One of South Africa’s great musicians, Hugh Masekela is coming to Vancouver, Canada. When he gets here on Friday March 11, he will first give a lecture on the musician’s role as a cultural ambassador and how music can raise social and political awareness.
This lecture will be delivered at the University of British Columbia’s downtown campus at 800 Robson street.
The next day, Saturday March 12, Masekela, a renowned and internationally recognized jazz musician, will deliver a concert at UBC’s Chan Centre. Both events are organized by UBC-Robson and the Chan Centre.
Hugh Ramopolo Masekela was born in 1939 in Witbank, South Africa. He started his musical career as a young boy of 14 on the piano but later switched to the trumpet, thanks to the encouragement of Archibishop Trevor Huddleston the famous anti-apartheid campaigner who was then a chaplain at Hugh’s school, St. Peters Secondary school.
Hugh has been influenced by a long list of American jazz icons including Dizzy Gillepsie, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, Mahalia Jackson and many more. Hugh’s first band as a young musician was the Huddleston Jazz Band, the first jazz band of young people in South Africa sponsored by Archbishop Huddleston.
Due to the deplorable political situation in apartheid South Africa in the 60s, Hugh joined the long list of South African exiles that found their way to London and other Western capitals. He later gained admission at the Guildhall School of Music in London.
Later another great South African musician Miriam Makeba helped Hugh to relocate to New York and attend the famous Manhattan School of Music. The late Makeba soon became his wife. They divorced in 1966. Makeba later got married the Trinidadian revolutionary Stokely Carmichael, alias Kwame Ture. The couple went to Guinea where they lived until they both passed away: Makeba while on tour in Italy in November 2008 and Kwame Ture of cancer in Conakry, Guinea in November 1998.
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