Terry Callier is my number one contemporary songwriter/vocalist. His ability to write about the experiences, desires, dreams and hardships of ordinary people is unparalleled. This is music to listen to and reflect on life, to weigh the what went rights, the where we went wrongs, to honestly consider what’s next after examining what happen on the way to where we are now. This is music for adult considerations of the values manifested by how we have chosen and how, in the future, we will choose to live.
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The brilliance of Masekela’s song is that Masekela makes the train live through sound. Not just the choo-choo chug-a-lugging of the rhythm but also the whistles and the steam, the rocking, and, more importantly, the dislocation and emotional ripping of families and community, the separation of urban exploitation and toil from traditional land and cultural community. You don’t have to speak a South Africa language to understand the feeling and to feel the pain.
Hugh Masekela is an excellent instrumentalist. His horn crackles and notes burst forward in a passionate outpouring, but on "Stimela" it’s Hugh’s vocal work that aptly and brilliantly dominates. With his voice he does a creative call and response: he is both the laboring men cursing the train, and the train itself carrying the workers to an accursed circumstance.
Over the years, Masekela developed a verbal prologue that effectively contextualizes the song. Even people who have never heard about conscript labor under apartheid, even an audience of people who are truly ignorant of the conditions decried by the song, even those who know nothing are given a glimpse of what hell under earth looks like, and if not an intellectual understanding, certainly an emotional portrait.
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We begin the week with an intimate set from The Divine One, aka Sarah Vaughan accompanied by only guitar and bass. We follow up with a career spanning retrospective on singer/songwriter Terry Callier. We close with Hugh Masekela offering six versions of his signature song "Stimela."