Lakutshon' Ilanga

Miriam Makeba's reading of "Lakutshon' Ilanga" is one of the great vocal performances of African jazz, a setting of Mackay Davashe's composition whose Xhosa title means "when the sun goes down." Makeba sings it as a torch ballad threaded through the swing-era harmonic language that South African township jazz absorbed and made its own — sophisticated chord changes, a horn section breathing behind her, the marabi lineage dressed in big-band clothes. Her voice is the marvel: warm, precise, conversational in the verses and then suddenly opening into clarion sustained notes, an instrument that never strains for effect because it doesn't need to. The lyric is a lover's anxiety, the ache of searching for someone as darkness falls, but under apartheid that image of looking for a missing person at sundown carried a heavier, unspoken political charge that listeners understood. There is dignity in her phrasing, an adult sorrow rather than melodrama. Recorded by a woman who would become a global symbol of exile and resistance, the song now sounds like both a tender standard and a document of a community's interior life. It belongs to late evenings, to a glass of something and dim light, to anyone who has waited for a person who has not yet come home. Restrained, gorgeous, quietly devastating.