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MUSIC EXTRA - HUGH MASEKELA: WORDS AND MUSIC (96kbs-m4a/35mb/49mins)
BBC World Service broadcast: 27th January 2018
The BBC’s Audrey Brown pays tribute to one of the best known trumpeters in the world - Hugh Masekela. Known affectionately as Bra Hugh, Masekela was a man whose personality was as big as the sound he blew through his trumpet.
Masekela’s love affair with music started very early in life. He picked up his first trumpet at the age of 14, a gift by the British anti-apartheid activist Trevor Huddleston. In 1956, Huddleston arranged for another trumpet to be given to the young Masekela. It was from another musical giant Louis Armstrong – and, as Masekela said, that small gesture changed his life and helped launch a career that spanned over 50 years and took him all over the world. But life was struggle. He spent three decades in exile – unable even to return to apartheid South Africa to bury his mother. And his music became one of the sounds of the struggle to overthrow apartheid. We look back at his life – the struggles, the sorrows, the passions and the joys – through his own words and music.
Producer: Penny Dale
(Photo: Hugh Masekela (centre) Marcus Miller and Guillaume Perret perform at the International Jazz Day 2015, Paris. Credit: Kristy Sparow/Getty Images)
DESERT ISLAND DISCS: CLASSIC DESERT ISLAND DISCS - HUGH MASEKELA (320kbs-m4a/78mb/34mins)
BBC Radio 4 broadcast: 1st April 2018
Another chance to listen to the world famous musician speaking to Sue Lawley in 2004. As a boy growing up in the impoverished townships of South Africa, he was inspired to learn the trumpet after seeing Kirk Douglas play Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man With A Horn. He begged one of his teachers - the anti-apartheid crusader Father Trevor Huddleston - to buy him a horn and in return he promised to stay out of trouble.
Hugh soon made a name for himself in South Africa but as the racial tensions intensified during the 50s he decided he had to leave his homeland to get a better music education in America. There he quickly made a name for himself with his fusion of African jazz music and became a 'flower child' playing with some of the great bands of the decade: Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and the Byrds. He's still probably best known for his number-one track, Grazing in the Grass, which sold four million copies worldwide in 1968. He returned to Africa in 1973, spending the next 17 years working on a range of musical collaborations in Botswana, Liberia, Nigeria, Congo and Guinea. Then, after thirty years in self-imposed exile, he returned to his homeland in 1990.
Favourite track: Lilizela Mlilezeli by Mahlathini & the Mahotella Queens
Book: Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Luxury: A keyboard
Mahlathini And The Mahotella Queens - Lilizela Mlilezeli [Kaz]
Louis Armstrong - Rockin' Chair [Accord]
Miles Davis - All Blues [Columbia]
Dizzy Gillespie - Con Alma [Verve]
Billie Holiday - You've Changed [CBS]
Franco & Sam Mangwana - Fabrice Akende Sango [CBS]
Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir - Radke, Mama Radke [Philips]
Louis Armstrong - When It's Sleepy Time Down South [Columbia]