Hugh Masekela, the legendary South African jazz musician who scored an unlikely No. 1 hit on the Billboard chart with his song “Grazing in the Grass” and who collaborated with artists ranging from Harry Belafonte to Paul Simon, died at 78 (January 23, 2018) after a protracted battle with prostate cancer.
“[Our] hearts beat with profound loss,” the Masekela family said in a statement. “Hugh’s global and activist contribution to and participation in the areas of music, theatre, and the arts in general is contained in the minds and memory of millions across 6 continents.”
Over his career, Masekela collaborated with an astonishing array of musicians, including Harry Belafonte, Herb Alpert, Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, Paul Simon — and his ex-wife, Miriam Makeba. For almost 30 years, “Bra Hugh,” as he was fondly known, was exiled from his native country. And almost despite himself — as he struggled for decades with copious drug and alcohol abuse — Masekela became a leading international voice against apartheid.
The trumpeter, composer, flugelhorn player, bandleader, singer and political activist was born in the mining town of Witbank, South Africa, on April 4, 1939. Growing up, he lived largely with his grandmother, who ran a shebeen — an illicit bar for black and colored South Africans — in her house. (Until 1961, it was illegal for nonwhites in South Africa to consume alcohol.)
Masekela heard township bands and the music of the migrant laborers who would gather to dance and sing in the shebeen on weekends. One of his uncles shared 78s of jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller. Those two forces, the music and the booze, did much to shape Masekela’s life. He began drinking at age 13.
He was given his first trumpet at age 14 by an anti-apartheid crusader, the Rev. Trevor Huddleston, who was also the superintendent of a boarding school that Masekela attended.
“I was always in trouble with the authorities in school,” Masekela told NPR in 2004.
He had been inspired by the Kirk Douglas film Young Man with a Horn. Huddleston, hoping to steer him away from delinquency, asked what it was that would make Masekela happy. “I said, ‘Father, if you can get me a trumpet I won’t bother anybody anymore.’ ”
Masekela soon became part of the Huddleston Jazz Band. And the priest managed to get one of the world’s most famous musicians to send young Hugh a new instrument, as Masekela told NPR in 2004.
“Three years later,” Masekela recalled, “[Huddleston] was deported and came through the United States on his way to England and met Louis Armstrong and told him about the band. And Louis Armstrong sent us a trumpet.”
By the mid-1950s, he had joined Alfred Herbert’s African Jazz Revue in Johannesburg; within just a few years, Masekela was good enough to co-found a landmark South African band, The Jazz Epistles, which also featured another landmark South African artist, the pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim. They recorded the first modern jazz record in South Africa featuring an all-black band.
Within months of The Jazz Epistles’ creation, South African police opened fire on thousands of protesters and 69 people were killed in the infamous Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. The apartheid government declared a state of emergency, and The Jazz Epistles couldn’t play together. Meanwhile, Masekela had learned that he was being targeted for his anti-apartheid activities, and he had made friends with a talented singer named Miriam Makeba, who had already fled the country for New York.
Masekela, now 21 years old, was scrambling to secure a passport and papers to study music abroad. And his friendship with Makeba proved crucial, as he told NPR’s Tell Me More in 2013. She and the singer and activist Harry Belafonte became his patrons and mentors.
Read more at NPR