Arts & Events

"What people don't realize is that war against occupation in South Africa began when the first Dutch settlers came in 1652, and it didn't stop till 1994. I don't consider myself a political musician; a consider myself a person who learned music from people who were resisting an oppression." 

So South African trumpeter-fluegelhorn player-songwriter-bandleader Hugh Masekela put the message across in an interview, as he spoke it onstage at Zellerbach Hall last Wednesday for Cal Performances, on the tour he and singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela embarked on last year to celebrate the first two decades of democratic government in their homeland--and in Berkeley to pay personal tribute from the stage to the assistance the Anti-Apartheid Movement received from the constant efforts of local activists (Masekela introduced "Brother Danny Glover," who performed in Athol Fugard plays and served the cause as a constant organizer and witness)--by performing songs and popular music from the decades of struggle. 

It wasn't all political-social material, by a long shot: there was a broad range of the remarkable music of their country, much carrying-on and humor, a lot of Township Jive by these two natives of those native settlements around the then-white only cities. Masekela's sharp horn-playing on his number one US hit of 1968, when he played the Monterey Pop Festival, "Grazing in the Grass," got the audience up on their feet, "swaying gently from side to side," as its writer urged, "we don't want to excite you! if you know this song, you must be almost as old as I am! There're a bunch of old geezers here tonight!"  

Vusi Mahlasela, a generation younger than Masekela, one of those who stayed and was imprisoned at home (he wryly introduced "a short number" by an imprisoned friend called "Jail Break," just sawing sounds scratched on the amplified strings of his guitar), who shared the stage with Masekela at Nelson Mandela's Presidential Inauguration in 1994, only performing together with him on this joint tour, is a big, lusty singer with a piquant, octave-leaping voice, somewhat reminiscent of the great Leadbelly. A member of the Congress of South African Writers, his first guitar lessons were sponsored by CSAW colleague--and later Nobel Laureate--Nadine Gordimer, who said of him, "Vusi sings as a bird does, in total response to being alive." His song "When You Come Home," addressed to exiles, was a major anthem of the movement in the day.  

Masekela, who was one of the most prominent of those exiles, had just recorded the first South African jazz album (with Dollar Brand, later Abdullah Ibrahim, on piano) and triumphed at unprecedented shows in the South African cities when the Sharpesville massacre took place in 1960. He left the country, only returning in 1990, when Mandela, a family friend, was released from prison and the ban on the African National Congress was lifted.His international hit song, "Bring Him Back," was composed spontaneously after reading a letter from Mandela. 

Masekela was helped by Yehudi Menuhin, John Dankworth, Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba, to whom he was briefly married (and to whose memory the first dedicated number went out), becoming a big international star. His free performance with his Union of South Africa Band in the Greek Theatre at the "all-black" UC Jazz Festival here 45 years ago this summer was a revelation to many of us of the range and depth of South African--indeed, of African--popular music, a nonstop flow of great playing, singing (some from the gospel choirs of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), wonderful tunes set to unusual harmonies in various styles, extraordinary rhythms, and exuberant dancing and stage presence ... 

Masekela's humor and the geniality of the whole troupe--Mahlasela and the quartet backing them--grew as the evening progressed through blockbuster, show-stopping tunes like "Stimela," in which Masekela imitated the sounds of a coal miners' train, taking blacks to what amounted as an internal exile, slavery in all but name, to "Maybe We Don't Know What he Looks Like," a song about Mandela when he and the other ANC leaders had been imprisoned many years--and it was illegal to possess photos of them--making the hanger-like Zellerbach expanse like a community hall, something intimate, even when the big crowd got up again to dance and cheer at the end of the long show, and through the encore of Township Jive.