It’s nice to get back to some jazz, which I never thought I’d say.
Masekela is (or rather was) a South African jazz trumpeter, here playing the flugelhorn throughout. Unlike the recent offerings from Miles Davis, there’s very little electronic instrumentation on this album, part from keyboardist Larry Willis occasionally resorting to the electric piano, but that’s just to give a different tone than anything particularly scary.
The style here is very laid back, cool style jazz, with even the more up-tempo tracks being very smooth and relaxing. I thought that, given his biography, we might hear some African rhythm elements to the music, but by and large this isn’t the case (except maybe to some extent on the track Maesha). And this is despite one track, Unhome, having Miriam Makeba on a writing credit. What we do get, however, is quite a soulful feel to many of the tracks. The Big Apple and Inner Crisis would sound at home on the Shaft soundtrack, for example, driven especially by Willis’ piano and Eddie Gomez’ bass.
Masekela tends to play quite sparsely, and his flugelhorn doesn’t dominate. He shares the brass/woodwind duties with Dudu Pukwana on alto sax, and sometimes Gomez gets a solo section (on Nomali especially), with even drummer Makhaya Ntshoko getting a solo on the track Blues For Huey. It’s all quite laid back and inoffensive, an interesting contrast to Ian Paice’s solo on Deep Purple’s Lazy.
The Africana is stored up for the final track, Ingoo Pow-Pow, which features African beats and a call-response vocal that feeds into some jazz piano, and works really well. I wish that there’d been more of this on the album, if only because I’d have liked Masekela to incorporate more of his culture into the music rather than American jazz. That said, however, I really was a nice return to a style of music I’ve not heard for ages.
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