Afropop Interview / Hugh Masekela

Afropop Interview / Hugh Masekela

www.afropop.org 

Hugh Masekela-2002  
Place and Date: New York City
2002 
Interviewer: Banning Eyre 


Hugh Masekela came to New York in November, 2002, to do press around his
new release, Time. The city clearly awakened nostalgia for the South
African legend, who has been coming here for over forty years. Banning
Eyre and Christina Zafagna caught him at the end of a long day of
meetings and interviews, but Hugh wasn't tired, and certainly not shy.
Here's our interview. 


Banning Eyre: I'm struck right away that you have a Louis Armstrong
compilation in front of you. Because I was feeling Louis Armstrong in
many of the tracks on this record. 

Hugh Masekela: Really? 


B.E.: Yeah. Tell us about your relationship with Louis, artistically. 

Hugh: I think that anybody from the 20th century, up to now, has to be
aware that if it wasn't for Louis Armstrong, we'd all be wearing
powdered wigs. I think that Louis Armstrong loosened the world, helped
people to be able to say "Yeah," and to walk with a little dip in their
hip. Before Louis Armstrong, the world was definitely square, just like
Christopher Columbus thought. Louis Armstrong paved the way for the
African American experience to access European and Western social life.
Because after Louis Armstrong, everybody started speaking slang. What
was amazing about Louis was that he never finished a paragraph without
mentioning New Orleans. He had a great sense of self, and how he got to
be where he was. He was an inspiration to everybody when I was a kid,
during the days of the Gramaphone. 

Just by coincidence, the man who got me my first trumpet at my boarding
school, Father Trevor Huddleston, was expelled from South Africa.
Everybody, after about six months of playing the trumpet, went to Trevor
Huddleston and said, "Father, could I have a trumpet? Could I have a
trombone?" And we finally ended up with the Huddleston Jazz Band. And
then he was expelled by the South African government because he was such
a forward, vociferous and aggressive foe of apartheid, and he was a
nightmare for [President] Verwoerd. So on his way back to England, he
came here, because they have some missions here. In fact, there is one
in New York on 10th Avenue, and they have another one in Rochester where
there was a clarinet-playing priest from his order, who also was crazy
about Dixieland and had befriended Louis Armstrong. So he introduced
Father Huddleston to Louis Armstrong, and Huddleston told him about the
band he had started back in South Africa and Louis Armstrong send us a
trumpet. We received it when Louis Armstrong was touring Africa. He
wasn't allowed to come to South Africa, but his trumpet came, and it put
us in the front pages of all the written media in South Africa,
including white media where they had never seen black faces on the front
page before. 


Later, of course, when I came to the States I got to meet him. Miriam
Makeba helped me to come here, and Dizzy Gillespie was a really dear
friend of his. He remained the funniest person that I've ever known. He
had one story after another and he really enjoyed life. I think the
greatest thing about Louis Armstrong was that he never became an adult.
He remained playful. He remained a child, and that child personality
made him very appealing to everybody. That and the fact that he knew
where his roots were. Like I said, he couldn't talk for a paragraph
without mentioning New Orleans. He always spoke like he owed a debt to
New Orleans. 

I think that was the greatest inspiration for me, because I don't think
I would be what I am if I didn't come from South Africa. I owe an
endless debt to the people of South Africa and all those other African
communities all over the world that I have accessed, and lived with and
learned their music. Because we're all born naked. We don't come here
with anything, but we never learn to pay back. When we make it, we
always think that we did it on our own. 


B.E.: You first came her
e in the late '50s, right? 

Hugh:1960. I arrived the day that Castro left the Waldorf to go and live
at the Theresa Hotel, and it was a couple of days after Khrushchev had
banged his shoe on the lectern at the U.N. and said, "We will bury you!"
Lumumba was here, and Kennedy was campaigning against Nixon for the
presidency. It was the time of Martin Luther King and civil rights and
Belafonte, one of my sponsors, was the greatest fund raiser for civil
rights. It was the time of the emergence of Malcolm X. And I came here
right into the golden age of jazz, when you could go to the Apollo and
see a whole gospel or Latino show, and you could go to Wells and see
Abby Lincoln and Mel Waldron, and come downtown to Birdland and see Duke
Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and go to Basin St. West and see Sarah
Vaughn and Count Basie, and go to the Half Note and see Coletrane and
Miles, and then cross over and see Horace Silver and Les McCann at the
Village Gate, and at the Jazz Gallery it would be Monk and Dizzy, and
across the street at Five Spot would be Max Roach and Charlie Mingus. It
was that kind of a time. You could go to the Coronet in Brooklyn. And
you'd do all this if you were a student on like less than twenty bucks.
Today, twenty bucks doesn't even get you into a club. 


B.E.: Well, I was thinking about that history and all that's happened to
you, here and in South Africa. Your new record is called Time, so I
guess you're thinking about that kind of perspective as well. How does
the world look different to you now? Let's talk first about this place,
America. New York. How is it different from the world you found in 1960?


Hugh:It doesn't look that different. You know, I always think of my life
from a musical perspective, and music doesn't really change. The
industry has tried to change it and tried to label it and categorize it.
But music: you either like it or you don't, and it makes life simple
because it's not translatable as a language. You know, it goes to the
heart and the mind. 

I have the greatest joke about New York. When we brought Sarafina to New
York, the kids were like fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and one of the lead
singers, who had just turned fifteen, said to me, "Uncle Hugh, there's
going to be a very big carnival happening in New York, right?" 
I said, "Why do you think that?" 
She said, "They are preparing. All over, they are digging. They are
fixing things and all that. Something very big is going to happen." 
I said, "This is New York. I've been here like seventeen years. They've
been doing the same thing." 


She said, "Ah, you like to joke! You're so funny." And then, about three
years later, we were on Broadway and they were still digging, and I
said, "So when do you think the carnival is going to be?" And she said,
"Leave me alone." She still lives in New York and whenever I see her, I
say, "Carnival's coming soon." 

When I came here as a student in 1960, the big slogan was, Con Edison
had a big billboard that said, "Dig we must for a greater New York." But
they're always digging. Can you dig it? 


B.E.: I dig it. Alright, let's talk about your side. You weren't able to
go to South Africa for how long? 

Hugh:Thirty years. 


B.E.: So what's it like to live there again now? 

Hugh: Well, for me it's a real bonanza because I never thought I'd be
able to go back home, and I've been back twelve years. And in twelve
years, I've been able to get to the point where like this album Time is
on Chissa Records, which is our own label. I think that, except for like
the young musicians who are into like what is called kwaito--South
African hip-hop or whatever you call it--they are the first people to do
their own productions. It the same way it happened when reggae started
in Jamaica or when samba became a craze in Brazil. We're just getting
into a stage where we're building the first steps towards creating our
own industry, and our own manufacturing, wholesaling and marketing, and
hopefully our own distribution. And our own broad
casting. But that's
going to take time because we are trying to access a business that was
previously white owned. With Chissa, we're trying to set up something
that is modeled on Motown, where there's collaboration instead of
divided artists. We all try to bring like excellence out of each other. 

After being home for twelve years, this is the first time I've been able
to do what I dreamed of doing when I went back--to unlock the excellence
of all the diverse talent that is there. There are big bands there, and
there's nostalgia. There's music I first heard when I was a kid. There
are bands that I grew up with. So it's like a kaleidoscope of what is
available in South Africa. We did this by choosing the material first
and then rehearsing it so that when we got into the studio we wouldn't
spend much time, so we could afford it. But the reaction we have gotten!
This is the first album I've done since I went back to Africa that is
really getting international attention. It means that this kind of
collaboration has a universal appeal. 


And our other two artists--we just did Sepho Tsola and we did Busi
Mhlongo that we just finished last Friday--their albums were done the
same way. And it's the beginning. I'm just one of the people who's
beginning to get to the point where the music industry won't be owned by
the old establishment five years from now. That to me is one of the most
exciting things. I'd like to be able to do it in television. I'd like to
be able to do it in film, events. In anything where we have been
consumers, I'd like to see us becoming retailers and manufacturers and
exporters. Having not been allowed into enterprise until a few years
ago--we were just a cheap labor, mega warehouse for exploitation--that's
the exciting part for me. I wish I was younger because it's going to
take a long time. 

But the main thing is planting the seed and changing the mindset not
only of our people to say, "Yes, I can," but also changing the mindset
of the old establishment who are the people who are really free because
they have the economic wherewithal to enjoy freedom and to do something
that could make South Africa the beacon of Africa as far as arts are
concerned, by having a real African industry. 

Spike Lee said it long ago. He was one of the patrons of the Africa Arts
Fund--we used to like raise funds here to educate South Africans in the
arts--and at one of our fundraisers he made a speech and he said, "The
one thing you shouldn't kid yourselves about is to think that when South
Africa is free, the ones who oppressed you and made all this money off
of your backs are going to turn around and say, 'Sorry that we oppressed
you for all these years. Here's five-hundred-trillion dollars to show
you how sorry we are.' It's not part of human nature. It's never
happened anywhere in the world, and why people should expect it to
happen in South Africa--it's kind of naīve." 

So to a certain extent, we have freed the people who were privileged
before because now there is no longer an international embargo against
them. They are the ones who are benefiting from the efforts we put in to
free ourselves. That's one thing we learned from Mandela, who said,
"Well, whatever it is, it's better than destroying the place. So build
on whatever it is." We are not expecting to see any good will charity
from the people who fed off, who still feed off us. I don't like for
people to see South Africa disappearing into the horizon singing
"Hi-De-Ho, Hi-De-Hi." All the solidarity groups that supported us and
all the NGOs that supported us have left and said, "You're free now.
Good luck. We have to go." 

To that extent, life is more difficult than before, but nobody is
harassing us, and we have opportunities open to us. We obviously won't
get the funding to have a revival of our excellence from the people who
oppressed us before, because it would mean that they did something wrong
before. So we have to generate it ourselves. I'm just generating a
picture of what we are facing. 
But we certainly have the talent. That
can't be taken away from us. And we have the enthusiasm and we have the
will, and I think that in the long run, maybe my nephew sitting here
with me now, maybe his generation will be the ones who like run away
with it and come up with the industries that we are trying to establish
right now. 


B.E.: On the musical side, I think this is a strong album. It's varied,
passionate, engaged, and it covers all these different genres. One thing
that really strikes me is your singing. I always thought of you as a
horn player who sang, but you really have some great singing on here. It
seems to me that you've risen to a new level as a singer here. Do you
think that's true? 

Hugh:Well, I think I'm a healthier person. I had quite a delinquent
life. I got by a lot with talent, but six years ago, I decided to like
admit to myself that I was like an alcoholic and a druggie and decided
to go into recovery. When I came out, not only did I go public, but it
became a passion of mine to help people like myself. In the process, I
think that my thinking got clearer. My focus got sharper. And I knew
what to go after. And all the things that I thought I could do well when
I was high, I was very wrong about. In the five years that I've been
clean, miracles have happened for me in every way, in my private life
and in my creative life. 

I actually handed in my last 77 pages of my manuscript today for my
autobiography, which Random House is very excited about. We had a major,
high-powered meeting today and they'll be publishing it. That has taken
seven years, but in the last five years, I was really able to do it
because I was focused. And I think that it's like that with everything.
At first, it looked like a stretch, because when you're high, you're
recovering every day, so you're working at ten-percent of your
capability. But you are straight, you first remember what you really
felt like as a child, and once you have regurgitated all those things
that made you unhappy and wanting to hide behind a mind-altered state.
Addictive people do things in excess. Other people can have a glass of
wine or take one toke off a joint and say, "I got to do what I got to
do." But a person like me, if I go to a party, they have to chase me
away. [LAUGHS] "Hugh, we want to sleep. You've been here for three days,
now, and the booze is finished." "It is!?" 


So I think that comes out in the last three projects I've done. But I've
finally got the window, and seen where to go, and it feels great. 


B.E.: The music speaks well for that. 

Hugh: I also had great collaborators. You know, all the people that I
admired and should have worked with earlier, I finally identified them
and said, "Let's do this," and they were almost like, "Damn, we've been
waiting for you to get like this so we can do it." 


B.E.: It's a hell of a band. 

Hugh: Yeah, just wonderful people too. You know, at home, we're trying
to come up with funding to tour this contingency. It's a 20-piece band,
with like eight vocalists. When we did the launch for this album, we had
everybody again, plus a 50-piece choir and it was just massive. It was
fantastic. For me, the joy of it all was I never thought it would happen
in my lifetime again, so I'm doing it with the enthusiasm of a child.
I'm like a pig in swill. I never thought I'd be able to do this music
with its owners, the people who can really express it. It's just
wonderful to be back home. 


B.E.: That's wonderful. Let me just ask you about a few of the songs.
"Happy Mama." That's really got that mbaqanga thing. To me, it's an
interesting marriage of a jazz vocal approach and mbaqanga. Tell me how
that came about. 


Hugh:It's an old song. "Send Me" and "Happy Mama" are like folk songs.
"Happy Mama" was sung mostly by prisoners long ago. When I come out of
jail, my mother is happy to see me. It's just a natural thing. It's a
sing-along. And "Send Me" was a conciliatory song that was sung mostly
at wakes. In South Africa, up to 
today, when somebody dies, you go to
console the people and all week you go to the house and sing at night,
and it's actually like a kind of township gospel song. But all these
songs are songs of hope, encouragement, and conciliation, also
celebration and joy. And "Happy Mama" was picked up by--I don't know if
you've seen Amandla [the film]--but there are some guys who sing it.
They picked it up when they were in the camps. That's a song that was
picked up by the liberation movement and became one of their themes. 

On both songs, I put English inserts there to be able to explain it,
because all the years that I used to live here, people would say, "Hugh,
that's a beautiful song. What are you singing about?" They're often like
two-or-three word songs, that get the message across. So with this
album, like "Saduva," we've got English lyrics, just to explain what the
song is about so people will feel like they're participating in the
experience. 


B.E.: And you sing in French on "Ce Soir." 

Hugh: Mais oui, Monsieur. [LAUGHS] 


B.E.: And I gather from the notes that it's a little bit tongue in
cheek. 

Hugh: Yeah, it's a stupid song. [LAUGHS] It's a stupid song about a guy
who sees this girl who only speaks patois when she hears samba music,
and he's obviously after her, and then when she hears it, she starts to
cry and then she disappears while they are dancing the samba. And then
he says she doesn't speak any English or French, but a whole lot of Zulu
and Chinese. This is very bizarre, and he says, "Yesterday, she called
me so that we could go dancing, but this time, I'm not going to let her
go." It's a joke, but you can tell it was written by someone who has
been to a lot of movies. 




B.E.: On a slightly more serious note, in "Cochita," you're dealing with
the whole Latin music thing. 

Hugh:Yeah, well that was my first entrée to American. I went to school
in Spanish Harlem. When I came here, the Manhattan School of Music was
on 105th St. between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, and like the second generation
of Puerto Ricans were about my age at the time. It was the time of West
Side Story, and the Palladium. Tito Puente was the king, and Celia Cruz
was in here thirties. You know what I mean? Eddie and Charlie Palmieri
were still young people. Ray Baretto was still a teenager. Willie Colon
and Pacheco and all these people were there, and I went out with a lot
of a great mamitas, and I could do a major charanga and pachanga, and I
was taught by those people. Ella Breu (??) was like 19-years old when he
joined my band. He was a genius who came out of the Tito Puente band and
we went to school together. So I got to be able to speak pretty good
Puerto Riceņo. Oh, goņa, Mami!. It's a world that I know very, very
vividly. 


B.E.: That's interesting, because I've spent a lot of time in West and
Central Africa. 

Hugh: So did I. 


B.E.: And there, as you know, the influence of Latin and Cuban music is
so much stronger than it is in South Africa. South Africa was sort of
insulated from all that during the 1940s and 50s, wouldn't you say? 

Hugh: We were more exposed to like African-American pop and jazz, and
not only that, but there's nothing we didn't know about Glen Miller or
Benny Goodman or Frank Sinatra, or Tommy Dorsey or Jimmy Dorsey. 




B.E.: Which was much less felt in West Africa. 

Hugh:Right. They didn't know it. They were more exposed to the
Caribbean, because most of the people of the Caribbean come from them.
Like, the South African experience is a great parallel to a great extent
to that of the African American people here. Also the hopes, and the
styles. I think that for urban life--you know, because we were a rural
people--when we came to the cities and we had to learn urban life and
Western life, the only model that we had access to was the African
American experience, because here were people who came out of slavery
and became third-class citizens when they were so-called "freed." Just
like in South Africa, their slavery really 
didn't go, and it's still
very evident when you go to the African American neighborhoods, or even
the Latino neighborhoods in this country. You can still see the bigotry
lingering that affects their lives. 

But still, the most sparkling people socially in this country are the
African Americans and Latinos. All over the world, everybody tries to
dress like them, to sing like them, to dance like them, to cook like
them, to walk like them, to talk like them. And I think that was a great
inspiration to us. You know, you can be oppressed, but there's something
that they can't take away from you, your talent and your sparkle. They
sure have the sparkle. 


B.E.: I have to ask you about a personal favorite of mine, kind of a
message song, and a powerful one, "Change." Tell me about that song. 

Hugh: One thing "Change" is going to do is curtail my traveling around
Africa. That's for sure. But you know, there are a lot of things that
are wrong. In the '80s, artists were singing a lot about South Africa.
There was the Live Aid, the starvation thing. They seem to have always
gotten their inspiration for social commentary about things that were
going wrong. At one time in this country, it was the civil rights. There
were a lot of protest songs. And then it was the anti-Vietnam war
movement. And then it became the poverty thing in Africa. But in South
Africa, everything was very militant. When we had guns facing us, and
tanks and bullets, we used to take to the street at the slightest
infringement of any of our rights. But since we voted, we've become very
complacent, and we sort of don't know how to translate what freedom is.
Because when politicians lead you into the freedom loop, they don't give
you a prescription of how to live when you are free. By then, they are
completely obsessed with their own successes, and their own inroads, and
amnesia sets in. 

I just feel like there are too many things that are going on that are
wrong in Africa: the generals with their surrogate wars that are really
inspired by greed for the cheap international price of raw materials.
There are people that just feel that they own the countries that have
chosen them as leaders, and they never want to retire. These are things
that have to be said. 

When I did "Change"*. I don't compose songs. They are sent to me. Songs
that are meaningful are sent to you. I was saying earlier that everyone
of us wakes up with a song of the day. We all wake up humming a tune.
But sometimes, if you are a musician, that space is occupied by a song
that was sent to you and you feel that this song has to be heard and
it's something that has to be said. And yes, change is very, very badly
needed in Africa. But we have to realize that for the international
business establishment, they prefer Africa in turmoil because then the
raw materials are available at cheap prices, so it's in the interest of
many people who are in business to make sure that there is turmoil in
Africa, to make sure that exploitable societies never progress, because
otherwise, who's going to like sweep? Who's going to collect the
garbage. 




B.E.: I mentioned Thomas Mapfumo earlier, and one of the reasons I'm
writing about him is that he is someone who has stood for that principle
over the years, never accepting the idea that just because we've won our
freedom, the fight is over. No, there's always another fight. I told him
that you mention Mugabe by name in that song, and he was very pleased
about that. 

Hugh: [LAUGHS] Well, the thing is, what we always have to remember is
that the source of our success is the people we come from. We can't
forget where we came from. Again, I have to bring up Louis Armstrong. So
you have to pay back, because when you are born, you are born naked. You
don't come here with anything. My grandmother always reminded me that
when I was born, I didn't bring any money, I didn't have anywhere to
sleep, and it took me three years to show me where the bathroom was.
They taught me how to talk. They taught me h
ow to think. They taught me
how to walk. I lived rent-free, and they clothed me and gave me food for
seventeen years. I would never be able to repay them, but at least, I
must always acknowledge that when I came into this world, I didn't know
shit, and that if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't know anything. If you
live by that motto, I think that you are not only able to pay back, but
it sort of helps to center you. You have to remember that. You didn't
make it by yourself. 


Christina Zafagna: I have one last thought going off that. You were
talking about paying homage to the people who came before you. I
appreciate a lot of older music, music that not a lot of my
contemporaries listen to, and your last song "Old People, Old Folks"
talks about how old people listen to music too and still have their
finger on the pulse. I was wondering think we can create more fusion
between younger and older people through music. 

Hugh:We have to not follow advertising as much as we do, and not exclude
old people from our lives. They're the only ones who know who we are.
That's the one thing that I've been able never to forget. I hang out a
lot with the older people. When I came back home, one of the things that
I thought I'd do was to relearn the languages and be very proficient in
them. We have long family praises. I was telling Nicole today, and I'm
going to finish with this. Traditionally, when they ask you what your
name is, you couldn't just say "I'm Christina." They would say,
"Christina of who?" Then you say your surname. Then they say, "Of what?
Of where?" So you had to be able to know your lineage. That's like
poetics. When I go to my village, I spend a lot of time with my aunts
and my uncles. They are all in their 80s and 90s and they teach me
saying. I mean, my name, for example, is Ramapola Hugh [HUGH FOLLOWS
WITH ABOUT FORTY SECONDS OF AFRICAN ADORNMENT ENDING IN A LOUD THROAT
WARBLE.] And that's just my nick name. 

But it's important to know where you come from, because otherwise, where
are you going? You can't go anywhere if you don't have a starting point.
And if you don't hang out with the old folks, if you don't find what
your path is about, then you are completely open to being consumed by
foreign cultures. You don't have a mirror against which to judge them.
They consume you completely. But if you do have your background, then
you can also see the great things about other cultures, and you know
what not to try and access because you are not it. We have become
hybrids of things that we pick up from television. When I grew up, we
didn't have television, so we played more in the street. But today's
younger people don't have the potential for longevity because they don't
play as much and they don't exercise as much. They are not into nature
as much. They're into cyber, and they're into television, and they're
into machines. To a certain extent, they're like manipulated people.
It's great to use all those things, but you have to have that mirror
that shields from them, and only from hanging out with old folks can you
get the wisdom of the past, and you might also be able to know a little
more about herbs and how to use them to heal yourself. 


C.Z.: So we can learn how to play from old people. That's ironic. 

Hugh: Yeah, like that long quotation I was just saying. It's very
playful. We don't play anymore. We can't even calculate; we have to have
a calculator; we've become finger people. And it's dangerous. I think
that's how species become extinct. After awhile, they don't have a past,
so they become mutations of themselves. I think so. I gotta go. My mom
is looking at me. 




B.E.: Thanks, Hugh. It's a great pleasure. Are you coming here to play
soon? 

Hugh: Next year. April. 


B.E.: I hope you can bring your 20-piece band. 


Hugh: Me too. Let's speak to somebody. You have Bill Gates' phone
number?