The horn of Africa comes to Adelaide

HUGH Masekela is not one to boast, but does like to blow his own trumpet.

masekela

HUGH Masekela is not one to boast, but does like to blow his own trumpet.

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I don't want to boast," says Hugh Masekela, puffing out his chest, "but the only musicians I know who can play any style of music are South African." He jerks his thumb over his shoulder at two of the musicians from his band - bassist Fana Zulu, 53, and 68-year-old percussionist Francis Maneh Fuster - who are sitting backstage here at the WOMAD Festival in England's rural Wiltshire, eating a pre-show meal off paper plates they're balancing on their laps.

"These guys grew up around music, just like I did." Masekela's gaze is direct. "Traditional music, children's songs and migrant labour music; gospel, township jive, big bands and combos." And of course, jazz: "Everybody had a gramophone," he says in his no-nonsense baritone. "Our greatest mirror was African America. We meshed what they were doing with our own interpretations."

It's a warm summer evening. The band's remaining three musicians, who are all in their 20s, are off wandering the festival site. Hugh Masekela, the great elder statesman of South African music, isn't due onstage for a couple of hours. "About three years ago I decided that since I was playing live so much I had better get a leaner band together," says the two-time Grammy winner. "Those older guys have been with me for 22 years on and off. But those young guys! We've gelled into a great piece of synergy. That young drummer should be in jail for playing the way he does." A twinkle. "Though I'm the youngest, you know."

At 73 years of age, Hugh Ramopolo Masekela is busier than he's ever been: "When I look at the time I have left I figure I better hurry up and do a lot of stuff."

Back home in Johannesburg, where he returned in 1990 after 26 years of exile, Masekela is immersed in establishing an infrastructure aimed at preserving and nurturing the "unfathomable" amount of music that exists in his homeland. "I want to see music and heritage in Africa come back into African life," he says animatedly. "I want Africans to develop and form their own African market, especially in rural ethnic areas. I want tourists to come to South Africa for the music as well as for the geography and the animals."

As progressive and experimental as he always was - this, after all, is the man who fused jazz, pop, Latin and African influences into a style all his own - Masekela has been rediscovering his own musical roots as well. "I'm going backwards," he quips.

His most recent album, Jabulani, is a tribute to the township weddings he attended as a youth, which was about the time he saw Kirk Douglas play an American jazz trumpeter in the film Young Man With a Horn and decided to chuck in the piano in favour of the trumpet, which he sensed was the instrument for him.

After being given his first trumpet aged 14 by the anti-apartheid campaigner Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, he went on to join jazz groups such as the Jazz Epistles with pianist Dollar Brand (later known as Abdullah Ibrahim) and played in the orchestra of the successful musical King Kong, which starred his future wife Miriam Makeba, the late great Mama Africa.

Following the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 - after which gatherings of more than 10 people were banned - Masekela left South Africa to study music in London, then in New York. His tales of the city's buzzing jazz scene are peppered with heroic names: Dizzy Gillespie. John Coltrane. Charlie Mingus. "It was the golden age," he says. "Dizzy introduced me to everybody. I thought maybe I could join the Jazz Messengers with Art Blakey, but everyone said, 'You're from Africa. Form your own group. Use what you know and stand out.'"

So he did. In 1968 he recorded the catchy instrumental pop tune Grazing in the Grass, which gave him a surprise number one hit and sent him on his way to household name status. "I remember performing that tune on the Johnny Cash TV show, which was very exciting at the time because I loved country and western music. I still do. I'm a big Faith Hill fan."

He pauses, smiles. "Jim Reeves and Roy Rogers were huge in the mining communities. The only contact migrant workers had with the West was via cowboy movies, which always ended with a barbecue and a singalong and a yodel." He yodels, briefly; his musicians glance over, smile and continue eating. "Miners would finish their nine month contracts and go home carrying a guitar and wearing cowboy clothes."

It is the original songs and music of these workers that Masekela is celebrating in his musical Songs of Migration, now playing in London after opening at Johannesburg's Market Theatre in March, 2010. The musical is an attempt to reclaim what apartheid suppressed; to showcase the creativity of those who came to Jo'burg from all over Africa after gold was discovered in 1886.

The musical might not be on its way to Australia, but Masekela is. This week he was announced as a headline act at next March's Womadelaide Festival, alongside the likes of Jamaican reggae giant Jimmy Cliff and Australian outfits The Cat Empire and The Herd.

Masekela has no truck with the increasingly unfashionable "world music" label. "World music is a marketing term that came up in the '80s and neutralised African music. What we play is music. We work to make sure that the people who come to our shows have the greatest time of their lives, because the music we make makes people feel like they're listening to music."

Back at WOMAD UK, once Masekela and his band have delivered a show in which no one - especially not Masekela - stopped moving for two hours, it was easy to see what he meant. Not to mention why he might be tempted to boast about it.