Names carry a lot of baggage with them. If you listen to the wrong Grover Washington, Jr. disc, the wrong Gato Barbieri album or even some of the lesser efforts from Keith Jarrett, each player seems subsumed in an barrage of malingering nonsense. Some of those players issued incredible work apart from those lean times and others were just kinda average over the span of their career. Fitting in to all of this, though, is Hugh Masekela. His name is weighted down by the misnomer of world music.

Americans possess a bizarre view of the world, which translates into genre names and its perception of music. So world music is anything and everything involving non-Americans. Odd, but you can definitely walk into any record store and find the word ‘World’ making a section somewhere. Masekela, though, might have been, during the ‘60s and ‘70s, one of the biggest names in the pseudo-genre. He issued innumerable albums and worked with some of the biggest names in music, not just jazz. Hailing from South Africa made his alliance with Fela Kuti, for a time, possible and even sensible. But as the trumpeter and flugelhorn player grew in popularity, he began to figure that further experiments in genre leaping would be appropriate. And where much of his ‘60s work has a cheese ball tinge to it – though not all – his 1972 album Home is Where the Music Is comes off a great deal better than the rest of his catalog, then or now.

Enlisting a bevy of players from South Africa and the States, there should be an air of the exotic or at least adventurous to the entire album, but there’s not. Bummer, huh? There are more than just a few moments when it all works, though, and listeners are treated to something tantamount to a fusion work out.

Home is Where the Music Is should be surmised over the course of its first track, because really, there’s not too much else to hold on to after its nine and a half minutes are over. The entire album is a combination of playing that boarders on free, some funk and soul and of course jazz and African melodies. That’s a great deal to shove into a single album or even a single track. But what “Part of the Whole” does is to focus on groove more than anything else. The rest of the disc is given over to an odd compendium of soloing and ambient backing tracks. This opening number, though, has a melody you might want to whistle along to. And even if that’s not the case, the backbeat is more than enough to get it over. It won’t be mistaken for a lost Miles Davis excursion, or even a second rate Mahavishnu Orchestra. But for a few minutes those saxophone solos do the trick.

It’s unfortunate that such a promising opener is squandered. And while there are certainly folks that are going to eat this stuff up, there’s probably better music out there in the world.