Four months before he would succumb to death, Hugh Masekela gave no sign that he was a man about to shuffle off this mortal coil. He moved like a man bent on defying time and age, determined to make his next meaningful contribution to music and our heritage in general. Even as he moved towards the end of his days, Bra Hugh kept elegantly clawing at uncovering one more spark of creative genius.
In August last year, on the eve of the Standard Bank Joy of Jazz festival, I had the rare joy of presiding over an exclusive dinner and conversation to launch what was conceived to be a transgenerational, cross-genre collaboration between Bra Hugh and rapper Riky Rick.
Because it was organised by Standard Bank, the event gathered some high-level staffers, along with key members of the media and an assortment of socialites and musicians. We were all gathered to kick off the celebrations marking two decades of the jazz festival.
But, more important, the collaboration aimed to make the point that jazz and hip-hop are closer than many might think. Bra Hugh and Riky were going to create music together that would encourage young musicians to explore our local classics in their creative processes.
It was a simple enough affair. Bra Hugh was to sit enthroned on a couch next to the young rapper and the two would talk about their lives, love of music, fashion and other stuff. My role was to prod them with leading questions.
The night turned into an intimate journey through the large heart of jazz's elder statesman. He sat there wrapped in the glare of cameras and the glow of a hundred awestruck faces. We were enthralled.
"Music hijacked me when I was a baby. By the time I was two or three, I couldn't stop singing," he told us. His was a life that was always defined by music and its many excesses. Bra Hugh had a voracious appetite for all of them.
'THE MOST USELESS THING'
Ever the performer, Bra Hugh was a class act in the art of sharing the stern lessons of how he was first seduced by bad appetites.
"I had a beautiful soprano high voice," he said. "I was singing in the boys' choir. When I turned 12, my friends said: 'We can't hang out with you because you sing the girl's part.' I said: 'Friends, you can't abandon me because of my voice. What can I do?' They said: 'You have to drink and smoke cigarettes.' I think it's the most useless thing I've ever done."
Music instils in the player a capacity for hope; hope that the next phrase will be better than the last; a belief in the promise of a better tomorrow
He gently shared the tale he has told before of his struggle with substance abuse. We all knew about it, but his fresh subtlety made us understand it anew. Suddenly it was a story of youth and the perils that come when we seek to belong above all else, not the old cliché of drugs and stardom.
This is a jazz thing. The jazz soloist must tell his story in a fresh way with every new take on any composition. The greatest gift of jazz is a capacity for renewal, on the bandstand as well as in life.
A jazzman learns fast to treasure life's perennial possibility to improvise beyond a bad decision. The music instils in the player a capacity for hope; hope that the next phrase will be better than the last; a belief in the promise of a better tomorrow.
By the time we all started getting thirsty that night, Hugh had travelled decades in a set of neat anecdotes. He kept switching from latter-day Jozi patois to the classic tsotsitaal of Sophiatown, then back to Oxford English. An astute ear could have picked up the themes of his life and the three continents on which he has made his home. The warm counsel of an African grandfather, the slick African-American capacity for self-display, the Englishman's performed restraint.
THE JAZZ EPISTLES
The dapper 78-year-old clasped the collar of his coat with a smirk to announce he could not wear any wool but cashmere. He had just thrilled us with the tale of how trumpeter Stompi Manana woke him up to the importance of fashion. They were still boys then. Our elder statesman was yet to discover how "those old jazzmen like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Sydney Bechet civilised the world and taught everyone how to dress".
As he sat on that stage chatting away, Bra Hugh took his place among those jazz giants with easeful style. Just as they had pioneered the music in the US, he, along with Abdullah Ibrahim on piano, Kippie Moeketsi on alto saxophone, Jonas Gwangwa on trombone, Johnny Gertze on bass, and Early Mabuza and Makaya Ntshoko on drums, were the first South African band - The Jazz Epistles - to record a jazz album, The Jazz Epistles: Verse 1.
DARING TIME
That was in 1959. They all went on to create unparalleled work as both campaigners for human rights and as jazzmen. Bra Hugh recorded music as diverse as kwela, high-life and Afro-beat. He was in New York as hip-hop took shape. He returned home from a long exile to share in the rise of kwaito.
WATCH Hugh Masekela perform his hit single Mandela (Bring Him Back Home)
As he sat there, crowned with a tweed cap of the same coffee brown as his turtleneck and shoes, as he sat there on that August night as our southern winter gave way to a spring in which new blooms would unfold, Bra Hugh was daring time to take away from him the promise of yet another season of productive life.
He was winning. He looked like he was winning. Then the rug was pulled from under his feet. The whispers of cancer grew loud. The collaboration was put on indefinite hold. Then the news came flooding in. Bra Hugh is dead.
I'm left to think that what we witnessed on that night, in what we did not know then were his last months, was a man daring to claw at a future he would not live.
