Ovation Recording Studios — Graceland sessions, Johannesburg

In February 1985, Paul Simon flew to Johannesburg with engineer Roy Halee to record with South African musicians at Ovation Studios — a trip made in violation of the United Nations cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa, a decision that generated significant controversy when the album Graceland was released the following year. Simon had been given a bootleg cassette of mbaqanga — South African township music — and had been transfixed by its rhythmic complexity and melodic directness. He came to Johannesburg with song fragments and an idea: to build the recordings around the South African musicians rather than imposing his own arrangements on them.

The Johannesburg sessions produced the rhythmic and musical foundation of Graceland, including the bass playing of Bakithi Kumalo — whose fretless bass lines on tracks like 'You Can Call Me Al' are among the most recognisable bass parts in popular music — and the contributions of musicians including Ray Phiri and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose choral harmonies on 'Homeless' are a direct transmission of Zulu musical tradition into Western pop. Simon subsequently invited the musicians to New York to complete the recordings, crediting and paying them equitably in a way that was not standard practice for Western artists working with African musicians.

The controversy over the boycott violation followed the album throughout its release and reception. Critics argued that any engagement with South African institutions normalised apartheid; defenders argued that the equitable collaboration and the global attention it brought to South African musicians was a form of resistance. Graceland won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1987. The studios in Johannesburg where it began represent one of the most consequential recording decisions in the history of popular music — a trip taken on instinct that produced one of the most celebrated albums of the twentieth century.