www.ritmoartists.com/Hugh/Masekela.htm

South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela is one of the earliest proponents of world fusion music, performing with artists around the world in styles ranging from jazz and R&B, to pop, disco, and Afropop.

Masekela grew up in Witbank, a mining town in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. At the age of 14, he started playing trumpet, after being inspired by the film Young Man with a Horn, a biopic about the legendary jazz trumpeter Bix Biederbeck. Along with his classmates at St. Peter's Secondary School, Masekela joined the Huddleston Jazz Band, formed by the school's chaplain Archbishop Trevor Huddleston.

After Huddleston was deported for his anti-apartheid activities, Masekela co-founded the Merry Makers of Springs along with Jonas Gwangwa, and joined Alfred Herbert's Jazz Revue in 1956. In addition to performing with studio bands backing popular singers, Masekela was in the orchestra for the musical production King Kong, South Africa's first blockbuster theatrical success. The musical later went to London's West End for two years.

At the end of 1959, Abdullah Ibrahim, Kippie, Jonas, Makhaya Ntshoko, Johnny Gertz and Masekela formed Jazz Epistles, the first African group to record an LP and perform to record-breaking audiences in Johannesburg and Cape Town. With the assistance of musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Harry Belafonte, Masekela and Miriam Makeba, his wife at that time, left South Africa in 1961. Masekela studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Manhattan School of Music.

Masekela recorded for MGM, Mercury, and Verve, developing his hybrid African/pop/jazz style and scored a breakthrough with the song "The Americanization of Ooga-Booga," produced by the late Tom Wilson who had worked as a producer with Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel. Masekela moved to California and started his own record label, Chissa. The song "Grazing in the Grass" topped the charts in 1968 and eventually sold four million copies worldwide.

In the early 1970's Masekela recorded with Monk Montgomery and the Crusaders and traveled to London to play with Nigerian Afrobeat great Fela Kuti and his Africa '70. Masekela also collaborated with Dudu Pukwana, Eddie Gomez, and Ntshoko on his jazz/African album Home Is Where the Music Is.

Masekela toured Guinea with the Ghanian Afropop band Hedzoleh Soundz, and recorded a series of albums with them with guest stints from the Crusaders, Patti Austin, and others. Masekela alternated between America and Africa, cutting a successful pop/dance album with Herb Alpert in the late 1970's. During the 1980's Masekela returned to South Africa and recorded two albums with The Kalahari Band. In 1981, Hugh moved to Botswana where he started the Botswana international School of Music with Dr. Khabi Mngona. 

Masekela was part of Paul Simon's Graceland tour in the mid-'80s, while he continued recording and produced sessions by Makeba. His record label Jive Records, helped him to set up a mobile studio in Gaborone where Stewart produced "Techno Bush" from which came the hit single "Don't Go Lose it Baby" in 1986. Starting in the mid-90's, Masekela began releasing a stream of albums and collections that showed his versatility and growth in South African jazz.

While back in England, Masekela conceived the Broadway musical "Sarafina" with Mbongeni Ngema and recorded another runaway song "Bring Back Nelson Mandela bring him back home to Soweto" with Kalahari in 1986.

In 1991, he launched his first tour of South Africa called "Sekunjalo This is it" with Sankomota and Bayete; it was a four-month tour, selling out in the country's major cities. His recent albums Black to the Future and Sixty have both gone platinum.

With the May 2005 release of "Revival," this latest recording in the acclaimed Heads Up Africa series is a reminder of Hugh Masekela's extraordinary growth and versatility.