Hugh Masekela, Trumpeter and Anti-Apartheid Activist, Dies at 78

Hugh Masekela, Trumpeter and Anti-Apartheid Activist, Dies at 78

Courtesy of https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/hugh-masekela-dies.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

ORBITUARY

Hugh Masekela, a South African trumpeter, singer and activist whose music became symbolic of the country’s anti-apartheid movement, even as he spent three decades in exile, died on Tuesday in Johannesburg. He was 78.

His death was confirmed by Dreamcatcher, a communications agency that represented him.

Mr. Masekela came to the forefront of his country’s music scene in the 1950s, when he became a pioneer of South African jazz as a member of the Jazz Epistles, a bebop sextet that included the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and other future stars. After a move to the United States in 1960, he won international acclaim and carried the mantle of his country’s freedom struggle.

His biggest hit was “Grazing in the Grass,” a peppy instrumental from 1968 with a twirling trumpet hook and a jangly cowbell rhythm. In the 1980s, as the struggle against apartheid hit a fever pitch, he worked often with fellow expatriate musicians, and with others from different African nations. On songs like “Stimela (Coal Train),” “Mace and Grenades” and the anthem “Mandela (Bring Him Back Home),” he played spiraling, plump-toned trumpet lines and sang of fortitude and resisting oppression in a gravelly tenor, landing somewhere between a storyteller’s incantation and a folk singer’s croon.

In the 1970s and ’80s, he collaborated with musicians across sub-Saharan Africa, constantly expanding his style to accommodate a range of traditions.

In 1986, Mr. Masekela founded the Botswana International School of Music, a nonprofit organization aimed at educating young African musicians. The next year, he played with Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the “Graceland” tour, which was not allowed in South Africa but made stops in nearby countries. On that tour, Mr. Masekela often performed “Mandela (Bring Him Back Home),” a hit song demanding justice for Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned on Robben Island at the time.

Ramopolo Hugh Masekela was born on April 4, 1939, in Witbank, South Africa, a coal-mining town near Johannesburg. His father, Thomas Selema Masekela, was a health inspector and noted sculptor; his mother, Pauline Bowers Masekela, was a social worker.

As a young child, Mr. Masekela was raised primarily by his grandmother, who ran an illegal bar for mine workers. “One of the great things also about Witbank was that all these people brought their different music and their different stories about where they came from,” he said of the miners. “As a little kid, I hung out with them in the backyard and the kitchen and I knew all about their countries.”

When he was 12, he entered St. Peter’s Secondary School, a boarding school in Rosettenville, closer to Johannesburg. By that point he had already begun to pursue music, singing in groups on the street and learning piano in private lessons.

He grew infatuated with the trumpet in 1950, after seeing Kirk Douglas in the film “Young Man With a Horn,” based on a novel inspired by the life of the trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke.