Biography

International world music star Johnny Clegg’s four-decade-plus career has generated enough memorable personal and political songs to attract a global audience, sell more than five million albums, and help change the culture of his adopted South African homeland through his music and apartheid-defying integrated bands (Juluka and Savuka) despite restrictive performance laws and airplay bans.

After apartheid officially ended, Clegg started his solo career in 2002 with an updated agenda. “Where he often wrote in the past about the personal and social dynamics of the struggle for freedom and political equality, many of the songs . . . now center more on finding identity, understanding or love in a rapidly shifting landscape,” wrote Los Angeles Times reviewer Randy Lewis. The songs Johnny writes and performs combine modern Western instrumentation, yearning, passionate vocals, and a strong undercurrent of African rhythms.

Among Johnny’s best-known compositions are “Scatterlings of Africa,” originally recorded with Juluka in 1982, and “Asimbonanga,” written about Nelson Mandela, the South African political leader who was jailed for years by the country’s repressive government before his 1990 release. Clegg performed at all four of Mandela’s “46664 Aids Awareness Concerts” in South Africa, where Mandela joined him during a live rendition of “Asimbonanga,” and in Norway. “Mandela,” the poem Clegg wrote and recited at the December 2013 Cape Town Mandela Memorial Day after the South African leader’s death, electrified the Cape Town Stadium crowd.

Clegg will undertake his longest of many North American tours to date, from March 14 to May 10, 2014, leading the six-piece Johnny Clegg Band in concerts that will contain electric and acoustic segments and a tribute to the late Mandela, who died in December 2013. The Clegg band will share the bill in several cities with fellow South Africans Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the male choral group; on other dates, Johnny’s 25-year-old son Jesse, an accomplished musician with a gold record in South Africa already to his credit.

The members of the Johnny Clegg Band on this tour are:
Johnny Clegg: lead vocals, guitars, melodica, concertina
Andy Innes: guitars, vocals
Brendan Ross: keyboards, sax, vocals
Mandisa Dlanga: vocals
Trevor Donjeany: bass, vocals
Barry Van Zyl: percussion