Reviewed by
SHERIDAN GRISWOLD
Correspondent

Hugh Masekela is well known to Batswana. A Few of his 40 albums were recorded in studios in Gaborone. These include Songs of Kalahari with Tsepo Tshola of Lesotho's Uhuru band. Kalahari in the early 1980s performed at the Woodpecker Inn. One of the favourites was Tsepo's Pula Ea Na. In 1985 they were working on Waiting for the Rain.

Odd that rain was a theme as it also brought serious losses a decade later to a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Botswana that scheduled a large concert starring Maskela at the Lion Park that got rained out - but his contract had no "rain check", so he still had to be paid. Their hit Don't Go Lose It, Baby made the charts in the United States of America (US) and won Kalahari a tour of the United Kingdom (UK) and US.

While working in Gaborone on the recording Techno Bush (1984) Hugie and his friends set up the Botswana International School of Music. They were even visited in Botswana by Bishop Trevor Huddleston, whom he had not seen for 22 years. It was Huddleston who had given him his first trumpet at St Peter's Secondary School in 1954, when Hugie was 15. He then performed in the Huddleston Jazz Band. In 1956, he received a trumpet from Louis Armstrong (Satchmo). Hugie leapt with joy - the book and record cover photo.

Masekela, in his autobiography, talks of leaving Botswana in 1985 as being "forced into a second exile". He had been arrested in Lesotho and more recently in Zimbabwe and now found he was a target of the raids on Botswana by the South African army.  His farewell concert with Kalahari was at the old Blue Note in Mogoditshane.

His first exile from Southern Africa was 25 years earlier, in 1960, and it took him to New York City, where he arrived on 27th of September, a 21-year-old following in the footsteps of Miriam Makebe, who had taken the States by storm the year before when she was sponsored there by Harry Belafonte, and had lived for six months with the SWAPO founder and representative in NYC, Mburumba Kerina. Kerina met Masekela on his arrival in Manhattan on the bus from the airport.

Masekela was soon performing at the Village Vanguard, and through it suddenly enmeshed in the world of music in New York City, meeting and playing with an extraordinary range of performers: Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Mingus and Johnny Coltrane, to name a few. On his first night in Manhattan, he moved between the Five Spot, Jazz Gallery and the Half Note.

"My favourite albums were coming alive right in front of my eyes. I could have been dreaming ... My Favourite Things kept ringing in my ears. I'll never forget that moment. It was one 'o'clock in the morning. September 27. I had not had a good sleep since my last night in London ... all my years of dreaming about what it would be like in America, none of these dreams came close to what I actually experienced".

Soon Masekela was enrolled to study at the Manhattan School of Music at 206 East 105th Street in East Harlem. Besides courses in music he studied English, French History and Psychology. Here many more doors opened for him. His fellow students included Herbie Hancok, Ron Carter, Astley Fennel and Sharon Johnson. The Belafonte Foundation supported Masekela's studies.

The Kerina's house was a centre of activism. There the young Hugie met a range of freedom fighters, representatives and political activists, including Nujoma and Kozonguizi, Maya Angelou and John Clarke, Ben Gurirab and Malcolm X. By his second year in school, he was beginning to get work "as a sessions man on recordings and club dates". Soon he was part of the fast life in the circles of music and art, including all nightstands, smoking and drinking and drugs-leading to a downside of life that would curse him for many years.

By May 1964 he was married to Miriam Makeba.  It didn't last and in 1968 he was married again to Chris Calloway, a turbulent marriage "filled with so much substance abuse that it felt like thirty years" instead of three months.

Masekela's story is overwhelmed by his boozing and consuming of women and music.

David Cosby introduced him to LSD. But his journey is greater than drugs and music - as implied in the subtitle of his book. He loved the music of the African Diaspora, but he was also a political creature and an anti-apartheid activist. He helped create the Tony Award winning Sarafina (1988) Best Score (Musical) with Mbongeni Ngema.  He became involved in the music of Nigeria and Zaire. He joined Paul Simon on his Graceland tour. He linked with Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. He says his trumpet was his "personal choice of weapon".

He writes that when he was four years old at a Jazz Maniacs concert, "I stood wide-eyed next to the lead trumpeter, Drakes Mbau, fascinated by all the gleaming silver instruments, the drums, guitar, and double bass. The band was tight and played all night, swinging and smiling and sweating and creating a widening circle of bliss that enthralled and hypnotised the wedding guests and left me thrilled and wrung out, dazzled and slack.

The band played and danced as if possessed by some uncontrollable magic. I fell asleep on the stage while the party raged on, and dreamed of big bands into the early morning. It was in those days in Witbank that music first captured my soul, forced me to recognise its power of possession. It hasn't let go yet".

His story really begins with his grandmother Johanna Mthise WaMandebele a Kwa Nnzunza, Mahlangu, Mabena, Mdungwa, Mganu-Ganu ka Maghobhoria Bowers of the "royal clan of the Ndzundzas, an aristocratic house of the Mahlangu Ndebele royal family".

It still continues today. My favourite song of Hugh Masekela's remains Stimela, a rare six minutes and 46 seconds long and part of the prize CD Stimela (1994). This year he released his latest Jazz collection, Phola (2009).

His retrospective recording, the best of his work, is Grazing in the Grass (2001) that includes a mix of re-recordings and new recordings of classics like Ziph'inkomo and Don't Go Lose it Baby. You can read about his life and listen to his music at the same time.

Dr D Michael Cheers, who helped create this great read, taught at the University of Mississippi and was an editor of Ebony. Cheers also wrote Songs of my People and Mission Accomplished.

E-mail sheridangriswold@yahoo.com