Thursday 15 February 2018

Hugh Masekela: Waiting for the Rain



Poor Hugh. He seemed such a decent man. He died recently of prostate cancer a year or so before his 80th birthday. BBC4, bless 'em, repeated a concert from somewhere like the Barbican to celebrate his 70th birthday and around half a century spent in the musical limelight. 

He was supported on this occasion by an orchestra and a huge community choir along with his own band and backing vocalists. One hell of a lot of people to assemble on one stage. The choir was full of rather earnest-looking mainly white and probably middle class choral types, who sang out with gusto but just under-whelmed me slightly because it seems such an incongruous thing to see so many cheery white faces from places like Stoke Newington singing Zulu refrains. Well, that's my issue – and probably something to do with the fact that I've not sung in a choir since primary school.

Had I been born a few years earlier, my introduction to African music might have come from something like 'The Click Song' of Masekela's ex-wife, Miriam Makeba, or 'Wimoweh' – which appears in the adapted form of 'The Lion Never Sleeps' as part of a medley called 'The Seven Riffs of Africa' on his first album for Jive Afrika in the '80s, Techno-Bush. The medley also includes a re-recording of 'Grazing in the Grass', which Masekela originally took to number 1 in the US charts, where it kept 'Jumping Jack Flash' out of the top spot for a couple of weeks.

No, my introduction to African music really came with Osibisa, the group of British-based Nigerian exiles whose 'Sunshine Day' and 'Music for Gong-Gong' still figure on my party compilations. I remember playing on my father's Ekco gramophone what I think was their first UK album, complete with Roger Dean's flying elephant cover, at an intimate party (by dint of my parents' proximity) in the back room of our second house in Belfast. That was the mortifying party where I had to turn away the whole familiar crowd of Malone Road party-seekers on the grounds that my mother's nerves wouldn't stand for that many strangers in her house. It wasn't cool of me. I don't think my 'rep' ever recovered from the slur.

However, Hugh Masekela came about next, admittedly a dozen or so years later. He was part of the early days of what would soon become labelled 'world music', along with such other African luminaries as Manu Dibango, King Sunny Adé and the Bhundu Boys – and a few years before I embraced Fela, Youssou N'dour, Baaba Maal and Salif Keita. During my brief interlude in central London, my Trinidadian friend and work colleague Pedro and I would go cruising for vinyl in Soho. I picked up both Techno-Bush and Waiting for the Rain in the insalubrious Cheapo Cheapo Records. And a few short years and one geographical move later, my good wife and I caught the great man live in Sheffield Polytechnic's Student Union (called, inevitably and appropriately, the Nelson Mandela Building). It was a memorable concert, with energy levels, unsurprisingly, rather higher than for his 70th birthday.

This would have been a couple of years or so after he took part in Paul Simon's Graceland world tour, circa 1987. Like Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Hugh Masekela probably benefited more than most from the tour. Always a fervent critic of apartheid before and after leaving his native South Africa soon after the Sharpeville massacre, he didn't bleat about the finer parts of the cultural boycott but acknowledged that the diminutive minstrel 'brought the music of South Africa to ten million ears – that's never been managed before'.
It's significant that Masekela chose to open Waiting for the Rain with a version of Fela Kuti's 'Lady'. During his long self-imposed exile, he spent years in London, New York and West Africa. He socialised and played with Fela in Lagos, and he described playing with Africa 70 as like 'being on a big fat cloud. You couldn't fall off'. He was reputedly particularly taken with 'Lady'. Fela took him to Ghana, where Masekela fell in with Hedzoleh Sounds, who played a kind of stripped-down Afrobeat/highlife hybrid. They recorded a number of albums together and from what I've heard of Masekela, Introducing Hedzoleh Soundz, our Hugh never sounded better. 

By comparison, Waiting for the Rain is quite a polite affair. Recorded for Jive Afrika during his time in Botswana, frustratingly close to the mother country he couldn't go home to, it is coloured by the predominant synth-etic sounds of the era. 'Politician' follows 'Lady' and it encapsulates the different approaches to protest that Masekela and Fela Kuti took. Having fled his native country, the former could do little more than protest via his music. While the lyrics and the playing are just fine, it lacks the brooding menace of Fela's long, simmering rants and the excoriating ridicule that he aimed directly at Nigeria's military and body politic. Fela was brave and confrontational to the point of suicidal recklessness, but undoubtedly not such a nice guy as Hugh Masekela seemed to be. 

If the first side of Waiting for the Rain is less than memorable, Masekela makes up for it on the second. Sandwiched between the relentless opener, 'Run No More (A Vuo Mo)', and the suitably celebratory closer, 'Zulu Wedding', there's a fine 'Ritual Dancer' and a re-working of what might be remembered as his masterpiece. 'Coal Train (Stimela)' is the story told in his rich reverberating tones of the train 'from Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe... and the whole hinterland of South Africa' that brings the young men and the old men conscripted to work 'in the gold mines of Johannesburg and its surrounding metropoli'. Masekela's voice drops 'deep, deep down into the belly of the earth' where the conscripts are mining 'that mighty evasive stone'. It's chilling and thrilling, and when Masekela's beautiful burnished flugelhorn soars over the female backing vocals, it's guaranteed to send shivers down your spine. It does mine, anyway. Every time.

Before he left South Africa, way back in 1959, Masekela recorded with the great pianist, Dollar Brand (as Abdullah Ibrahim was then known) in the Jazz Epistles. They were the first black jazz group to record an album in the country and it's not for nothing that Masekela has been called 'the father of South African jazz'. He managed to assemble a pretty decent group in Botswana to record in the mobile studio and one of the highlights of the album is the interplay between Masekela's warm flugelhorn and Barney Rachabane's more strident alto sax (that reputedly 'blew away' the likes of Archie Shepp and Weather Report when he played in New York). Another is the presence of Bheki Mseleku, the self-taught multi-instrumentalist who died far too young at 53. Mon épouse et moi witnessed the incredible sight of him playing tenor sax and piano at the same time in a concert at the Brecon Jazz Festival in the early 1990s, around the time of his wonderful Celebration album. Roland Kirk managed three saxes at once, but never with a piano to boot.


Poor Bheki. Poor Hugh. At least the latter almost made it to 80: a goodly age for a jazz legend. And they managed to play together at least once. In Botswana. While no doubt waiting for the rain.

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