78 The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018
T
HE parcel arrived by courier post. It
was big, rectangular, and had come all
the way from America, where 17-year-old
Hugh Masekela knew nobody except the
folk, like Glenn Miller or the Andrews Sis-
ters, whose music rang outof the family’s
wind-up gramophone. He tore off the pa-
per, flicked the clasps, and found—a used
F.X. Huller trumpet sent by Louis Arm-
strong. Wild with joy, he leapt out into the
dusty streets of his township outside Jo-
hannesburg, where the worn-down peo-
ple stopped to stare at him. He was waving
his horn like a weapon. And so it became.
It was not his first trumpet. That had
been bought for him by Trevor Huddles-
ton, his school chaplain, after he had prom-
ised to make no more trouble if he had one.
Ever since seeing “Young Man With a
Horn”, a film about the trumpeter Bix Bei-
derbecke, he knew what he wanted to do.
He already tootled all his spare hours with
the Huddleston Jazz Band in the carpentry
shop. But with Satchmo’s trumpet, also
sent on a hint from Huddleston, he could
take on the world, or at least start to loosen
up his own godforsaken land.
On this horn he raised the roof in 1959
on the tour of “King Kong”, the first multi-
racial musical in South Africa. Round it he
formed the Jazz Epistles, who cut the first
record ever made there by a black band.When theyplayed the Ambassadorsin
Cape Town all races filled the hall, and
even white girls threw themselves at him.
He was hot, but so harassed as a bloody
kaffirthat he appealed to friends to get him
a scholarship abroad. The breaking point
was the Sharpeville Massacre of1960,
when 69 African protesters were killed by
white police, and public gatherings of
more than ten blacks were banned. Live
music vanished. He left for the Manhattan
School of Music and, for three decades,
lived in America. At college his beloved
trumpet was found to be so leaky and full
of gunk that it was declared unplayable.Dancing in work boots
He never meant to leave Africa for so long.
It lay at the heart of his playing, in tribal
chants and folk songs and especially in
mbaqanga, the music ofthe illegal bars or
shebeens where miners in the townships
would go after work to get stuporous on
sorghum beer. His grandmother ran one,
and when small he was her lookout,
watching for the police. Mbaqangawas
played on acoustic guitars and double-
basses, with girls singing close harmony
while the miners danced in rubber work
boots, stamping away their sorrow. He
combined this with American bebop and
the horn style he liked best: lazyphrasingand long notes to show off his fat, beautiful
tone, singing and playing in much the
same register. In time he added samba and
calypso grooves, a bit of rock, a bit of rap, a
pot pourri from the whole African dias-
pora. “Jazz” did not begin to cover it. Miles
Davis, his idol among trumpeters, had
urged him to be different anyway: “No-
body knows the shit that you know.”
The balance was hard to strike in Amer-
ica. If his music was too African, in that
land of apartheid in a different hat, it didn’t
please audiences. If it was too poppy or
west-coast, it didn’t please him. He was
miserably homesick, and would wander
into Central Park just to talk township
slang to himself. At his moment of greatest
success in America, with “Grazing in the
Grass”, at the top of the charts for three
weeks in 1968, he wasso dazed with booze,
blow, pot and sex that he could hardly
function. Trips to west and central Africa in
the early 1970s turned into another sham-
bles of self-destruction, relieved only by
partnerships with famous local musicians.
This was Africa, but he was still not home.
Home was where the music was.
Rhythms of Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana; lyrics of
township romances, girlssashaying to get
water, rowdy shebeens. The songs kept
coming across the Atlantic like a tidal
wave. “Stimela” (Coal Train) described
black miners digging and drilling in the
belly of the earth to bring wealth to glitter-
ing Johannesburg, eating mush from iron
plates, living in filthy barracks, torn from
their loved ones by the screaming train.
“Soweto Blues”, searingly sung by his
sometime lover, sometime wife, Miriam
Makeba, marked the killing of hundreds of
young protesters by the police in 1976: “just
a little atrocity”, deep in the City of Gold.
His horn lamented that he could not re-
turn, even to bury his mother; that his re-
cords were banned there, and that in 1980
he could get no nearer than Botswana,
where he set up a studio and music school.
Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album of 1986
seemed to do as much for African music as
he had, pushing towards freedom. But his
trumpet always gave him a sharper edge.
The next year he was singing “Bring back
Nelson Mandela” with raised fist, his an-
them for the anti-apartheid struggle.
His eventual return to Johannesburg
was like a dandy’s, in expensive half-coats,
scent and shiny shoes, for he had always
enjoyed good clothes, and now he was a
star. He had a fine trumpet too, a Vincent
Bach, which had cost him $150 in New York
when he had sadly putSatchmo’saside.
With this he could bring audiences in con-
cert halls to their feet. But Bra Hugh was
just as pleased to play to a barefoot crowd
among the shacks of Alexandra Township
outside the city, giving them a taste of his
undiminished joy, and showing what one
poor black boy could do. 7Freedom’s blast
Hugh Masekela, trumpeter, songwriter and apartheid-fighter, died on January 23rd,
aged 78ObituaryHugh Masekela