I don’t like it. But you have to write.’ And that’s really how we evolved. It was from listening to other artists and trying to find ourselves in the midst of what was going on in the States.”
Of course, Mbulu wrote too, including a number of songs that were sung by Makeba herself.
Although Mbulu and Semenya were able to reach the apex of their respective and conjoined careers in the US, working within the confines of a nascent music industry there and branching off into film scoring and acting, it was the alchemy of their approach that ensured their longevity.
For example, a biography on the Macufe website notes that at Capitol Records, where Mbulu released the gorgeous but low-selling Letta Mbulu Sings in 1967, producer David Axelrod dropped her surname for palatability on her following album, Free Soul, but it featured “the beautiful young Letta on the cover swathed in colourful Afrocentric clothing”.
Sonically, the music was underpinned by South Africa’s urban musical trajectory, infusing mbaqanga with contemporary American styles like soul and funk.
Thematically, a song like What Is Wrong With Groovin’ is instructive of Mbulu’s tone, somewhere between the overtly political while simultaneously concerned with something else — the lived urban experience, especially in as far as it pertains to her right to be ungovernable.
“Most of those artists that influenced us,” Mbulu says from the comfort of her couch. “There was a certain spirit in them that we can’t describe. It was a form of protest. They didn’t spell it out. The only time you saw it was when they hit the stage. That spirit permeated and some of us caught it, both hands, and we ran with it.”
Her emotional range, her held notes, sometimes sturdy and at times quivering, transformed a listening experience curated by music industry imperatives into something altogether more transcendent and human.
“From the time I was performing, the music has made serious strides,” she says. “It’s a tradition. South Africa is a voice country. We sing. We are good at it and that’s a fact. We have choirs that are slamming. And that’s a fact. The only thing that has not moved is the industry side of music. The companies are still fumbling to take an artist, groom them and let that artist grow. We grow because we have to grow, but what we need is guidance as artists. So that we know why we are singing, we know why we want to play.”
The future
The business of the day, even as I get overwhelmed by history, is that Semenya and Mbulu are finally bringing to fruition what has been a 20-year plan to establish the National Academy of Africa’s Performing Arts. It’s an idea they cherished long before resettling in South Africa, first dropping it at the doors of Nelson Mandela’s presidency in the mid-1990s.
“When we came back home, we were already full of these ideas to influence the younger artists to be themselves, to unhinge what was in their minds,” says Mbulu in her typically measured and emphatic manner.
“In the US, another thing that