Funky Africa

Compared to, say, Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim, Almon Memela is not a name much celebrated in the pantheon of apartheid-era South Africa’s jazz giants, but he deserves his place. Born in KwaZulu-Natal in 1936, he moved to Johannesburg when he was 19 to work in the mines. By night he took guitar lessons and made his first recordings in 1959. He worked on the jazz musical King Kong with Masekela and Miriam Makeba but did not follow them into exile and in 1963 formed Almon’s Jazz Eight. Funky Africa was released in 1975 and has been unavailable pretty much ever since, with original vinyl copies going on eBay for eye-watering sums.

This welcome reissue reveals why it has become a collector’s item. The title-track swings in a space gloriously located somewhere between Donny Hathaway’s ‘The Ghetto’ and Masekela’s ‘Grazing in the Grass’, while on ‘That Sweet Feeling’ Memela sounds like a South African George Benson. ‘Telephone’ with its penny whistle is a delightful township kwela tune and ‘The Things We Do in Soweto’ is a rich Afro jazz-funk jam with a psychedelic twist. Hopefully this will be the start of an extensive reissue programme of Memela’s back catalogue.