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Books by Kalamu ya
Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts
Movement /
360:
A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology
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From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident /
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
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Hugh Masekela: Out
of the Hell That Was Apartheid
By
Kalamu ya Salaam
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I think that any
artist that comes from an oppressed
community and doesn’t sing or talk about
it needs his head examined. Now, I
wasn’t making music because of
oppression; I was making music because I
loved it and it’s all I’ve ever done.
The fact that I came from a country with
oppressed people was just a coincidence.
Had I been a garbage man, I would have
been just as militant.—Hugh
Masekela |
In the sixties and early seventies Hugh Masekela was
a long way from home. Black Power Los Angeles was
nothing like Apartheid Johannesburg—or was it?
One struggle different fronts and, of course, the
different fronts had different conditions,
nevertheless, the centrality of black people
struggling to create a new identity, struggling to
challenge and change status quo social conditions,
all of this was very much like home to the young
African man in exile.
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Here was a man who
learned to play trumpet on a trumpet
given to his school by Louis Armstrong.
Music was his ticket to ride. Straight
up on out of the hell that was
apartheid.
And
to marry Mariam Makeba, one of the
sweets singers to ever ululate Xhosa.
There my man was in
the midst of cultural revolution,
American style and in the midst of
protest, riots and rebellions. Was Watts
really far away from Soweto, was Harlem
that distant from Sophiatown? |
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Listen to
Hugh’s early music and you will hear something,
something startling, something familiar, something
surprising, something enjoyable. You will hear
African-American music echoed in a South African
sound. You will hear the old world origins of new
world innovations.
From the funk of “The Boy’s Doin’ It” to the hard
bop of “Blues for Huey”; from the gospel of “Hush
(Somebody’s Calling My Name)” and the balladry of
“Mamani” to the protest of “Coincidence” and the
samba of “Felicidade”; from the party hilarity of
“Grazing In The Grass” (which was a mega 1968 hit)
and the ironic sarcasm of “A Song For Brazil” to the
introspective beauty of “Where Are You Going?” and
the spiritual sublimity of “Minawa,” all of this
fabulous music is music recorded in exile, music
made years before a return home.
And please check out the fabulous Letta Mbulu,
multi-tracking her voice on the appropriately titled
“Melodi (Sounds of Home),” consistently hitting high
notes a piccolo is afraid of. Imagine the guts and
the imagination it took to produce these songs.
In one sense it is unbelievable—is it not a wonder
how we can hold our sanity within the sanctuary of
our woolly heads amid trials, tumult and indefinite
alienation from all that we hold dear?
I remember bra Hugh laughing about those years. We
were in Martinique (or it might have been Guadeloupe
or even St. Lucia), attending a jazz festival and I
hung out with him for an evening. You should have
seen him talk about how physically fit they were
while living in Los Angeles. Hugh said that one of
the recording executives even commented on it. Then
Hugh laughed his hearty South African chortle: “they
didn’t know we were so poor we couldn’t afford any
transport. We rode our bicycles everywhere—that’s
why we were in such good shape.”
You can not fully understand the joke if you’ve
never been to Los Angeles where everything is so
spread out, you need to drive a car to get to the
corner store! But hasn’t humor always been one of
the secret (or really not-so-secret) ingredients in
our survival kit?
Hugh’s music has that deep humor in spades, running
in parallel to the even deeper seriousness: the
freedom ideals, the struggle encouragement, the,
shall we say, mad and maddening coincidences of
life.
I will never erase my internal recording of Hugh’s
eyes as he said what it felt like to be in exile in
New York City and one day run across a man in
Central Park, a black man who turned out to be South
African and the overwhelming joy Hugh felt as he and
that brother-stranger talked in their mother tongue;
how important it was to speak those birth syllables
after so long being tongue tied by alien English.
I have always
loved the way Hugh sings. Full out, bellowing,
shouting, cussing, laughing, 100% invested in the
sounds his voice makes regardless of whether it is
pretty or in tune in a western sense.
I have always
believed that black music was and remains the
African-American mother tongue. Music is our
address, where we live, how to reach us, especially
in a strange and alienating land. But music was also
our firmament, our line of defense and, in sometimes
subtle, sometimes strange ways, also our weapon and
escape vehicle.
Every step of the way, Hugh was challenging the
system. Music—the force of his personality
personified in song and flugelhorn, confronting
stereotypes.
No jungle bunny, he challenged what they saw when
they looked at him, what they heard when they
listened to him. All of his music had a deepness
that was captivating.
Credit must be
given to Hugh’s expertise as a jazz musician. But
then again equal credit must be given to Hugh’s
fearless deployment of his African roots.
When Hugh did
The Boy’s Doin’ It album it was a pan-African effort
that employed Ghanaian musicians while most of his
other recordings had been with fellow exiles and
American musicians. This was early, early examples
of what we have come to call world music.
And beyond recording, he started a record label,
Chisa; worked out a distribution deal with Motown,
attempting to seize the means of production. Too
many of us are unaware of all that we have been. We
think fighting to get ahead, to own and to control
is something new, something recently thought of. Not
so. Much of this music is available to us today
because Hugh owns rights—give thanks.
On the artistic scale, the pinnacle of all of Hugh’s
early catalogue is his jazz album
Home Is Where The Music Is. The title alone is a philosophical
statement of the highest order, a statement
intuitively, if not consciously, embraced by
African-American culture.
The band is composed of three South Africans (Hugh
Masekela – trumpet; Dudu Pukwana – alto; Makhaya
Ntshoko) and two Americans (Eddie Gomez – bass and
Larry Willis – piano).
This 1972 recording is an accurate reflection of the
time period and one of the best jazz albums from
that era. Although it is not well known, when people
do hear it, invariably, they are knocked out by the
exhilarating excellence of the music. The repertoire
moves from moments of soft shinning subtlety to all
out, surging, no holds barred passionate playing. At
the end of the drum solo on “Blues for Huey,” you
can hear one of the band members shout out: call an
ambulance!
This mixtape is a homage to the early years of a
musical hero. There is more to come—Hugh is still
making beautiful music. And we will get to all of
that in due time but for now let us pause and
reflect. Let us journey back in time. Here are some
artifacts from those long gone years.
These are not mere curios to be gawked at
momentarily and then forgotten. This is a sinew
holding together our souls. These sounds are moments
you may not remember but once you hear them, whether
now for the first time or for the first time in a
long time, these sounds are songs that should reside
forever in the home of your heart.
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Africa Makes
Some Noise—Documentary on
contemporary music from Africa
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 8 December 2008
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