Masekela, Hugh

▪ 1996

      The 1995 album Johannesburg surely was a surprise to trumpeter Hugh Masekela's longtime fans. The title promised South African-styled music by that country's most popular instrumentalist. The content, however, was American-sounding rap, hip-hop, and contemporary urban pop selections, with the ostensible leader's contribution limited to jazzy trumpet introductions and backgrounds (and on some pieces he apparently did not even play). After the 1994 Hope, which offered Masekela's South African band reviving his biggest hits over the decades, Johannesburg was a new direction. He now appeared as a mentor for young South African performers, the youngest being the 16-year-old rapper Anansa.

      It was as if Masekela were enjoying a second career in music. His first career came to an end in 1990 when he received a telephone call that he had been awaiting for 30 years: Come home. The caller was his sister Barbara, in Johannesburg, reporting that the South African government had declared amnesty for political exiles; herself an exile, she had returned home to become Nelson Mandela's chief of staff. An outspoken opponent of apartheid, Masekela had lived in the U.S., Europe, and Africa while bringing his own country's unique rhythms and harmonies to international stages.

      Born on April 4, 1939, in Johannesburg, Masekela was the son of the chief health inspector of Sharpeville township, a sculptor in wood who owned an extensive jazz record collection. Records by the American trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown inspired the son to play bop with the Jazz Epistles in 1959, a group that included the noted pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (then Dollar Brand) and that was the first black band in the country to record an album. When the grip of apartheid tightened the following year, Masekela immigrated to the U.S., where he attended the Manhattan School of Music in New York City and began forming his own bands. In the 1960s he arranged for and accompanied his then wife, the singer Miriam Makeba; he also wrote and played songs in the kwela style, the pop-folk music of the South African townships.

      With his 1970s travels in Africa, Masekela became involved in the continent's varieties of music, teaching for a year in Guinea, playing in the popular Nigerian performer Fela Anikulapo Kuti's band, and recording five albums and touring with the band Hedzolleh Soundz. In the 1980s, after starring in outdoor concerts in Lesotho and Botswana that drew throngs of black and white South Africans, he settled in Botswana and set up a mobile recording studio near the South African border to be able to record that country's musicians; he also played on Paul Simon's "Graceland" world tour. When the call came from his sister, who later became South Africa's ambassador to France, he was ready: "We had both been abroad only physically. Spiritually we'd never left for one second." (JOHN LITWEILER)

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