“The bass strings broke – I had to tie them together. I would slide down the strings, cutting my fingers and getting blood all over the bass”: Bakithi Kumalo looks back at his formative years touring South Africa

Bakithi Kumalo.

Since his groundbreaking bass work on Paul Simon’s Graceland, Bakithi Kumalo’s unmistakable fretless tone on classics like The Boy in the Bubble still stands as a pitch-perfect example of bass playing beyond the American tradition.

As noted engineer Roy Halee remarked in Sound On Sound magazine, “Oh, man – that bassline is off-the-wall great.”