Nothing Hugh(ph)emistic

Jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela won’t mark his 70th birthday year by quietly slipping into retirement. Instead he has released a new album, Phola (slang for cool down), and will fly off on a tour of Europe and North America.

The Mail & Guardian is speaking to Masekela at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Johannesburg where he is conducting a series of interviews with journalists to mark the release of on the eve of his birthday on April 4.

The jazz legend is withering in his assessment of South African society, the general state of the arts, the continent of Africa and its diasporic children flung to the Americas and the Caribbean.

His harsh judgments belie his warm personality. Arriving a few minutes late at his hotel suite, I stretch out a hand anticipating a formal handshake and, perhaps, a scowl. There is nothing of that infamous fiery temper or a rebuke for my tardiness; instead he opens his arms to welcome me and the M&G‘s photographer with warm hugs.

Masekela’s battles with drugs and alcohol addiction are well documented. It is a measure of how far back the substance-sodden days are that, when a waiter arrives, he politely orders watermelon and water, which he gulps down in our hour-long interview. In such wholesome ambience I couldn’t order the coffee that I really wanted.

He compliments South Africa’s democracy that is firmly rooted but he is quite emphatic that the country faces grave challenges. ‘You still can’t take a stroll at night. You can’t live without alarms.”

Recently his daughter and his wife separately witnessed shoot-outs between robbers and the police. ‘Babies get hit by stray bullets. If you go to Pritchard Street at night you will see 10 000 Zimbabweans hanging around at the high court. If you go further east you will see 50 000 more people who are locals.”

Masekela says night-time hauls out on to the street seductive youthful girls selling flesh in the city, while during the day beggars try to squeeze the stray coin off motorists at intersections. ‘Am I the only one who notices these things?”

He sums up his experiences. ‘I have seen the world in transition,” he says with a nonchalant shrug. ‘I was born the year World War II started. There have been great ideological and political changes. Things seem to have changed but the plight of African people has not changed, here, on the continent, in the Americas or the Caribbean. They still live in squalor.”

Surely it’s not that bleak for black people, Barack Obama is now the 44th president of the United States. This comment elicits a mirthless grin. ‘Poor Obama. I don’t envy him at all. He comes into office when the whole world is going through a difficult time. A person of African descent seems to be getting a raw deal,” he says.

When we turn to speak about the local arts scene, Masekela says culture is in recession. His postmortem report is terse: ‘The arts are dead.” I point out that local publishing is vibrant, community halls are abuzz as hip-hop MCs battle one another and spoken-word poets rhyme, Ladysmith Black Mambazo just won a Grammy and, a few years ago, the movie Tsotsi won an Oscar.

‘The Grammy they won is not from here,” he says coldly. ‘They just come here to change clothes. They have the odd corporate gig — Miriam [Makeba] wasn’t here when she died. Abdullah [Ibrahim] is never here.”

He waves away my objections. Masekela is firm in his belief that cultural activity shouldn’t be a matter for debate. ‘Cultural presence should be self-evident,” he says. Last year, he says, he was able to stage only two or three gigs because he can’t find work locally.

Masekela is despondent about the local cultural scene, which he considers a replica of the vacuous US hip-hop scene, besotted with pomp and ostentation but bereft of substance.

‘It isn’t about music any more. It ended up with bling, diamond necklaces, vilifying women. Music was used to promote ignorance. The artists became caricatures.”

Closer to home, he argues that ‘when kwaito started it played an activist role. It was concerned with the quality of our lives. But now the youth sing along to nonsense: aye-ye aye-ye or tsiki tsiki yo,” he says laughing in disgust. ‘The elements that control the arts are not interested in anything but numbers. There is nothing wrong with unintelligible stuff but when the people in the industry try to kill off everything else —” his voice trails off in mid-sentence.

It’s easy to dismiss his concerns as the rantings of the old, whose familiar world has shifted, but there is clear danger in a culture frozen in adolescent frolickings. ‘If the whole world is kwaito or hip-hop then there is something wrong with that world.”

Phola is musically diverse. The influence of Masekela’s journeys on the continent are apparent in the resonant drum sound, his collaborations with Malawian guitarist Eric Paliani and Mozambican guitarist Jimmy Dludlu. The CD tackles global warming, hunger, disease and other ills. His trumpet blasts are belligerent and his vocals provocative, which makes it an accessible production.

I ask him if he thinks he has arrived. He says: ‘I was never interested in arriving anywhere. I don’t know where those stations are in life. There is no destination — I have lived my life and made my mistakes. You can’t have regrets when you can’t turn time back,” he says, wistfully, staring past me. ‘Everything happens for a reason.”