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Africa’s great musician Hugh Masekela dies at 78 (video)

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Hugh Masekela



Hugh Masekela, South Africa’s trumpeter, jazz artist and music legend, is dead. He died of prolonged prostate cancer. He was aged 78.

His death was announced on Twitter today by South Africa’s minister of arts and Culture, Nathi Mthethwa.

“A baobab tree has fallen, the nation has lost a one of a kind musician with the passing of Jazz legend bra Hugh Masekela. We can safely say bra Hugh was one of the great architects of Afro-Jazz and he uplifted the soul of our nation through his timeless music”, Mthethwa tweeted.

Masekela’s was introduced to the trumpet in 1954 when he got it as a gift from another Jazz legend, Louis Armstrong.

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His classic, Grazing In The Grass topped the Billboard Hot 100. He was the first African male Grammy nominee (1968). He won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the CHOMVA, Ghana Music Awards, Jazz FM Awards and MAMAs.

In 2003, he was featured in the documentary film Amandla! In 2004, he released his autobiography, Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela, co-authored with journalist D. Michael Cheers, which thoughtfully detailed Masekela’s struggles against apartheid in his homeland, as well as his personal struggles with alcoholism from the late 1970s through to the 1990s. In this period, he migrated, in his personal recording career, to mbaqanga, jazz/funk, and the blending of South African sounds, through two albums he recorded with Herb Alpert, and solo recordings, Techno-Bush (recorded in his studio in Botswana), Tomorrow (featuring the anthem “Bring Him Back Home”), Uptownship (a lush-sounding ode to American R&B), Beatin’ Aroun de Bush, Sixty, Time, and Revival. His song “Soweto Blues”, sung by his former wife, Miriam Makeba, is a blues/jazz piece that mourns the carnage of the Soweto riots in 1976. He has also provided interpretations of songs composed by Jorge Ben, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Caiphus Semenya, Jonas Gwangwa, Dorothy Masuka and Fela Kuti.

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In 2009, Masekela released the album Phola (meaning “to get well, to heal”), his second recording for 4 Quarters Entertainment/Times Square Records. It includes some songs he wrote in the 1980s but never completed, as well as a reinterpretation of “The Joke of Life (Brinca de Vivre)”, which he recorded in the mid-1980s. Since October 2007, he has been a board member of the Woyome Foundation for Africa.

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