Soweto Gospel Choir - African Spirit

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The Scotsman

Thu 16 Aug 2007

SUE WILSON

ASSEMBLY @ ASSEMBLY HALL (VENUE 35)

THE magic begins in the dark, as a solo voice seems to call from overhead, and others answer in a soft but swelling chorus from either side.

As the lights come up, the 26 members of the Soweto Gospel Choir - winners of a 2006 Grammy Award for their last album, Blessed - parade onstage, resplendently clad in vividly-hued costumes and filling the air with the glorious vocal tapestry that's made them such a surefire Edinburgh favourite.

The roots of South African gospel were planted by 19th-century missionaries, but these European influences have long been cross-fertilised with the country's own ancient and diverse musical traditions.

Formed in 2002, as a cultural embodiment of post-apartheid South Africa, the SGC has cast its net still wider, incorporating not only US gospel numbers but rock and pop material.

Firmly at the heart of their performances, however, remain the indigenous songs of their homeland, variously sung in Zulu, Sotho and Xhosa, and usually deploying some variety of call-and-response format, between one or more lead singers and the massed voices behind them.

Glaring though the contrast might be between the choir's physically exuberant, wholeheartedly joyful praise-giving and the Free Presbyterian austerity that engendered Scotland's tradition of Gaelic psalm-singing, there's surely a link in the shared practice of "free heterophony": each singer embellishing the same melody-line with their own, variations.

The result, in both cases, is a marvellous surging sea of ecstatically chiming timbres and shimmering micro-harmonies - a truly otherworldly sound that literally takes the breath away.

The succession of lead vocal performances, both male and female, is never less than dazzling, bestriding the compass from operatic grandeur to searingly passionate soul; smoky, voluptuous sensuality to raucous feel-good funk.

Most of the African material is accompanied, if at all, solely by a pair of djembes, underscoring the muscular rhythmic pulse that drives both the music and the periodic rubber-heeled, double-jointed dance sequences.

The one fly in the ointment is the tooth-achingly saccharine, Vegas-style treatment of a few pop numbers, complete with full band, but it's the giddy delights of the rest that linger in the memory.