Singer Somi heads to SA with an album and show honouring Miriam Makeba

March 4 this year marked what would have been the 90th birthday of “Mama Africa,” Miriam Zenzile Makeba. Makeba died in November 2008 after a heart attack, suffered right after she'd performed in Castel Volturno, Italy, in a concert organised to support Italian journalist Roberto Saviano. The writer was living in fear after the publication of Gomorrah, an exposé of the mafia.

It was a tragic but also fitting death for the woman who, for over a half a century, had made her name as one of 20th century music’s most distinctive vocalists and an outspoken political activist for the rights and equality of black people on stages across the world.

For Grammy-nominated vocalist Somi, who was born in 1981 in the US to Rwandan and Ugandan parents, it’s hard to recall when she first heard Makeba’s music but, “like many Africans who grew up in the '80s, [my] parents were big fans so I remember knowing her voice and because of that I think when you grow up so close to something, you end up in some ways taking it for granted. I didn’t really start to listen closely probably until I was in my early 20s. Once I did look closer at her music ... there was something about her approximation to jazz, about the seemingly inherent transnationalism in her music and sound and her unapologetic cultural pride that really gave me a certain type of agency and freedom in my own work ... So she’s been a north star for me for a very long time.”

Somi is currently performing in the US in Dreaming Zenzile, a musical she’s written about Makeba’s life, and touring to promote the accompanying album Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba. She recalls that the spark for the project was perhaps first ignited by a 2008 tribute concert that she organised in New York after hearing of Makeba’s death and wondering, “Who’s honouring Miriam Makeba? Where’s the big tribute event?”

She hosted a gig at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a bar and club that stands on the Greenwich Village site once occupied by the legendary Village Gate jazz club, where Makeba made numerous appearances after her arrival in the US in the early 1960s. It was attended by a legion of musical luminaries, who all came to offer their tributes to the remarkable musical force of nature and friend that Makeba had been to so many of them. It was, for Somi, “one of the most important things I’ve been able to do in my career in New York”.

Seven years ago she began a deep dive into Makeba’s recorded catalogue and life story in an effort to try to understand “what was going on in her own life and the world when she was recording these songs? The more I started to look at the social and cultural, political, emotional and spiritual context that was happening in her life and around those performances and recordings, the more I realised I didn’t know.”

This deep immersion in Makeba’s life and work only made her more and more appreciative of “the tremendous generosity and grace that Miriam Makeba showed up with every time we heard or had the fortune or gift of seeing her perform”.

“You don’t think about Miriam Makeba and think about melancholic music; you don’t think of Miriam Makeba and think of sadness. You might think of ferocity; you might think of truth telling, of joy, but I think there is a different colour to her story that we weren’t necessarily privy to and that just speaks again to her generosity and strength,” says Somi.

The album consists of 17 tracks carefully picked from the vast output of Makeba’s 50-year catalogue and rearranged so as to “honour what I loved about the songs and still honour my own voice”, says Somi. She has also worked with a variety of collaborators including Gregory Porter, Angelique Kido, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Thandiswa Mazwai, Msaki, Seun Kuti and Nduduzo Makhathini.

As she prepares to arrive in SA to launch the album, Somi hopes the project will be received by international and South African listeners as “an offering of love... and a reminder that there’s so much of her story and her voice that we can all revisit and learn from and hear in new ways. It’s an invitation for people to meditate on the role of her music in all of our lives ... and hopefully reflect on what she means on both the individual and the collective level ... Her voice lives in that way: it’s still with us, it still inspires us to do more, to be more, to give more.”

• Somi is launching 'Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba' with a performance at the Nirox Sculpture Garden on March 27. Tickets are available from howler.co.za