HEAVY HUGH
Bra Hugh is back — with an album, a festival and a fierceness, writes Carlos Amato
Carlos Amato takes time out with a grumpy jazz legend
NOBODY does grumpy exuberance like Hugh Masekela. His mind is an improbable mashup of warmth and gloom. He believes this country and this world are several bends up shit creek — but, even at 77, he is not willing to accept it.
Hence he is back, again, with a spiky and sparkly new album, No Borders, plus this year’s edition of the Hugh Masekela Heritage Festival, which happens next Saturday at Soweto’s Elkah Oval, featuring Ringo Madlingozi, Phuzekhemisi and a clutch of rising talents.
Most 27-year-old music stars would kill to make a record as vigorous as No Borders. The voice is still leonine, the horn tone still buttery bright. Star guests include Oliver Mtukudzi, J’Something, Kunle Ayo, Kabomo, Tresor Riziki and his US-born son Sal Masekela, a sportscaster by trade, whose glossily pure voice is a revelation.
The album rolls like a hollering steam train of pleasure and anger.
He disputes the anger, though. “It’s rather disgust,” he said this week, when I met him in the booth at Ayo’s recording studio in Joburg. “I’m disappointed. In the ’60s, I was in my 20s in the States, and it was a time of really great hope. Hair, the love generation, the anti-war passion, anti-racism. And it seemed like it was going to work. And it didn’t.
“I’m very close to Harry Belafonte, and he’s 90 years old now. Every time we sit down he looks at me and says: ‘How do you feel, man? I feel so bad. We worked so hard for so long, and then there’s nothing to show for it.’ Martin was killed and Malcolm was killed. The young people don’t want to be that element, that free element — African Americans don’t want to be part of it. And look who’s running for office? And the Ku Klux Klan have disappeared into the American police forces.’”
And what about the place he yearned for through decades of exile, the place for which he survived a long storm of booze, coke and globe-trotting activism?
Masekela is baffled by today’s South Africa, by the polarised incoherence of its rage. “You know what bores me more than anything — it breaks my heart boringly — is that everybody is singing: the president, the unions, the churches, the parties, the students.
“Every time you see a gathering. Singing as they litter the streets and burn things. And sometimes I wonder, how come I don’t know these songs?” He laughs that immortally irreverent laugh. “Is it because I’m not living there?”
But he spends much of his time here, enough to take the national pulse. “When apartheid was there, there was a unified passion against a target. And we were all into it. Here and now, we’re just compartmentalising shit. Because the dissatisfaction in this country is what everybody should be fighting. What Robert Sobukwe, the old ANC, Steve Biko stood for... Ruth First, all the unknowns who gave their lives so that everybody could live a decent life. But instead, the poverty and unemployment and ignorance is completely contradictory to what was fought for.
“Only 22 years ago we were one of the most intelligent societies in the world. We were inspirational. Hardly anybody ever comes here anymore. Our president travels. You don’t see statesmen visiting us.”
For Masekela, the failures of post-colonial Africa rub salt in the wound of colonial theft. “People have lost so much hope. They’re tired of fighting again. But then they fight the surrogate wars that are really big. So the only thing I can tell you that brings joy to my heart is music.”
That, and daily swimming at the gym, which eases his back pain and sciatica. Masekela does at least 40 lengths a day. Unsurprisingly, he mixes up his strokes. The weathered clarity of his face betrays his two lives: the wild one and the calm one.
He still snatches fellow musos from the jaws of addiction. “I’ve been quite successful. But I’ve lost a few people who I’ve intervened with. The percentages are very low. And when you’re in an addictive country, it’s difficult to be healthy — to feel like I feel now is almost miraculous.”
In his teens in Joburg, he was a moderate drinker. “I remember meeting girls and they’d say: ‘You don’t drink? Shit! A man who doesn’t drink? I could never hang out with you. You would bore me to death! Oooh a kang bhora! Nee man, vat ’n suipie!’”
But Masekela rejects the totalising glumness of organised sobriety. “Now and again I will have a glass of wine or a shot. When I was in rehab in England and South Africa, and going to meetings, everybody was scared and uncomfortable. I wasn’t getting any inspiration.
“One day I stood up and said, you know, you’re all really bringing me down. You’re all miserable as shit. You don’t seem to be enjoying your recovery. I’m enjoying mine. I can’t be part of this.”
Grumpy exuberance knows no borders. LS
‘No Borders’ is out now. To win one of five double tickets to the Hugh Masekela Heritage Festival, send an e-mail to lifestyle@sundaytimes.co.za by midday November 1 with the name of Masekela’s relative who performs on his album.
’Girls would say: ‘You don’t drink? Shit! You would bore me to death’ ‘People have lost so much hope. They’re tired of fighting again’