HUGH MASEKELA
Opera House, October 6
Reviewed by Bruce Elder
THE South African diaspora is now so extensive, and so racially diverse, that when Hugh Masekela launched into Khawuleza (his last song for the night - there was no encore) the capacity audience leapt to their feet and, with an enthusiastic familiarity, spontaneously started clapping and singing along.
This was a night to celebrate the country's music and culture and the large South African contingent were happy to remind the audience that this 70-year-old, who spent more than 30 years away during the apartheid years, is a political and musical icon whose songs are known and loved.
Masekela has often been described as a jazz musician but every song now is a mesmerising musical journey through the sideways and byways of funk, jazz, blues and soul all filtered through his uniquely South African perspective. The result, on a song like The Boy's Doin' It , is that the song starts with a smooth, cool jazzy languidness which is punctuated by blasts from Masekela's flugelhorn.
It then moves into a rhythmic vocal repetition of "Doin' it, doin' it", adds some sublime scat singing, is enriched by an excellent bass guitar solo and even sees Masekela shaking out the rhythm on a tambourine.
But the highlight of the evening, indeed the highlight of all Masekela's recent concerts around the world, is the political and painful Coal Train , the story of the men who travel from all over southern Africa to work in the mines of Johannesburg. It is a 20-minute opus which opens with Masekela announcing "I'm going to try and pump you up" and proceeds through a kind of spoken free jazz poem about the lives of the miners interspersed by remarkably accurate train whistle blowing and shunting (all done vocally by Masekela) and on to a truly glorious guitar solo, some wonderfully imaginative use of - wait for it - cowbell and a melancholy, emotionally-rich flugelhorn solo.
Towards the end, Masekela, confident of his audience, asked the South Africans to sing along - and they did!
They were like a glorious harmonising extension of Ladysmith Black Mambazo with voices rising and falling in the darkness of the Concert Hall. It was a night of homage for a musician who symbolises all that is good and great about modern South Africa.
© 2007 The Sydney Morning Herald
