Selaocoe/Manchester Collective et al(Warner)Cellist and vocalist Selaocoe’s new album is easy to enjoy with its seamless mix of throat singing, Bach, a southern African hymn and elements of jazz.
Elsewhere, there’s more of a jazz sensibility at work, with electric bass and percussion often leading in music by Selaocoe himself – infectious dances full of tricksy rhythms, his vocals a virtuoso blend of throat singing, overtones and clicks.
He begins with a free-ranging version of the hymn Tsohle Tsohle, which grows from a whisper to a buoyant mass of sound, Selaocoe’s velvet voice freewheeling above the harmonies of his string-playing colleagues from the Manchester Collective.
He’s front and centre in a richly woven ensemble harmonisation of the Sarabande from Bach’s Suite No 6 in D and in two movements of Giovanni Sollima’s LB Files, which the composer describes as a soundtrack to an imaginary mini-movie about the 18th-century cellist Luigi Boccherini.
If anything, this time it feels as though Selaocoe has less to prove – the “classical” elements of his programme are mixed in with southern African music more indivisibly than ever.
