29 March 2006
Wednesday 29 March 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
On Night Waves this evening, Philip Dodd talks to legendary South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela.
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Given his first trumpet as a schoolboy by Anglican priest and ANC campaigner Trevor Huddleston, Masekela exchanged the horrors of Apartheid repression to jam with jazz greats in New York , but life in 1960s America was no wonderland. In a sinister echo of the regime he'd left behind, Masekela was stopped by the police on the way to his first concert- just for being black. Nor did things go quite to plan musicallyr - his idols Miles Davies and Dizzy Gillespie advised him not to try to follow in their footsteps. Masekela should embrace his own unique style, they said, and with it the rhythms and traditions of the townships in which he grew up.
And it turned out to be good advice... More than four decades on, Masekela remains the only African to have a number one hit in America . Now returned from exile and living in South Africa , he's devoted much of his life to battling racism, and to more personal ills - successfully battling drink and drugs. Music, however, remains paramount - it is, Masekela says, his religion.
