“It is from her where you come from, it is from her these seeds are sown, your DNA and mine, generations and bloodlines.” Pathos comes on gentle paws at the beginning of the video for “Never Forget”. Then two musical notes appear at the bottom of the screen, as if the play button for the music had now been activated. We hear tribal beats and a choir until Sampa The Great takes over the reigns with wide moves. More images are superimposed into the performance in quick succession, dancers, workers, a Zam rock band, an ex-president, a voice announces: “This is Zambia”. A finger traces the borders of the African country on an old map.
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Zambia is the country of birth and yet also a foreign country for Sampa Tembo, who first had to go to California and was later able to celebrate success in Australia as Sampa The Great in order to be able to relate to her origins again. She said in 2019 that she sometimes didn’t feel understood in Zambia. Here and now, the artist is concerned with a panorama shot – with the future, present and past of this homeland. To her own version of it: “Please do not rewrite my history.”
Sampa’s rap meets spiritual pop arrangements, psychedelic soundtracks and traditional instruments
In 2019, the album THE RETURN (sic!) was the first piece of this story to be released. The collection of songs influenced by hip hop, afrobeat and R’n’B was the breakthrough for Sampa. On AS ABOVE, SO BELOW, the 29-year-old takes it a step further, promoting in an ambassador-style way the culture she connects to as she searches for her identity as an Afro-Australian artist. In the eleven new tracks she uses the stylistic device of crossfading; Songs from the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual state of Zambia combine with the electro bass lines of global funk, Sampa’s rap meets spiritual pop arrangements, psychedelic soundtracks or traditional instruments (is that a Likembe wandering through “Shadows” and “Tilibobo”?) .
Sampa tears down the boundaries between inside and outside – between the places that the global West calls diasporic and those where black music has become omnipresent. The Zam rock of the mid-70s describes a lesser-known place, for a long time it found a rather modest response among Anglo-American musicians compared to the Afrobeat releases from Nigeria and Mali. The recordings of artists like Rikki Ililonga and Paul Ngozi were not African enough for the non-Africans.
The eleven tracks essentially stand for coming home in the sense of self-discovery
On their last albums, Leyla McCalla and Sélène Saint-Aimé impressively demonstrated how going back to one’s own origins can initiate a musical leap. Sampa The Great now follows them with AS ABOVE, SO BELOW. The album also bears witness to a very specific trip home. Sampa visited her family in Zambia at the start of the pandemic, and her sister Mwanjé was involved in the recordings. The eleven tracks essentially stand for coming home in the sense of self-discovery, which in turn extends to the collaborations with Denzel Curry, Joey Bada$$, Angélique Kidjo and the Zambian rapper Chef 187. Going beyond what she thinks she knows about herself is how Sampa described her desire to approach her album.
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