Hugh Masekela
South African trumpeter, composer and anti-apartheid activist who blended American jazz with joyful dance and folk music
HUGH MASEKELA, who has died aged 78, was a jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader whose flair for combining musical genres enabled him to appeal to audiences worldwide; he made acclaimed jazz albums and hit pop singles, but his great passion was for creating music which spoke for his native Africa.
Hugh Ramopolo Masekela was born on April 4 1939 at Witbank, South Africa, about 90 miles east of Johannesburg. His father was a health inspector and also a sculptor; his mother was a teacher.
“When kids in Europe were going to nursery school,” he recalled in the book African All-stars (1987), “I was winding up the gramophone for my mother and father and uncles.” They listened to American swing and jazz performers such Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington and the Andrews Sisters. At the age of 14 Hugh saw the film Young Man with a Horn, loosely based on the life of Bix Beiderbecke, and was seized by a strong desire to play the trumpet.
An instrument was provided by Father Trevor Huddleston, who was chaplain to Masekela’s Anglican school, St Peter’s in Rosettenville. Huddleston also found him a teacher from the local brass band.
Other teenagers turned up with instruments and soon they had enough to form their own band. They called it the Huddleston Jazz Band. After visiting America Huddleston brought Masekela another trumpet – from Louis Armstrong.
After that, there was never any doubt that Hugh Masekela’s life would be in music. He played and led several juvenile bands until, in 1956, he joined Alfred Herbert’s African Jazz Revue, followed by a tour with South Africa’s most popular vocal group, the Manhattan Brothers.
By 1958 he was playing in the band at the opening of King Kong, the first and probably still the greatest African stage musical. The show, starring Miriam Makeba, toured South Africa to wild applause for two years, although Masekela left in 1959.
As a multi-racial production, popular with black and white audiences alike, King Kong presented a direct challenge to apartheid. Performing artists, musicians especially, came under increasing suspicion and pressure. This was the moment when Masekela, along with the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (then called Dollar Brand), the saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, trombonist Jonas Gwanwa and others, chose to launch their all-star “township bebop” band, the Jazz Epistles.
Their appearances drew record-breaking crowds and their introductory album was selling very well. Then, on March 21 1960, came the shooting dead of 69 African protesters by the police, the “Sharpeville massacre”. The authorities instantly banned gatherings of more than 10 people and the music stopped.
Masekela seems never to have been short of influential friends, and these he turned to now. Father Huddleston helped him to acquire a passport, John Dankworth put his name forward for the Guildhall School of Music in London, and, a few months later, Harry Belafonte acted as his sponsor in the US, where, in September 1960, he began a four-year course of study at the Manhattan School of Music.
Unable to return to South Africa, Masekela went instead to California in 1964. There he became involved in the burgeoning pop scene, with considerable success. He appeared at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, had a small hit that year with a cover version of The 5th Dimension’s Up Up and Away, and a US No 1 with his own Grazing in the Grass (1968).
During this time he both married (1964) and divorced (1966) Miriam Makeba. He found the expatriate life, even with a measure of success, empty and frustrating, and missed the wholehearted gusto of Africa, with all its tribulations. For a change of scene, in 1972 he came to London and, with two fellow exiles, the drummer Makhaya Ntshoko (from the original Jazz Epistles) and the saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, plus two Americans, recorded an album, Home Is Where the Music Is, which expressed his longing and frustration.
Its success encouraged him to start working with a band of musicians from various African countries, whose music “just knocked [him] out”, and tour with them in west and central Africa. The band was called Hedzoleh Soundz. It recorded six albums between 1973 and 1977, beginning with Masekela: Introducing Hedzoleh Sounds, and was based in California towards the end of its life, but never really caught on with American audiences.
His 1977 album You Told Your Mama Not To Worry contained one of the pieces by which he will be best remembered. Soweto Blues, with lyric by Stanley Todd, and sung by Miriam Makeba, is a powerful, angry lament for those killed in the previous year’s uprising.
Masekela returned to Africa in 1980, settling first in Zimbabwe and moving two years later to Botswana, close to the border with South Africa. He was joined at his “Coming Home” concert by Miriam Makeba. (They appeared to get on much better when they were not married.) The open-air show drew an estimated crowd of 35,000. Masekela set up a mobile recording studio in Botswana and also established the Botswana Music Camp, where musicians of all ages could meet and learn from each other.
On his birthday in 1985, he received an unexpected letter of good wishes from Nelson Mandela, smuggled out of prison. The gesture affected him deeply and, in reply, he wrote the song Bring Him Back Home, demanding Mandela’s release to walk “freely down the streets of South Africa”. He included it on his 1987 album, Tomorrow, and it came to be regarded as the unofficial anthem of the anti-apartheid movement.
African music received worldwide exposure with the release of Paul Simon’s hugely successful album, Graceland, in 1986. Inspired originally by records of township music, Simon created a patchwork of “roots” music from around the world, including many African artists. There were, however, complaints of exploitation from some musicians and politicians. Masekela would have none of it, applauding instead the encouragement Simon had given to African music. Although he had not been involved in the recording, he joined the supporting tour in 1987, along with Miriam Makeba.
With the release of Mandela in 1990 and the multi-racial elections in 1994, Masekela’s role as an activist was over. He returned to South Africa and settled in to playing his unique blend of American jazz and mbaqanga, the supple rhythmic dance music originally developed in the shebeens of Sophiatown. He also continued to make occasional excursions into funk and Afro-pop.
In 2012 he joined
Paul Simon for a 25th anniversary tour of Graceland, opened a new studio, House of Masekela, in Johannesburg, and launched a record label with the same title. In the years that followed, health problems began increasingly to limit his activities. In 2017 a much anticipated London concert with his old Jazz Epistles comrade, Abdullah Ibrahim, had to go ahead without him.
Hugh Masekela was twice married; Miriam Makeba died in 2008 and his second wife, Elinam Cofie, survives him. He is also survived by a son, the American television presenter and sports commentator Selema (Sal) Masekela, and a daughter. Another daughter predeceased him.
Hugh Masekela, born April 4 1939, died January 23 2018