Rock Paper Scissors - Hugh Masekela, 2010 North American Tour

A musician of incredible spirit and talent, trumpter/vocalist Hugh Masekela brings his South African roots and global influences to the Dakota this week, October 20-21.

Hugh Masekela was born in Witbank, South Africa, where he began singing and playing piano as a child. After seeing the film, Young Man With A Horn, with Kirk Douglas as Bix Beiderbecke, 14-year-old Hugh started on a trumpet provided by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, the anti-apartheid chaplain at St. Peters Secondary School. Inspired by the music he heard on gramophone records of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Fats Waller, the Mills Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and more, he also fell under the spell of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Chet Baker. With his classmates he formed the Huddleston Jazz Band, South Africa's very first youth orchestra. After playing with other dance bands, he joined Alfred Herbert's African Jazz Revue in 1956. In 1958, he played in the orchestra for the highly successful King Kong musical written by Todd Matshikiza, which toured South Africa for a year with Miriam Makeba before moving on to a two-year run in London.

Next Masekela joined forces with Dollar Brand (now Abdullah Ibrahim) to form the Jazz Epistles, the first African jazz group on record in the country, and performed in Johannesburg and Cape Town through late 1959 to early 1960. But soon the brutality of the Sharpeville Massacre and Apartheid government’s ban on group gatherings led Masekela to leave his homeland, and with help from Hugh Trevor Huddleston, Yehudi Menuhin and John Dankworth (among others), enrolled in London´s Guildhall School of Music. He later was admitted to the Manhattan School of Music, with help from Miriam Makeba, Harry Belafonte, Dizzy Gillespie and John Mehagan. Soon he began recording with Makeba (who he married in 1964 and divorced in 1966), and in 1963, recorded his first solo album, Trumpet Africaine. His big break came in 1965 with a live performance of The Americanization of Ooga Booga, produced by Tom Wilson (Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel).

After his divorce from Makeba, Masekela relocated to Los Angeles, and began a recording relationship with MCA’s UNI subsidiary, releasing such hits as The Emancipation of Hugh Masekela, Africa ’68, and The Promise of a Future, which included his 1968 super hit “Grazing in the Grass.” With MCA’s Stewart Levine, he formed Chisa Records, releasing his own music as well as that of The Crusaders, Letta Mbulu and Monk Montgomery. Before it folded in the early 70s, Chisa released Hugh’s Reconstruction and Hugh Masekela and the Union of South Africa. He began to dig more seriously into his African heritage, moving to Guinea, Liberia and Ghana, and recordingHome Is Where the Music Is. In Nigeria, Masekela met Fela Kuti who introduced him to his “afro beat;” Hugh was inspired to a five-year collaboration with the Ghanian band Hedzoleh Soundz, yielding several successful recordings including I Am Not Afraid, featuring his compositions In the “Market Place,” “African Secret Society,” and “Coal Train.” He continued in a more marketable vein in the mid to late 70s with Casablanca Records, merging disco, pop, and soul with African forms.

After touring with Herb Alpert, Masekela reunited with Makeba in 1980 for a famed concert in Lesotho. The next year, Hugh moved to Botswana, cofounding the Botswana International School of Music and later establishing a mobile studio where he recorded the dance hit album,Techno-Bush. Yet political massacre again forced him to leave Africa with his band Kalahari in 1985. Relocating to England, he recorded Tomorrow, featuring his hit “Bring Him Back Home” (“Mandela”), and cowrote the mbaqaga musical, Sarafina, which had a successful run on Broadway in the late 1980s and gained a Tony nomination. Masekela next toured with Paul Simon’s Graceland (which included Ladysmith Balck Mambazo and Miriam Makeba). He finally returned home to South Africa after the release ofMandela in 1990, and launched his first South African tour with his bands Sankomota and Bayete, yielding the DVD release, Homecoming Concert. With his new label Columbia, Hugh released Black to the Future and Sixty in the early 90s. He has since continued an active touring schedule throughout the world, adding his flugelhorn and voice to Bob Marley’s early recordings and bringing a message of peace and harmony wherever he goes.

“I come from a nation that has fought very hard for its dignity, liberation, and human freedom. Yet as Africans, we’ve never been able to project our image ourselves. We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking our culture is barbaric and savage. A lot of people think progress is what they see on TV. They’ve been turned into consumers who don’t produce anything. But our heritage is our biggest wealth. It’s more diverse and richer than anything else we have. And it is the only thing that cannot be taken away from us.” – Hugh Masekela

The Dakota is located at 1010 Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis; tickets (7 and 9:30 pm) are available at www.dakotacooks.com.