'The lion still roars...'

Hugh Ramopolo Masekela
by Kerry Awia Markey 5 Oct. 2009


Music is inseparable from the African continent. Throughout South Africa’s struggle against apartheid it was ‘Music’, Masekela says, ‘that saved us.’

‘It wasn’t called liberation music…(but) it was part of liberating ourselves’.

Hugh Masekela is a lion of jazz and world music – as a trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, and singer, and his music has been an instrument to demand change.

As part of a world tour, Masekela is touring Australia to promote his new album Phola, which he describes as meaning, ‘To get well, to heal, to relax, to be cool.’ He says, ‘Even where you live is your personal phola.’

Born in South Africa in April 1939, Masekela’s current world tour is becoming a long 70th birthday party that Australian audiences will help him celebrate.
And what a party it’s been! In a recent high-energy performance in Durban, he shared the stage with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ray Phiri, Oliver Mtukudzi and Johnny Clegg.
In September Masekela received the Doctor of Musicology (honoris causa) from the University of South Africa for his contribution to the growth of music on the African continent.

Masekela is also a pioneer in bringing the voice and spirit of Africa to the West. Over the last forty years, he’s recorded over forty albums, and sold more than 5 million recordings. Masekela considers music ‘an unfathomable well, an eternal orchard of sound, there for the picking for those who recognize that.’

Masekela’s birthplace is as inseparable from his music, as music is from his soul. ‘I grew up in a small town named Witbank, a one-street, redneck, right-wing Afrikaner town, surrounded by coal mines and coal trains with endless carriages and coal-packed containers criss-crossing the horizon...’

In his powerful song, ‘Stimela,’ he vividly describes the ‘curse’ of the coal train that would arrive in Johannesburg each morning, full of black workers who provided cheap labour to fuel South Africa’s economy.

‘I remember seeing women in the mornings and at sunset running alongside the coal trains with large tin cups collecting the coal nuggets that fell from the cars.’


It was a film about the life of trumpeter Bix (Leon Bismarck) Beiderbecke that inspired the young Masekela to play jazz. In his own youth, Beiderbecke had been inspired by the music he heard playing on riverboats coming up the river from New Orleans.

Another major influence was Louis Armstrong, who sent Masekela a trumpet. You can see a photo of Masekela – aged 16 – holding that trumpet on the cover of his autobiography ‘Still Grazing.’ It was while Armstrong was touring the African continent, that he sent Masekela the trumpet. Under apartheid, Armstrong’s trumpet could enter South Africa, but Armstrong himself could not.

‘When I was growing up, we were able to survive this country because of the inspiration from Black American musicians,’ says Masekela. ‘There was a sociopolitical umbilical cord that joined us.’

By contrast, South Africa had very few openings for local black jazz musicians. Masekela was one of a group of local musicians that made the first ever LP of African jazz. Those musicians went on to form the nucleus of the first complete band of black South African musicians to play modern jazz, replacing swing, boogie and jive-based music.

They called themselves the Jazz Epistles: Abdullah Ibrahim, Jonas Gwanga, Kippie Moeketsie, Johnny Gertze, Makaya Ntshoko and trumpeter Hugh Masekela.

It was jazz musician John Dankworth who helped Masekela leave South Africa by arranging a passport to Britain - where there were no legal restraints on the movements and actions of non-whites. Masekela then moved to the USA, where he played a blend of bop and South African township music.

In New York City, he met bebop heroes like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Gillespie told him, ‘Man, I’d like to be part of your revolution… because the people are always dancing and singing.’

In the 1980’s, Mbongeni Ngema and Hugh Masekela conceived the musical Sarafina! It brought the music – mbaqanga – and the stories of life in the townships in South Africa, to America.

While most Broadway musicals were based on fantasies, Sarafina! was based on reality – a reality in which most black children were born into a world of poverty, segregation and oppression. The musical tells the story of a girl named Sarafina who inspires her classmates with her commitment to the struggle against the government. Sarafina! premiered on Broadway in 1988 and became a hit musical.


While a sense of peace pervades the pace of the new album, Masekela’s message still has an edge, ‘I come from a country that fought for liberation for 400 years without a break.’

In a recent interview for an American TV network he commented: ‘I grew up in the 60s… when I came here, Harry Belafonte was the biggest fundraiser for civil rights, and they were on fire. And it was like I hadn’t left home…’

‘In this day and age,’ he told Tavis Smiley, ‘it seems like we've lost that outrage that we had. A lot of a sense of outrage has been lost all over the world…’

What can we expect when Hugh Masekela performs in Australia? ‘Some songs from Phola,’ he says, ‘and all the old favourites…’

Phola was produced by Erik Paliani and features a blend of jazz, R&B, Afro-beat and township music.

In Australia, he'll be touring with Zimbabwean-born Chris Gudu, who now lives in NSW.


AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES:
3 Oct – Bellingen Global Carnival; 6 Oct – Sydney Opera House; 8th Oct – Hamer Hall, Melbourne; 11th Oct – Perth Concert Hall

More info: www.diaspora.com.au