In honor of what would have been South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela's 80th birthday Thursday, Google's doodle team curated an artful graphic for its homepage.
Born in 1939 in Witbank, South Africa, Masekela was considered one of his country’s most renowned instrumentalists.
His love of music came in part from his father, a chief health inspector who owned a killer jazz record collection featuring names like Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, according to Brittanica Encyclopedia.
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Masekela grew up just as bebop began popularizing in America, and in 1959, he joined pianist Dollar Brand’s Jazz Epistles, “the first black band in the country to record an album.” But within the year, the 21-year-old and the other members of Jazz Epistles were forced out of South Africa by the apartheid government.
During his 30 years as a political exile, Masekela immigrated to New York City, where he attended the Manhattan School of Music. Later, he traveled throughout Africa and played in various bands, recorded multiple albums and collaborated with musical icons like Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Fela Kuti and Bob Marley.
"You're just going to be a statistic if you play jazz," Miles Davis once advised him, according to the Google doodle blog. "But if you put in some of the stuff you remember from South Africa, you'll be different from everybody."
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He'd go on to create records featuring "vibrant trumpet and flügelhorn solos... in pop, R&B, disco, Afro-pop, and jazz contexts," according to AllMusic.com. "He had American and international hits, worked with bands around the world, and played with African, African-American, European, and various American musicians during a stellar career. His style, especially on flügelhorn, was a charismatic blend of striking upper-register lines, half-valve effects, and repetitive figures and phrases, with some note bending, slurs, and tonal colors."
In the 1960s, Masekela recorded for MGM, Mercury and Verve, and started his own record label. His song “Grazing in the Grass” topped charts in 1968 and sold four million copies around the world.
But Masekela wasn't just a musical genius. His political exile also made him a fierce human rights advocate. In fact, his 1986 hit "Bring Him Back Home," written for South Africa's first black president Nelson Mandela, was considered an anthem of 1980s anti-apartheid, according to CNN. Masekela's own sister, Barbara, even became Mandela's chief of staff after the government declared amnesty for exiles.
In the 1990s, he returned home, too, and released revival hits through 2009.
He died on Jan. 23, 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa, after battling prostate cancer. He was 78.
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