The Sunday News
Allan Foti, Life Correspondent
LAST Tuesday, the world woke up to the shocking news that South African jazz and struggle icon, Hugh Masekela had died aged 78!
Artistes, politicians, and millions of people from different walks of life mourned the legend that was Bra Hugh.
But one lad from the sprawling, often dusty streets of Mzilikazi felt his death perhaps more personally than most locals.
He calls Bra Hugh his “mentor” and recounts stories of several times he had the privilege to jam with his idol over the years and he picked up a lot from him during that time.
Paul Lunga is primarily a trumpeter while the late Bra Hugh was a master of the flugel horn. Lunga told Sunday Life from his base in the United Kingdom of jam sessions with Masekela during which he learned a lot of what became his craft and career.
“Bra Hugh was one of the most creative jazz musicians of our time. He made township jazz internationally recognised almost single handedly and I certainly hold him in high regard. With Bra Hugh, legend and performance were intertwined,” Lunga shared with Sunday Life.
“The most memorable time I shared with him was when we performed together on the same stage at the then Sheraton Hotel (now Rainbow Towers). We literally exchanged jazz phrases: Bra Hugh from his flugel horn and me from my trumpet,” he said.
Lunga described that night as the most “serious and joyful conversation” he had ever had.
“He will be sadly missed by this world especially me because he was my mentor. I was shocked to the core when I heard the news of passing,” Lunga said.
The Jazz Impacto front man remembers Bra Hugh as a loving person to be with, always smiling, but quick to react when crossed. Lunga revealed that Bra Hugh would not hesitate to tell anyone how he felt about them on the spot.
On Tuesday, Bra Hugh’s family sent a statement confirming his death to the media.
“After a protracted and courageous battle with prostate cancer, he passed on peacefully in Johannesburg, South Africa surrounded by his family,” read the statement.
In October last year, his handlers revealed that he had been battling prostate cancer since 2008. They explained that the jazz veteran underwent eye surgery in March 2016 after the cancer spread, and had to go into theatre again in September 2016 as another tumour was discovered.
Bra Hugh was born in KwaGuqa township in Witbank and began singing and playing the piano as a child.
After seeing the film Young Man with a Horn when he was 14, Masekela began playing the trumpet.
His first trumpet was given to him by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, an anti-apartheid chaplain at St Peter’s Secondary School.
He soon mastered the instrument and by 1956 joined Alfred Herbet’s African Jazz Revue. Bra Hugh’s music was inspired by the turmoil that South Africa went through during apartheid and he said it was used as a weapon to spread political change. -@AllanFoti
