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.
