Warner Music SA presents an honorary Album called Mzansi Undercover with a smoky Caribbean flavour of Hugh Masekela’s ‘Stimela.’
‘Stimela‘ is precedence of a weekly release into the Mzansi Undercover album launch.
Mzansi Undercover honours a selection of timeless, iconic South African songs through a production approach that delivers a wide-screened, chilled-out experience to the listener.
Over an unparalleled and storied career, Hugh Masekela revealed himself to be an artist capable of evoking as much high-velocity energy as deeply felt emotion. Considered a masterpiece across the world, his 1971 composition “Stimela (The Coal Train)” was written while Masekela was in exile in the USA and recorded for the first time for his 1974 album, I Am Not Afraid.
The song carries the imprint of the Blues in its telling of the train that brings miners from Namibia, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe to apartheid, South Africa, to work. But, like Masekela’s life, it is a composition that allows for a multiplicity of interpretations and, in this reimagining, is underpinned by a smoky Caribbean flavour that keeps the classic song moving forward into new generations.
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