Wambura Mitaru looked out at the crowd — a couple hundred strong but small for College Street Music Hall — and smiled. Half of the audience was still sitting down, a couple tiers from the stage. More adventurous people had started to fill in the floor right in front.
“It is illegal not to dance,” she said. Then her band showed the people gathered there why.
The Kenyan-born singer and her multinational band were the opening act in the last night of the Yale-sponsored Africa Salon, a week of art, film, fashion, music, dance, and talks celebrating the continent’s (obviously) extraordinarily diverse culture. The capper of this week of exhibitions, screening, and general festivities was a three-act bill at College Street on Sunday evening, beginning with Mitaru, continuing with the Ghanian-American Blitz the Ambassador, and concluding with Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, an act from Zimbabwe that it is not an understatement to call a living legend.
Blitz the Ambassador heated up College Street’s cavernous space with a blistering set that drove a deep path through Afrobeat to hip hop and highlife, a testament to his immediate predecessors and a statement about where the music is now. Blitz’s band, the Embassy Ensemble, was a world-class outfit that could seemingly do everything well — from the precise and thunderous bass and drums, to the sharp-as-a-tack horn section, to the guitar, which switched easily from sinuous melodic lines to gritty rhythm to Eddie Hazel-style funk solos.
All of this rested on Blitz’s more than capable shoulders as singer and bandleader. He led his band in the style of James Brown or Fela Kuti, building signals to the band right into the songs, letting them know what he expected at every turn, and giving them love when he was happy. He seemed happy and uplifted all night, even when he injected the party — again, like Brown or Kuti would — with the urgency of a message of social justice.
“We travel from place to place doing this, and it’s a pleasant occupation for sure,” he said near the end of his set. He then introduced a song that was overtly about global inequality and the need to change the international economic system, set to a raucous, angry beat. The inequality, he said, is “due to design. It’s not some accident. It’s been structured to extract. We’re feeling it, and I hope you understand where we’re coming from.”
Blitz’s combination of raging groove and political foment set the stage for Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited. Mapfumo is called the Lion of Zimbabwe; he has been a musical star there since the 1970s and a outspoken political figure for just as long. His musical innovations — along with his peers, combining elements of traditional Zimbabwean music with rock, jazz, and soul — were at the time political statements in and of themselves, and this combined with his outspoken lyrics landed him in jail under the colonial regime of Rhodesia. His chimurenga music was part of the soundtrack to Zimbabwe’s independence; later, however, his same outspokenness ran him afoul of the Mugabe regime, and he has been more or less living in exile in Eugene, Ore. since the late 1990s. He has been touring internationally for decades and is a regular festival headliner around the world. Had the advertising for this show — especially given its free admission — been different, it’s possible that College Street wouldn’t have been big enough.
As it was, it was a rare and unusual treat to see Mapfumo and his band perform in what became a much more intimate setting. Those lucky enough to be there saw Mapfumo smiling at his rabid fans as they shouted to him and danced with each other. Mapfumo delivering only the smallest glances to his bandmates to keep things moving. When this reporter saw Mapfumo perform 20 years ago, the singer spent much of the evening in a low crouch, the microphone close to his mouth, while the music and dancers swirled around him. On Sunday he stood more upright, slower on his feet, a guitar around his neck that he played only occasionally, when absolutely necessary. But his voice was undiminished in its poignancy or urgency after four decades in the spotlight. As a bandleader, he was light, effortless, conveying changes in the music, solos, beginnings, endings, with small glances, the slightest gestures.
Nothing else was needed. His band was in top form, warming up with a slow, enormous groove that brought together Zimbabwe and Jamaica. It only got better from there, tighter, more intense. At its largest the band incorporated horns, two guitars, and keyboards to make a fuller sound, an expert version of the Zimbabwean pop music that Mapfumo has been an integral part of for a long time.
But at the end, when the band slimmed down to just two mbiras, a guitar, a bass, and two percussionists, with Mapfumo’s crying voice as its soulful center, the band did what no one else on the planet could do. It laid down a rhythm that simultaneously seemed almost weightless and drove like a freight train. Each musician played only what was needed and nothing more, but so much more; it was quiet and huge, music full of notes and space, aching and transcendent, overflowing with joy and sadness, longing and redemption, all at once.
It was perfect. And then it was gone.
