Miriam Makeba

★★★★ Pata Pata STRUT. CD/DL/LP Makeba clicks with American listeners in 1967. Having bounced around US labels, Miriam Makeba surely felt a sense of security when she signed for Sinatra’s Reprise. Assigned to its pop team – people who could describe the singer as “hot as a Pretoria cat house, bright as a diamond mine” without blushing – she responded by putting the title track into the Billboard Top 20. If the need to follow that meant there wasn’t time to find enough new songs (Click Song Number 1, Yetentu Tizaleny and Maria Fulô had appeared on her previous LP), producer Jerry Ragovoy and Makeba still compiled a set that sits perfectly between soul, jazz, folk and African, and these new masters (both mono and stereo) sound uncannily fresh. One quibble with Strut’s “definitive edition” claim: Ballad Of The Sad Young Men should have been added. In South Africa it replaced the political A Piece Of Ground.