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The Mambazo group is the one who made the Graceland album with Paul Simon in 1985 – you know, "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”? They are also the voices on the Cream Savers commercials (“Cream Savers… Yum”). Plus, you’ve probably heard them a dozen times as a soundtrack for anything having to do with Africa. They’ve sung for the Queen, Nelson Mandela, and Pope John Paul II and been nominated for a dozen (and won a couple) Grammy Awards. So, yeah. I was expecting them to be pretty good.

What I didn’t expect was for them to be so darn entertaining.

The music itself was, of course, just gorgeous. These eight man spanned the spectrum of men’s voices – from a clear, pure soprano to that rumbly kind of bass that makes your teeth rattle. Since I don’t speak any African languages, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to understand what they were singing about and that the songs would start to all sound the same to me. Fortunately, this was nowhere near the case. When they weren’t singing in English (which they did fairly often), their movements and facial expressions told the story.

My only complaint for the entire evening, aside from tunnel traffic, is directed towards whomever was manning the lightboard. When the group first came on stage, the center three guys were in the dark. Now, if their microphone stands hadn’t already been set up so the lighting guy didn’t know where they were planning to stand, I might’ve excused this if it were fixed quickly. But the mics were already there, and the problem still didn’t get fixed quickly. Instead of gently fading in lights to find what was needed, most of the first half of the show had random lights coming on quickly and brightly. No unobtrusive fade-ins here.

The distracting lighting, however, was not enough to dim (Get it? Dim?) my enjoyment of the evening. Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s amazing sound is superbly blended, using tight harmonies, rhythms and dynamics to create an absolutely entrancing evening. According to their website, they are not yet scheduled to come back to Virginia, but when they do you definitely need to check them out. Buy a cd in the meantime. I did.

This being my first visit to the Attucks Theatre, I don’t know if this is their usual standard for what they bring in. But if it is, I am amazingly impressed.