“It was great, it was terrible weather, like in Britain,” laughs Hugh Masekela, describing playing in the White House for International Jazz Day. Hugh is a world famous South African trumpeter, known for his music that reflected the pains and injustice in South Africa under apartheid. “I just hoped to be a good man and then come back to South Africa and teach music,” he says, speaking about his time studying music in England, “but because of my associations and some of the things that I said about the South African government, I had to stay away for another 26 years. Everything else happened without my planning it. It was never my aim to get as much attention as I did. When I came back, it was great to see my family, my relatives, my old friends. And to play with a musician, to not have to explain anything and not have to write down anything was weird you know. I never thought I’d come back so it was really great.”
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Having been musically active since 1956, and working on a new album due out in the summer, what’s the secret to finding inspiration? “I feel like I felt as a child. From the time I was an infant I loved music, I was bewitched with it. So when you are bewitched you don’t need inspiration. When it comes I don’t it comes from, just go with it and try and finish whatever that it is.”
Having been famously outspoken about injustice and spreading political change in South Africa, what’s his view on the situation today? “I’m a human being first of all, and the thing that I think I find most frustrating is oppression, the oppression of people. Injustice makes me go crazy. When I see what oppression has done to Africa I just object to it in every way. I live my life by being bewitched with music, and then objecting to injustice. It’s all over, America, Asia, it’s in many parts of the United States and even here it’s still going on. And it’s not necessarily racial, there’s parts of Africa and Asia where there’s still slavery. All I can say is we belong to a cursed species because we’ve been at each other’s necks since whoever invented the system.”
words LUKE OWAIN BOULT
Hugh Masekela, New Theatre, Cardiff, Tue 7 June. Tickets: £10-£25. Info: 029 2087 8889