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Abel Selaocoe Presents Chesaba

with special guests BCUC

,Hall
Abel Selaocoe playing his cello against a black background

Chesaba: a trio devoted to the multilayered textures of South African music are joined by BCUC – fresh from winning the WOMEX Artist Award 2023 – for an evening of kaleidoscopic Sowetan sounds.

The three musicians of Chesaba, Abel Selaocoe, Alan Keary and Sidiki Dembélé, take cello, bass and percussion and add kora, n’goni and voices, singing languages including Bambara, Sotho, Tswana and Zulu. Add to this the whistles, tambourines, horns, bass guitar and vocals of the seven-piece BCUC – Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness – and you have a heady mix. Embracing hip-hop, Afrobeat, funk and indigenous music, BCUC specialises in the uniquely hypnotic sonorities of ‘ancestral trance’, combining big, psychedelic sounds with an empowering message of social justice.

‘BCUC represent the roots, trunk and branches of South African traditional music. This is cultural preservation in a way that isn’t frozen in time like a museum, but in a way that is living and breathing and growing and dancing.’ (WOMEX)

Tagged with: Classical music Barbican Presents Abel Selaocoe: Artist Spotlight

This performance will finish at approximately 9pm, with no interval

Produced by the Barbican

Performers

Chesaba
BCUC
Abel Selaocoe cello

Artist Spotlight

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