Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Although still best known for singing on Paul Simon’s Graceland album, the South African gospel group, led by Joseph Shabalala, has its own impressive history, including two Grammy winning albums. Here, Mambazo re-records some of its classic songs with Emmylou Harris (“Nearer My God to Thee”) and Taj Mahal (a Delta style “Mbube”), while Sarah McLachlan and Melissa Etheridge lend their voices to Graceland’s “Homeless” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” respectively. Sonic sweetness.  

Aaron Neville’s voice has the power to open doors. When he was a boy in his native New Orleans, he used to sing his way into basketball games and movie theatres, impressing ticket-takers so much with his sidewalk performances that they would let him in free. Then, in 1967, when Neville was a 26-year-old stevedore, his singing took him from the docks to the top of the charts with the achingly sweet ballad “Tell It like It Is.” Since then, his distinctive tenor has enriched the music that he and his three brothers make as the highly acclaimed New Orleans-flavored band The Neville Brothers, whose popularity expanded during the 1980s with such albums as Fiyo on the Bayou (1981) and Yellow Moon (...