I thought: Why am I so desperately wanting to enter the marketplace? And then I said to
Posted in General on 14. Oct, 2010
“I thought: Why am I so desperately wanting to enter the marketplace? And then I said to myself, ‘You made this thing that you received f partly as a gift, and you took it immediately to the marketplace without sufficiently appreciating it. And when you intuited that the marketplace wasn’t going to accept it you knew right away that you had no business taking such a thing there. The gift was the point.’”Several weeks went by before something in him relaxed, and he thought: “You exaggerate. You were born with a talent and you worked hard at it, and the result gave people a lot of pleasure, and no matter what you did that was wrong, you can’t throw that out You didn’t do it to give people pleasure.
You did it to see if you could make the sounds in your imagination come out on tape.”This insight was followed, even so, by the year and a half of drought, during which Simon couldn’t listen to anyone’s music, especially his own, and he felt that he might not write any songs again.SIMON IS less nomadic than musicians often are. What keeps him mostly at home is his wife, the singer Edie Brickell, who is from Texas, and their three young children Nevertheless, he travels frequently. On a trip to Memphis to meet Joseph Shabalala, the leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the Zulu group that appears on the 1986 album Graceland, I went along too. Shabalala wants to build a museum devoted to South African music, especially the kind he heard as a child on a farm (he is now 60). Ladysmith Black Mambazo were performing near Memphis and Simon thought that visiting the Delta Blues Museum, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, about an hour and a half south of the city, might suggest to Shabalala a plan. Simon also wanted to visit a health clinic in Clarksdale to which he gives a lot of money through the Children’s Health Fund in New York, a charity he started with his friend Dr Irwin Redlener.It is raining when Simon and I leave New Jersey in a small jet he has rented.
When we get to Memphis, one of those Jeep-like cars that make you feel as if you’re seeing everything from the perspective of a man on horseback has been delivered to the terminal for us, and Simon drives.When we get to our hotel, Shabalala is sitting in the lobby, at a table by a fountain He is drinking tea He is a small, sturdily built man, with a round, open face. He and Simon hug each other, then the three of us go out and get in the car. Shabalala has brought a tape of South African women singing traditional lama music, without accompaniment. For several of the songs, he had written parts for Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose 10 members are men.The first song, a hymn, is sung in Zulu. Instead of progressing in the stately manner of a Protestant hymn, it advances like a spiritual, with hesitations in the phrasing and silences between the verses Six or eight women take part.
Their voices are pure and unadorned, and the singing is deeply felt. The men’s voices enter unexpectedly after what I take to be the first verse, answering the women’s, and the contrast between the two registers and textures is thrilling “I don’t know what l can do with it,” Shabalala says “I hope I can do something. I’m still working on it.”We pass shabby little shopping malls, pawnshops, a burial ground next to a junkyard, the Crystal Palace roller-skating rink, and then, as if a piece of stage scenery had been pulled into the wings, we are driving among crop rows that run on either side of us to the horizon. The road is so straight that it seems to have been taped on to the fields The next song is a work song, Shabalala says. Along with the singers, he whistles sharply now and then, like a man calling cattle “I never heard you do that,” Simon tells him.