In July 1968, exiled South African singer/composer and flügelhorn player Hugh Masekela scored a #1 hit on the US charts with "Grazing in the Grass." He beat out that era's trumpet-wielding darling, Herb Alpert, who stood at #2 on the pop charts with "This Guy's in Love with You." Masekela has yet to repeat that achievement. In fact, most Americans didn't hear his name again until he joined Paul Simon for the Graceland project nearly 20 years later. But he's never stopped making music. During 30 years of exile, he lived and recorded all over Africa, in Europe, and in the United States. Twelve years ago, he returned to South Africa to begin a new phase of his career. And his latest release, Time (Chissa/Columbia), offers his best work since -- an inspired blend of pop, jazz, and African folk songs rendered with clarity, precision, and high spirits.

"For me it's a real bonanza," he told me last year in New York, "because I never thought I'd be able to go back home, and now I've been able to get to the point where my new album is on Chissa Records, our own South African label." For Masekela, music and politics have always been intertwined, and the creation of a label has everything to do with black South Africa's economic progress. "We are trying to access a business that was previously white-owned. With Chissa, we're trying to set up something modeled on Motown, where there's collaboration instead of division between artists."

Masekela's politics emerge in the music itself on just one song here, the pumping, revelatory "Change." The track finds him calling out the names of longstanding African leaders and telling them flat out that it's time to "say goodbye." He predicts that in the future he won't be welcome in some of his old haunts, but he has no regrets -- as far as he's concerned, "Change" says something that had to be said.

Masekela plays his horn with clarity and warm lyricism, but when it comes to vocals, he's always been a growler, sometimes straining for notes and displaying more charisma than polish. On Time, that growl assumes a Louis Armstrong charm in the lead track, "Send Me," and in the disco-meets-Dixieland celebration of geriatric musicality, "Old People, Old Folks." Masekela negotiates subtle jazz melodies on the whimsical "Ce Soir" and the disarming love song "Magic," the latter set to a classic township beat. So what's the secret of this nuance in his vocals? "I'm a healthier person. I had quite a delinquent life. I got by a lot with talent, but six years ago, I decided to admit to myself that I was an alcoholic and a druggie and to go into recovery. In the process, my focus got sharper, and I knew what to go after."

One thing he went after was a fabulous, 20-piece, all-South African backing band who make every track on this album crackle with authenticity, whether it's the mbaqanga crank of "Happy Mama," the smooth, melancholy Cape Town jazz of "Thimlela," or the moody, raucous blare of "Part of a Whole," a powerful instrumental written by jazz veteran Caiphus Semenya. He says his outfit is made up of "all the people that I admired and should have worked with earlier. I finally identified them and said, `Let's do this,' and they were like, 'Damn, we've been waiting for you to get like this so we can do it.' "

"Cochita" is a musical memoir of Masekela's discovery of Latin music in Spanish Harlem in the 1960s. It's not hard to get him reminiscing about his early days in New York, and his reveries are loaded with detail. "I arrived the day that Castro left the Waldorf to go and live at the Theresa Hotel. It was a couple of days after Khrushchev banged his shoe on the lectern at the UN and said, `We will bury you!' Lumumba was here, and Kennedy was campaigning against Nixon. It was the time of Martin Luther King and civil rights, the emergence of Malcolm X, and the golden age of jazz. Abby Lincoln and Mel Waldron. Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. Sarah Vaughan and Count Basie. You could go to the Half Note and see Coltrane and Miles, and then cross over and see Horace Silver and Les McCann at the Village Gate. . . . It was that kind of a time."

Masekela has just delivered the final pages of a memoir -- seven years in the making -- to Random House. It's hard to think of a living popular musician who has absorbed and reflected so many musical and social realities, from Guinea, Nigeria, Zaire, and Zimbabwe to LA, London, and Paris. If he recalls them all as vividly as he does his time in New York, the book will be as colorful as his recordings.

Issue Date: January 10 - 16, 2003