Hugh Masekela talks touring, the state of independent music in Africa

Masekela’s long-running career on the road started in South Africa with a youth band, “when I was very young, by the time I was 15 or 16,” he says. The deteriorating political situation in South Africa forced him to leave for the United States in 1960, where he went to school and started his professional musical career, first as a jazz trumpet player, then as a solo songwriter. Touring has since taken him all over the world—Masekela has had billboard hits (“Grazing In The Grass” being the most famous), played with the likes of Fela Kuti and Miriam Makeba, and was recently featured in Amandla!, a documentary about music’s role in the defeat of apartheid in South Africa. His two most recent releases, Live At The Market Theatre, and The Chisa Years 1965-1975 (Rare and Unreleased), are both excellent introductions to different aspects of Masekela’s enormous output as a musician, songwriter, and producer: Market Theatre is a recent live recording, and Chisa Years is a collection of red hot afrobeat and funk numbers by different groups Masekela had a hand in. “I was involved in all of them, some as a participant,” he says. “I was more of a producer than a participant though, you know?”

Though not quite as raw or energetic as Chisa Years, Live at the Market Theatre is a testament to the quality of those “high-caliber musicians” Masekela speaks about. Especially powerful (and long) versions of Masekela classics “Stimella” and “Grazing In The Grass” demonstrate that Hugh is still at the peak of his powers, and in good humor. The Market Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa has special historical significance as well. “[It] was one of the few theatres that really played protest and resistance theatre during apartheid and that was a very big miracle,” Masekela says. “It also was, I think, the only theatre that really highlighted black theatre.”

The general feeling one gets from Market Theatre seems hopeful, even jubilant (see disc one closer “Mandela,” one of the most celebratory anthems ever written, and with good reason), but Masekela’s mood is a bit more subdued on the topic of contemporary African music. “I don’t think that anything significant is going to come out of African music until there is an independent ownership of the industry in Africa, which hasn’t happened so far,” he says. “It’s the international majors who really record African musicians. People like Fela had an individual style, but it was really an uphill struggle. Fela didn’t get as much promotion as others; it was his controversial stance that really brought attention to him. Africa doesn’t have any African-owned independent labels strong enough, like, let me say Motown or Stax records to have impact on a universal or even a continental level. And until that happens, we will always be isolated in those situations.”

However, Masekela isn’t the type to just let a situation stand uncorrected—he’s worked tirelessly at Chisa, his own record label, for almost the entirety of his career. Touring is still probably the most effective means he has for promoting independent music, and his enthusiasm for it is audible. “We’re really here to feature a cross-section of South African musicians who are younger than me, and sort of give the States an idea of what is happening in South Africa. That’s what the tour is about.”

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