HUGH MASEKELA

Hugh Masekela: The Legendary Trumpeter Reaching 70 Years

by

Ntongela Masilela

          I think that’s where [Village Vanguard Gate in New York City] I met Hugh
          Masekela, the very fine South African trumpet player. He had
          just come over the States and was doing real good. He was a
          friend of Dizzy’s [Gillespie],  who I think had helped sponsor
          him while he went to music school [Julliard School of Music]
          here. I remember one night riding uptown [direction of
          Harlem] with him being somewhat in awe that he was in the
          same car with me. He told me that I had been a hero of his and
          other blacks in South Africa when I stood up to that policeman
          outside of Birdland that time, and I remember being surprised
          that they even knew about that kind of thing over there in
          Africa. Hugh had his own approach to playing the trumpet
          even then, had his own sound. I thought that was good,
          although I didn’t think he played black American music too
          well.
                 -Miles Davis, The Autobiography with Quincy Troupe (1989).     

How does one begin celebrating our legendary trumpeter given these words of high praise from one of the greatest horn players in the history of jazz. Unquestionably, Miles Davis belongs to the pantheon with Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marasalis and one or two others. What distinguished Miles from this pride of lions was his political awareness of the significance of Africa. This historical awakening was made possible by the impact of approximately fifteen African countries attaining political independence in 1960. In a real sense Miles Davis was educated about the continent the hard way in a momentous instance by the great drummer Max Roach. The true story relates that Miles Davis was giving one of his last performances with his first great quintet (John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones, Red Garland and Paul Chambers) performing at no lesser venue than Carnegie Hall for the benefit of African students in United States, when Max Roach stopped the concert for about forty minutes by occupying the stage with three African students carrying banners protesting that one of the sponsors of the concert was somehow connected to the apartheid regime. This was a few weeks after the Sharpeville Massacre of March 1960. After being allowed to explain his protest to the audience, Max Roach left the stage and the concert resumed. Miles Davis could not ignore Max Roach, even in an embarrassing public domain, not only because both of them in their young days in the late 1940s had been together in the band of Charlie Parker, the greatest exponent of jazz on the instrument, but also because Max Roach was a black nationalist like Miles Davis’ father who had been a follower of Marcus Garvey in the early years of the twentieth century. Max Roach and Miles Davis belonged to the hard bebop generation of jazz musicians of the 1950s and 1960s to whom jazz and politics were not separable from each other as they seemingly had been to earlier generations. One needs only to take note of Max Roach’s album We Insist!—Freedom Now (1960) and Miles Davis own albums or CDs of the 1980s Tutu (1986) and Amandla (1989).

So, when Miles Davis was driving Hugh Masekela in his car and talking, approximately about a year after the Carnegie Hall event, they were relatively well aware of each other’s country’s racial politics. Being a member of the Sophiatown Renaissance of the 1950s which had been profoundly influenced by the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hugh Masekela was very much aware of the cultural politics and achievements that had made the New Africans in South Africa emulate the New Negroes of United States. This was confirmed by the recent publication of his brilliant autobiography: Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela (2004). In the book, he recollects how in the 1950s his generation of musicians, which among others included Kippie Moeketsi, Dolly Rathebe, Ibrahim Abdullah (Dollar Brand), Jonas Gwangwa, Miriam Makeba, Ben Gwigwi Mrwebi soaked themselves in African American music, from the Negro Spirituals to the Blues, and from Gospel to Jazz. Much more important to them was the style of jazz that emanated from the bebop revolution led by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in New York City in the late 1940s: from Sarah Vaughan to Dinah Washington, from J. J. Johnson to Sonny Rollins, from Miles Davis to Fats Navarro. At this time they were also reading Drum magazine which serialized in its pages part of the autobiographies of Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. Their fellow intellectuals, the Drum writers such as Todd Matshikiza and Bloke Modisane were writing reviews of jazz albums by black Americans in Golden City Post while also at the same time writing portraits of these musicians in the magazine itself. So, the cultural education that Hugh Masekela and his cohorts received within the Sophiatown Renaissance, the last intellectual and cultural constellation of the New African Movement which stretched from 1904 to 1960, was brilliant. Just to see how astonishing that education was one has only to read Hugh Masekela’s essay written on the occasion of the tenth-year anniversary of the 1994 elections (“Miracle Imperfect”, Thisday, Tuesday, April 13, 2004). Its searing analysis of the refusal of some South African whites in accepting the new democratic dispensation is as powerful as the one Lewis Nkosi was to write four years later (“The Ideology of Reconciliation: Its Effects on South African Culture”, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing, Launch Issue, Autumn 2008).

So, the great Miles Davis intuited that although musically he was way ahead of the twelve years younger Hugh Masekela given his masterpieces of the 1950s (Relaxin’, Steamin’, Workin’, Cookin’, Round About Midnight, Milestones, and 58 Sessions), his soul brother from Africa was intellectually strong and a quick learner. Hugh Masekela was to prove himself formidable in the unfolding decade of the 1960s when he became one of its major stars with the song “Grazing in the Grass” which was the number one song internationally in the latter part of 1968 and in the early months of 1969. Given this achievement, it is not surprising that today, forty years after its effect, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba have retrospectively been designated by many American scholars of popular culture as the originating artists of what later came to be known as “World Music”. This should not be surprising because both of them, as well as Abdullah Ibrahim, and other intellectuals, artists and political leaders who had to flee to exile due to the political consequences stemming from the Sharpeville Massacre, had had a formidable cultural formation as the result of the way in which the New African Movement had participated in the construction of modernity in South Africa. In a very positive and complicated way the New African Movement had succeeded in displacing and decentralizing European modernity by inventing New African modernity. The monumental struggle between European modernity and New African modernity is what defined the central strand of South African political history in the twentieth century. The momentous but qualified victory of 1994 was the defeat of white nationalism of European modernity by African nationalism of New African modernity.

The awakening to political practice or cultural practice on the part of Hugh Masekela in the 1980s, like many other South African cultural artists, helped to make 1994 possible. For him this participation in the movement of history was an absolute act of redemption on his part, since as he relates so clearly in his autobiography, on becoming a megastar in the 1960s he descended into debauchery of drugs and hedonism of sex in the 1970s, and in the process manage to lose a beautiful 53 million dollars, yes Virginia, 53 million dollars and not 53 million cents. For sure, some of this money was lost in the process of having to close his CHISA RECORD company which was located at the center of Hollywood, at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard here in Los Angeles on Sunset Strip. I had occasion several times to visit the recording studio while I was a student at UCLA (University of California in Los Angeles) in the 1970s. To get personal for a moment: at the height of his popularity as a megastar Hugh Masekela took me to a Gato Barbieri concert at the Greek Theatre in the early 1970s perhaps because I had mentioned to him that idolized the ‘Cat’ from Argentina because he played deep streams of revolutionary consciousness on the saxophone. When he entered the concert hall bumping to his front seat with me following behind about twenty minutes after the concert had begun, practically all the eyes turned in his direction. When he took his seat in the front row right in front of Gato Barbieri, with my mine next to his, the ‘Cat’ nodded in his direction while continuing to play. This was one of the greatest thrills of my life. At this time the great saxophonist was pushing the idea of Third World music. He had begun to exemplify the concept of this music years earlier by recording an album in Milan, Italy in 1968 called Hamba Khale (perhaps the intended title was Hamba Kahle) with Abdullah Ibrahim. 

Hugh Masekela was dearly loved in Los Angeles, especially by African Americans, from the time of his arrival in the late 1960s from New York City to his departure for Conakry, Guineau in 1973. Part of the explanation may possibly be that Los Angeles was the most informed of all American cities about the tragedy of apartheid in South Africa. This is because the Los Angeles Times of all the American newspapers had the most extensive coverage of the country from the late 1960s onwards; in 1980s its superlative reporting of the struggle against apartheid was incomparable to any other newspaper in United States.  The interest of the newspaper in Africa, especially in South Africa, was directly connected to the fact that UCLA until the early 1990s had one of the two best African Studies Centers in the country; the other was located at Northwestern University in Evanston (a suburb of Chicago). UCLA attracted some of the exiled  New African intellectuals of the New African Movement: A. C. Jordan (1961 to 1967), the author of most distinguished novel written in isiXhosa, Ingqumbo yeminyanya (1940, The Wrath of the Ancestral Spirits), and the pre-eminent scholar of Xhosa literature in the last century after S. E. K. Mqhayi; Daniel Kunene (1968-1970), the pre-eminent scholar of Sesutho literature and author of a major book about its poetry, Heroic Poetry of the Basotho (1971), and also author of two book length studies of two eminent novelists of African Literature in the African Languages, Thomas Mofolo and the Emergence of Written Sesutho Prose (1989) and The Zulu Novels of C. L. S. Nyembezi: A Critical Appraisal (2007); and Mazisi Kunene (1975-1993), the towering African poet of the twentieth century, and author of these two epics, among many others:  Emperor Shaka The Great (1979) and Anthem of the Decades (1981). Also UCLA gave refuge to two leading South African scholars who were fierce opponents of apartheid: Professor Hilda Kuper (anthropologist) and Professor Leo Kuper (sociologist). In addition to these intellectuals, writers and scholars, there were musicians and actors of the Sophiatown Renaissance: Letta Mbulu, Jonas Gwangwa, Philemon Hou, Caiphus Semenya, and Zakes Mokae. And the extraordinary artist Dumile Feni spent the last fifteen years of his life in this city. So, Hugh Masekela was a member of this glittering galaxy of South African culture in this ‘City of Angels’. These fabulous individuals were part of the imaginary space of Los Angeles which presumably informed the ethical imagination of the Los Angeles Times.

One distinctiveness of Hugh Masekela from his illustrious compatriots in exile in United States was that his music became part of the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Liberation Movement and the Black Arts Movement, the manifestations that made United States so fascinating in the 1960s. It was conjointly part of the creative noise of the likes of Sly and the Family Stone, The Stylistics, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, The Delphonics, Barry White, Sam Cooke, The Supremes, Jimi Hendrix and many so others. When Hugh Masekela in a single winter night of 1965 at the Village Vanguard Gate recorded the eight tracks of a live performance that were released in April 1966 as The Americanization of Ouga Booga (“Bajabula Bonke”, “Dzinorabino”, “Unhlanhla”, “Cantalope Island”, “Masquenada”, “Abangoma”, and “Mixolydia”), he could not have anticipated that the music would touch the soul of many Americans, especially African Americans. This album not only proved the correctness of Miles Davis’ assessment regarding the path Hugh Masekela should take, but also the then young trumpeter’s astuteness in listening to that invaluable advice. It is not accidental that in the last track of the aforementioned album he announced that it was dedicated to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. The image of modern Africa created by this album for certain resonated with the imaginary Africa that was imprinted in the black soul of young African Americans who were the vanguard of the The Black Panther Party, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and US Organization. The dashikis and the Afros that were the soul style of the 1960s were in tandem with the poetics of these tracks, as well some of those in Hugh Masekela’s following album The Lasting Impressions of Hugh Masekela (1968, “Morolo”, dedicated to Kippie Moeketsi, “Bo Masekela”, composed by Caiphus Semenya, “Unohilo”). The astonishing popularity of “Grazing in the Grass” announced to those who cared to listen that Hugh Masekela had indeed arrived at the center stage American popular musical entertainment. From this enormous success it was perhaps logical for him to move to a spectacular house in Malabu Beach, where also Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and other megastars lived, not far from his mentor Miles Davis. Fela Kuti, the Nigeria music genius, King of Afro-beat, arrived in Los Angeles at this time in 1969, but did not manage to connect with Hugh Masekela. They connected a few years later when Masekela returned to Africa. It was a momentous encounter. To get an idea of the historic nature of this meeting, one has just to listen to the song “Fela” he composed when the giant of African music passed away in 1992; it can be found his Sixty CD (2000). This is a brilliant elegy in musical form.

From Witbank where he was born on April 4, 1939 through Sophiatown to New York and Los Angeles, Hugh Masekela was showcasing in United States in the middle of the twentieth century in the form of New African modernity what the New Negro intellectuals in the late nineteenth century had imparted to New African intellectuals in the form of New Negro modernity.  This was a remarkable achievement for Hugh Masekela to have already done so in 1969 at the height of fame at a relatively young age of thirty. Besides the importance of African American literary and music culture in the formation of modern sensibilities of the New African intellectuals of the Sophiatown Renaissance constellation within the New African Movement, Hollywood films were also crucially important. Witness the popularity throughout the 1950s of the American film noir The Street With No Name (1948) starring Richard Widmack directed by William Keighley to a particular segment of black South Africans. In the particular instance of Hugh Masekela, it was at the age of fourteen in 1953 on viewing Kirk Douglas in Young Man With a Horn (1950, directed by Michael Curtiz) portraying the tragic life of the trumpet genius Bix Beiderbecke who died at a very young age in the 1930s, that he decided he wanted to be a trumpet player. His father being Thomas Masekela, a sculptor and painter, and close friend with New African artists such as Ernest Mancoba and Gerald Sekoto in the 1930s in Pietersburg, he was able to listen the Swing era band music of Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller and others. It was approximately at this time that Hugh Masekela prevailed on Father Huddleston in Sophiatown to write to Louis Armstrong in New York City requesting a gift in the form of a trumpet from the great master. Unbelievably, the master who invented soloing in jazz with through his inventiveness in West End Blues in the 1920s, actually sent the gift to South Africa. At twenty, he was a member of the Jazz Epistles, perhaps the truly first and serious bebop band in South Africa, with Jonas Gwangwa, Johnny Gertse, Kippie Moeketsi, Abdullah Ibrahim, Early Mabuza (Makaya Ntshoko). Although the band did last long together, its formation and existence was a serious indication that whatever revolution John Coltrane was undertaking with Giant Steps (1960), likewise Miles Davis with Kind of Blue (1959), the young South Africans intended to emulate and transplant it in South Africa.

The tremendous adulation Hugh Masekela received in the 1960s in United States is partly explained by the fact that as a New African intellectual artist, his sensibility was in many ways a mirror image of African Americans (black Americans). Perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay Hugh Masekela, in celebrating his seventy years of a fruitfully lived life, is to view one of his remarkable achievements as having brought black America and black South Africa much closer to each other culturally than seemed possible given their particular distinctive histories. In this, he has widened the historical meaning and significance of Pan Africanism on the cultural plane. This is because when the oppressed people of South Africa demanded that culture be utilized politically in the liberation struggles of the 1980s, Hugh Masekela did not hesitate to do so while insisting on retaining the autonomy of art. This is the mark of a real legendary artist.

Claremont [Los Angeles], California, August 23-24, 2009.