Miles Davis‘s musical and personal example reshaped the trajectory of South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and continues to reverberate through a lineage of African jazz artists, according to accounts from Masekela, his contemporaries, and a new generation of musicians.
A Transatlantic Apprenticeship
As a student at the Manhattan School of Music, Masekela immersed himself in New York’s club circuit. His path there began at age 14, when British Anglican bishop and anti-apartheid activist Trevor Huddleston gave him his first trumpet at St. Peter’s in Rosettenville, Johannesburg. Huddleston later told Louis Armstrong about the young trumpeter, prompting Armstrong’s wife Lucille to send Masekela one of her husband’s horns from New York.
Huddleston helped Masekela leave South Africa in 1960, at 21, for London’s Guildhall School of Music. Soon after, Harry Belafonte arranged a scholarship to the Manhattan School. Dizzy Gillespie met him in New York and made introductions, including to Miles Davis.
Masekela recalled that Davis was already a hero in South Africa, his altercation with a police officer at Birdland having made front-page news even under apartheid. “Blakey and Dizzy and Miles, all of them said, ‘Why don’t you put some of what you got from your country and mix it in. Maybe we can learn something from you. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a statistic, like all of us,'” Masekela said.
That advice led to “Grazing In The Grass,” Masekela’s 1968 hit. The track drew on his old township dance band days, fusing marabi and mbaqanga with the funk that Sly and the Family Stone were introducing the same year. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, displacing Herb Alpert‘s “This Guy’s in Love with You,” and sold four million copies.
Style and Literary Parallels
Author and Masekela friend Bongani Madondo noted that Davis’s influence extended beyond music into personal style. “He carried himself with pride, without cutting himself from Blackness,” Madondo said. “Plus, he was a sharp dresser and an artistically open-minded creative who not only moved with the times but often anticipated them. That is how [Masekela] saw his own progression as a person and as an artist.”
Madondo also highlighted a parallel between Davis’s autobiography, written with Quincy Troupe, and Masekela’s Still Grazing, co-authored with D. Michael Cheers. “You can see Quincy Troupe’s direct imprints on it. In a way, as Miles Davis’s literary ‘alternegro,’ Troupe is also the invisible but metaphysically felt totemic figure to Hugh Masekela, at least insofar as the latter’s own book, Still Grazing, is concerned.”
An Epiphany in London
For percussionist Sola Akingbola, who later spent three decades touring with Jamiroquai, Davis arrived via black-and-white footage in a London cinema. The film showed Davis with John Coltrane, Jimmy Cobb, and Cannonball Adderley playing “So What.”
“I’m listening to this music, and I’m watching the film, and when Miles started to play the solo, blue notes started to come out of the screen towards me. It was an epiphany moment. That was literally Miles saying to me: ‘You need to come into this world,'” Akingbola recalled. The next day he bought Ian Carr‘s Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography.
Akingbola also remembered a passage from Davis’s autobiography: Davis once asked Dizzy Gillespie about a chord, and Gillespie replied, “Why don’t you sit down and play it on piano?” Davis then spent time at Gillespie’s Seventh Avenue apartment, watching Thelonious Monk work through what Davis later called “weird shit with space and progressive chords.”
The first tune Akingbola learned on keys was “So What.” He later toured with guitarist Ronny Jordan, whose cover of the Davis composition was a global success. “Miles, for me, the way I want to be a musician is like that. I wanted to be cool like that, but I wanted to be serious like that, and I want that kind of respect. I was young, so I said, okay, I’m gonna try to be a percussionist, but my vibe is Miles,” Akingbola said.
Among the Davis albums that shaped these musicians are:
- Kind of Blue
- Bitches Brew
- Birth of the Cool
On Air and in the Karoo
Brenda Sisane, host of The Art of Sunday on Kaya FM and an organizer of the Journey to Jazz festival in a small Karoo town, affirmed that South Africans were aware of Davis from early on. She recounted how her grandfather, a saxophonist and tailor in Sophiatown, instructed young men on the particulars of trouser fit, and how Kohinoor shopping bags served as a status symbol among working men of his generation, including her father.
“Miles was a special character within that entire movement, because he sounded like himself, looked like himself. He was cool, and the music was evolving through the times,” Sisane said.
