Growth, Growth and More Growth – An Interview with Hugh Masekela
By George Burrows
February 28, 2015
Live Gig Shots spoke with South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela via email prior to his March 3, 2015 concert at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City, Iowa. Hugh stated that his performance was “… aimed at giving great performances of South African music while enjoying our debut as a duo.”
Jazz is an old form of music (exact age is unknown). It is now 2015 and many things have changed. Does 2015 jazz reflect what has happened in the world?
I don’t connect music with human world events and politics. As a result, I cannot comment from this perspective. I love music for itself and do not categorize it.
“Bix” Beiderbecke was an early influence on you via the film Young Man With a Horn, and later the record Clifford Brown Max Roach Quintet.
The film inspired me to play the trumpet because of Harry James’s sound on the track. Clifford Brown was an amazing musician and made the trumpet into a beautiful vehicle for excellent playing. I will never reach his technical prowess and harmonic genius but I’m still trying to get there.
What was the impact of your performance at the first Watts Jazz Festival in Los Angeles?
It made me stay and live in Los Angeles because of the large attendance. I had never had such a big following before. In LA, I carved a universal audience and made unplanned hit records. It is from there that I was hurled onto the human race.
In 1967 it was your trumpet solo on The Byrds’ “So You Want To Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” which helped propel the song as an anthem of the excesses in rock ’n’ roll fame. (I believe “Grazing in the Grass” followed?)
I don’t and have never known the lyrics, I just played from a musical platform at the request of David Crosby and Jimmy McGuinn. Crosby became a dear friend from then on.
Roger McGuinn later explained the connection:
“Well, we’d known Hugh Masekela. At that point, we had a manager named Larry Spector, and Hugh was working with Larry, too. So, we knew Hugh, he was just around, and we admired his work and got him in there…”
— Roger McGuinn, Musicangle, 2004
Currently you are on tour with another South African musical icon, Vusi Mahlasela, in recognition of the start of democracy in South Africa. How did the collaboration materialize into “20 Years of Freedom”?
The tour is called that by the promoters and agency, we just aimed at giving great performances of South African music while enjoying our debut as a duo.
In 2004 your autobiography Still Grazing was described as a must-have item of world-music documentation and a revealing chronicle of growing up black under apartheid and living long enough to see that system fall. In a few words, what would you add eleven years later?
Growth, growth and more growth. Theatre production, acting, writing, community works and the promotion of African Heritage restoration into the lives of our indigenous society as an antidote against being consumed by other cultures.