Masekela Accentuates His Influences in Right Setting

Sometimes settings can make the difference. Veteran South African artist Hugh Masekela has performed all around the Southland in his lengthy career, in recent years at the Hollywood Bowl and the House of Blues.

But his performance at the Conga Room on Wednesday night had the feeling of the right artist in the right room. Not too big, like the Bowl, not too loud, like the House of Blues, and filled with an overflowing, enthusiastic crowd, the room had the perfect vibe, and Masekela and his sextet responded accordingly.

Having a hit early, as Masekela did with “Grazing in the Grass” in 1968 (when he was 29), has been known to lock performers into careers of repetition. But the opposite has been true for Masekela, who has surprised his fans with virtually every album, moving from jazz to rock to soul to traditional music with every imaginable stop in between.

The one constant has been his deeply rooted connection with South Africa.

Even in albums clearly aimed at generating high sales, echoes of Sharpeville, the townships, the mines, apartheid and Nelson Mandela are always present somewhere, resonating throughout his music.

The Conga Room set ranged widely: “Khawuleza” and “Chileshe” from his 1999 album, “Black to the Future”; “Polina” from 1992’s “Beatin’ Aroun’ De Bush”; and, of course, “Grazing in the Grass.” Masekela sang and played with equal effectiveness on most of the numbers. His fluegelhorn work sounded more adventurous, as well as more controlled, than it has in recent years--once again reviving the question of how his career as a jazz artist might have unfolded had he concentrated solely on his instrumental art.

But leaving Masekela’s marvelous vocal work would have been an even greater omission. Not only is he a fine, blues-based singer--as he proved in his humorous exchanges with guitarist John Selolwane--he also is an extraordinarily powerful story teller.

His rendering of “Stimela,” with its images of exploitation in the diamond mines, seemed especially vivid in this performance. And the spirited anthem “Nelson Mandela” still generated the sort of visceral rallying force it possessed in the years before South African freedom.

Masekela has often said that he is “the sum total of all my influences.” His Wednesday-night performance affirmed that fact, not simply in terms of the multiplicity of currents flowing through his music, but in his identity as an artist who is always acutely in contact with the complexities of the world in which he lives.