Like Makeba, Hugh Masekela lived much of
his life in exile. In 1961 Harry Belafonte helped the
young musician settle in the U.S. By the mid sixties Masakela
was recording albums like The Emancipation of Hugh
Masekela. In 1968 he released The Promise of
a Future, featuring perhaps his most famous recording,
“Grazing In the Grass”.
Masekela’s music is often not jazz
in the strictest sense, but there can be no question that
jazz music was a profound influence on him once he arrived
in the U.S. There is certainly a strong jazz element to
most of the tracks here, and that element is not limited
to his trumpet work. “Bajabula Bonke (The Healing
Song)” from The Promise of a Future is
very jazz-oriented and features an avant-garde influenced
soprano sax solo by Al Abreu. Drummer Chuck Carter can
be heard dropping numerous bombs behind Masekela’s
agitated trumpet solo, a sure sign that the group was
aiming right for the heart of post-bop jazz. The band’s
cover of Jimmy Webb’s optimistic ditty “Up,
Up, and Away” sounds like a lot of jazz arrangements
of pop songs that were being done in 1967, when the album
Hugh Masekela is Alive and Well at the Whiskey
(from which this performance is taken) was released. That’s
Hugh Masekela in a nutshell: combining musical genres
from Afrobeat to American pop effortlessly.
When Masekela arrived in America, everyone
from Belafonte to Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Art
Blakey advised him to form his own group and to play music
influenced by the music of his homeland. After all, they
reasoned, there were scores of American jazz musicians
all doing more or less the same things, and it would be
difficult for Hugh to break into the American jazz scene
playing straight hard bop. But, playing his own music
and allowing his South African musical heritage to shine
through, he would be completely unique. Fortunately, Masekela
followed their advice and has been a fixture on the world’s
musical stage ever since.
Apartheid was a major theme of Masekela’s
work for many years, which is inevitable considering his
background and state of exile from his homeland. When
the album I Am Not Afraid, featuring specifically
political songs, was released on the Blue Thumb label
in 1973, his music was a bit more relaxed than a few years
earlier when Masekela released Masekela, an album
many termed career suicide (featuring such songs as “Gold”
and “Mace and Grenades”), but the themes were
still the same. “Been Such a Long Time Gone”
is about Hugh’s dream of returning to his homeland
someday, while “Stimala (Coal Train)” is about
the train that carried men to the Johannesburg mines.
Both tracks feature Jazz Crusaders drummer Stix Hooper
(Masekela’s longtime producer, Stewart Levine, also
produced the Crusaders at this time) and have very modern
production values, and both predate the arrival of a new
genre designation—world music—that would come
to represent the kind of inclusive music that artists
like Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba were creating.
The Heads Up Africa Series and Still
Grazing provide listeners with some excellent entry
points into the music of South Africa at the points where
it intersects jazz. Of course, there are many other artists,
such as Abdullah Ibrahim, who are required listening for
anyone interested in the development of South African
jazz. In addition, there are also points of intersection
between jazz and the music of West Africa, including such
artists as King Sunny Ade, Fela Kuti, and Boubacar Traore.
But for many listeners, these new and reissued recordings
will provide a doorway into an incredibly diverse musical
world that they have not previously known, nor even imagined.
