Hymns of Bantu

Like William Blake the poet, who could detect a world in a grain of sand, Abel Selaocoe is attuned to the infinite depths of the human psyche. The South African cellist, composer and vocalist has a way of articulating profound emotions and feelings in a multitude of musical styles that transcend national and cultural borders. Hymns of Bantu, his second album, is gloriously rich in pulsating dances, ecstatic chants, otherworldly laments and joyous expressions of love, the intangible, heartfelt stuff of life, mined from different continents and centuries. “I think this recording is to do with universal truths,” Selaocoe tells Apple Music Classical. “It’s about things that we can all connect to, but it also contains pieces written in the context of my home, of my culture. This is why I start the album with a tune called Tsohle Tsohle, which translates into English as ‘everything is everything’. Honestly, if you get into a taxi in South Africa with 14 people and say, ‘Does anybody know Tsohle Tsohle?’, 14 hands will go up! It’s such a beautifully popular song there.” Selaocoe’s interpretation reflects his desire to give new meaning to pieces he has known since childhood, not least by extracting a sense of the universal from the particular. “Tsohle Tsohle means that everything is made by you in the image of you,” he notes. “I wanted to speak about universalities rather than highlight what’s so different about what I’m doing.” Selaocoe wrote fresh lyrics for Emmanuele, another South African favourite, harnessing its big hymn tune to words that celebrate those who work with their hands. “It’s quite a big thing in South Africa because much the population make their living that way. It’s such a different way of being from sitting at a computer.” The musicians of Manchester Collective bring their own energy and ease with different genres to Hymns of Bantu. They help shape the change in mood between the album’s upbeat opening tracks and Tshepo or “Faith”, the prayerful second part of which, Rapela, has a ritualistic feel. The latter prepares the ground for a spellbinding sequence comprising the sombre Sarabande from Bach’s Sixth Cello Suite, arranged for cello and strings by Fred Thomas; the heady combination of chiming percussion, prepared piano, throat singing and pizzicato cello in Dinaka; and Voices of Bantu, Selaocoe’s haunting improvisation on Les voix humaine by the 17th-century French composer Marin Marais. Despite their obvious stylistic differences, each work on the album shares the common language of four-part harmony. Selaocoe notes how worship songs from South Africa and the graceful Takamba dance cultivated by the peoples of Mali and Niger absorbed musical influences transported to Africa during Europe’s age of colonial expansion. “Somehow through time, different worlds collided through colonialism,” he observes. “They started speaking similar languages and those languages were then turned upside down. I’ve heard some of the bass lines in Marais before in South African music, in very simple forms and completely different contexts. But somehow, figuratively, there’s something that binds it all together, through this idea that we’re now singing with the same harmonies.” Crossing cultural boundaries comes as naturally to Giovanni Sollima as it does to Selaocoe. The album includes two movements from the genre-hopping Italian composer and cellist’s L.B. Files, a montage of melodies harvested from the work of his 18th-century counterpart, Luigi Boccherini. “Sollima is a giant of influences. I think authenticity is not pure originality; it’s actually a thousand influences melded together and being honest about where those things come from, and happily celebrating them. When you can do that, I think that makes you your best self. I find this type of authenticity in Sollima: he loves influences and doesn’t hide them.” Hymns of Bantu offers fresh perspectives on ancient traditions, musical and spiritual. Selaocoe compares the album’s ethos to that of Candomblé, with its melting pot of traditional African spirituality, indigenous Latin American culture and Catholic influences. “We shouldn’t mistake religion for our natural human yearning to understand what’s around us, what’s in us,” he observes. “There’s no way of getting around this; rather, we should reflect on it, because life will always challenge you and take you to those places where you have to think, ‘I’m not in control of any type of destiny here’. What are the powers that be, if there are any powers that be? And how do I live with the idea of continuous spontaneity that I can’t always control? I think that’s a very big part of being human. We can’t ignore that, and I think that this understanding of the nature of things feeds into a kind of universal spirituality.”