Famed jazz horn player Hugh Masekela performing in 2009. (Photo: Tom Beetz / Wikimedia Commons) 
Forty-some years ago, my wife and I were sitting in a Mexican restaurant in downtown Philadelphia for lunch. We were concentrating on our tacos and enchiladas and were not focusing on the background music being played, sounds that were probably the usual stereotypical Mexican mariachi-style music suitable for such a restaurant. Then, suddenly, there was that unforgettable, unmistakable staccato cowbell sound and those unique trumpet riffs, and we were enveloped in Hugh Masekela’s Grazin’ in the Grass. We were only recently back in the US for work, after our first assignment in South Africa, and now, suddenly, at least in our imaginations and memories, we were right back in South Africa again.
Never mind that this great tune would not have been heard on South African radio, nor easily come by in any local record stores at the time, but it had been a number one hit on the American charts in 1968, and it had been played incessantly for months almost everywhere. Hugh had been living in the US for half a decade by the time it was composed, recorded, and released, and it captured the popular imagination almost instantly. It could easily have been a musical paean to a homeland now lost to the composer, a place he would not visit again until 1990. Or maybe it was just a dizzyingly great tune out of Africa as constructed in the mind of the composer. Besides Grazin’ in the Grass, of course, Hugh Masekela went on to compose and record dozens of other fine tunes, but it was Grazin’ in the Grass that made him a musical household name internationally, early in his career.
As a youngster, at the famed St Peter’s School for African students in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, Masekela had apparently been a troublesome child in class. When asked by the school’s legendary head, the Anglican priest, Trevor Huddleston, what would help the young Masekela to settle down, the student had instantly replied, “a trumpet!”; Masekela had already fallen in love with the sound and the idea of the trumpet and trumpet player after seeing Kirk Douglas in the 1950 film, Young Man With a Horn, based on a novel that had been inspired by the life of Bix Beiderbecke. And he knew where he wanted to go.
View the trailer for Young Man With a Horn:
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Recognising talent, or perhaps just wanting the key to helping the boy to settle down, Huddleston scraped together the money to purchase a trumpet for him, as well as to pay for lessons, and this became a perfect fit for him. Eventually Huddleston even managed to meet Louie Armstrong during a trip to the US and Huddleston obtained a horn from the star – as a gift for his pupil in Johannesburg. Just imagine that moment and the effect it would have had on a still-unknown, teenaged student in Johannesburg, back in the 1950s, to be able to hold – and to play – an instrument that had already been owned by a world-famous performer like Armstrong. Some powerful stuff, that.
Horn in hand and still a teenager, by 1956 Masekela was already a regular in Johannesburg jazz and dance bands performing in cities across the country, and by 19, he was a member of the pit orchestra for the country’s great hit show, King Kong, the musical composed by Todd Matshikiza. King Kong told the story of the rise and fall of a local boxer Ezekiel “King Kong” Dlamini and it became a legendary show, combining the talents of black and white South Africans in putting it together, despite the restrictions of apartheid.
Upon his passing, the New York Times wrote of Masekela after his first successes,
“The next year he joined Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand) and four other upstart instrumentalists in the Jazz Epistles, South Africa’s first bebop band of note. With a heavy, driving pulse and warm, arcing melodies, their music was distinctly South African, even as its swing rhythms and flittering improvisations reflected affinities with American jazz. ‘There had never been a group like the Epistles in South Africa,’ Mr. Masekela said in his 2004 autobiography, Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela, written with D. Michael Cheers. ‘Our tireless energy, complex arrangements, tight ensemble play, languid slow ballads and heart-melting, hymn-like dirges won us a following, and soon we were breaking all attendance records in Cape Town.’ ”
But King Kong also took the cast and orchestra to London on what was supposed to be a much larger international tour. Successful in London, it never moved to Broadway, but many of the cast and musicians decided not to return to South Africa, including Jonas Gwangwa, Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba – and the young Hugh Masekela. Masekela promptly enrolled in the Guildhall School of Music, but it was not a good fit. Instead, he gained admission to the Manhattan School of Music in New York City under the encouragement of singer Harry Belafonte where he studied classical trumpet and roamed the clubs of a city that was near the peak of its time for progressive jazz, listening to the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, among others. Eager to become a jazz performer in that idiom, he got advice from the likes of Davis to draw upon his own musical heritage and make that music his own instead. (During that period, he was married to Miriam Makeba for several years and although the marriage did not last, their friendship and musical collaboration did.)
By the time my wife and I had returned to South Africa in 1989, it was becoming clear that apartheid was a dying ideology and musicians and other expatriated performers were beginning to figure out how to manage their respective returns to South Africa after long periods of exile. One afternoon, I received a phone call in our office in Pretoria – I never caught the actual name of the caller – and he told us we had to present ourselves at Kippies that night. That was it. By this time in the unravelling of apartheid, that could have meant almost anything, and so, curiosity aroused, we drove to Johannesburg to enter the city’s best known jazz club in Newtown, close to the Market Theatre. It was packed with people and most of those faces were rather well known members of the country’s black music elite or black political figures with a love for jazz.
The first set was well played by some local folks, but there was nothing earth-shaking about it. Then, as the musicians took their respective seats after the break, a short-ish, solidly built man carrying a trumpet case strode into the venue, opened up that instrument case and pulled out a horn and did a few rituals to get ready, and then just played. And played. And the crowd exploded at the sounds from a musical hero – finally returned home from a far distant place. Without any publicity or public warning, it was Hugh Masekela’s first public gig in South Africa after three decades abroad.
Years later, when we returned to South Africa for a third assignment and then retirement here, we became better acquainted with him. By then he had shaken off alcohol and substance abuse problems that had dogged him for decades; he had moved to a home out in Bryanston where he began gardens of vegetables and fruit trees and took up, of all things, the oriental exercise routine of tai-chi to keep him limber and ready for the rigours of live performance. My wife was teaching in a school nearby Masekela’s home and she remembers seeing him taking long walks through the neighbourhood.
In 2010 and ’11, he was a major part of the very successful Market Theatre production, Songs of Migration – both in Johannesburg and internationally. About Masekela’s contribution, Market Theatre artistic director James Ngcobo said, “Bra Hugh was many things to a whole lot of people who interacted with him, he was a mentor who loved nothing but sharing his passion of storytelling and heritage. The whole company that was involved in the creation of Songs of Migration would echo these words and say that around him they had clarity, guidance and a deep sense of memory.”
Songs of Migration recounted the music that so many people had brought with them to Johannesburg from throughout South and southern Africa as they came to work on the mines, as well as the music of immigrant groups from Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Paired up with renowned singer Sibongile Khumalo, as well as back-up singers and a full on-stage band, it was still Hugh Masekela who brought down the house with his horn playing, his singing, his dancing (!) and his storytelling. And it was his song, Stimela – once again with the cowbells and his gravelly, rasping voice – that told of the tribulations of so many men forced into mine work to feed families, but only if they left their homes.
Watch: Hugh Masekela – Stimela