How Miles Davis Shaped Hugh Masekela and Generations Beyond

As a student at the Manhattan School of Music, Hugh Masekela kept his ear to the New York club circuit, checking for what all the musicians were doing. The approach brought him closer to the inner circles of the city's jazz scene. The trail to that scene was long: Father Trevor Huddleston, a British Anglican bishop and apartheid activist, had given him his first trumpet at fourteen at St. Peter's in Rosettenville, Johannesburg. Father Huddleston then told Louis Armstrong about the young trumpeter during a trip to America a few years later, a story that resonated so strongly that it prompted Armstrong's wife, Lucille, to mail Masekela one of her husband's horns from New York. 

Huddleston had helped Masekela leave South Africa in 1960, at only 21, for London's Guildhall School of Music. Not long after, Harry Belafonte arranged a scholarship for Masekela at the Manhattan School. Dizzy Gillespie picked him up on the New York end and made the introductions, Miles Davis among them. Davis made Masekela reconsider his approach to playing music and brought him closer to a home he had left behind.

"Miles Davis was a major hero to everybody because that was on the front page of every South African newspaper, even though it was an apartheid country," Masekela said in an interview, referring to the infamous incident at Birdland where Davis was assaulted by a police officer. "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.'"

"Grazing In The Grass," Masekela's 1968 hit, found him digging back into his old township dance band days, emerging with a hybrid that fused the feel of marabi and mbaqanga with a touch of the funk Sly and the Family Stone were introducing to the scene the same year with "Dance to the Music." It went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, knocked Herb Alpert's "This Guy's in Love with You" off the top, and sold four million copies.

The influence stretched beyond the music and seeped into how a person carries themselves. As a style icon, Davis represented an alternative way of being in Civil Rights-era America. He was cool, calculated, and bad-ass. Author and friend of Masekela's, Bongani Madondo, observes that Davis "carried himself with pride, without cutting himself from Blackness."

"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," he says.

Madondo also points to a parallel between Davis's autobiography, written with Quincy Troupe, and Still Grazing, which Masekela co-authored with D. Michael Cheers. 

He continues: "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."

Two decades on and an ocean away, the same Davis arrived for a young percussionist named Sola Akingbola through a cinema screen in London. Akingbola, who would later spend three decades touring with Jamiroquai, was watching black-and-white footage of Davis with John Coltrane, Jimmy Cobb, and Cannonball Adderley. "So What" was playing.

"I'm listening to this music, and I'm watching the film," he recalls, "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.’"

The next day, he went out and bought Ian Carr's Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography. "That was it," he says.

Akingbola also recalls a moment from Davis's own autobiography, where Davis describes asking Dizzy about a chord one day, not long after arriving in New York. Dizzy's response — "Why don't you sit down and play it on piano?" — set him on the path. Davis would hang around Dizzy's Seventh Avenue apartment, watching Thelonious Monk work his way through what he later called "weird shit with space and progressive chords," soaking it all in while Dizzy practiced.

The first tune Akingbola ever learned on the keys was "So What," the same tune he'd seen on screen that day. The memory is so vivid that he mouths the changes as he speaks, pulling the recollection closer. Not long after, he was touring the world with Ronny Jordan, whose cover of Davis' "So What" was a big deal worldwide. 

"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," he says.

At Kaya FM, Brenda Sisane serves up weekly meditations in jazz and adjacent sounds on her show, The Art of Sunday. She is also an active participant in the scene, part of the organizing team that brings the Journey to Jazz festival, held in a small Karoo town, to life. She echoes bra Hugh's sentiment that South Africans were hip to Miles from early on, and tells of how her grandfather, a saxophonist and tailor in Sophiatown, would lecture young men on the particulars of wearing pants, and how Kohinoor shopping bags were a status symbol among the working men of his generation, such as 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. South Africans were not bereft of admiration for him, and that influence did come through. I believe it was just part of how he arrived in the world, and we did not miss that beat," she says.

"From a broadcaster's perspective, there's no doubt that Miles's creation is one of the best offerings of our time, and the times beyond his — also because of its elegance, its simplicity. We recognize the qualities that make him Miles. There's some reverence when you put a Miles song on. It immediately carves and shapes the space. That trumpet of his, it immediately changes the nature in the room, and calls for people to listen. There's something people recognize. Even people who are least interested in jazz would wonder: is this the Miles everyone is talking about?"

South Africa is where the Nigerian trumpeter Etuk Ubong imbibed from the cup of Masekela, and perfected the sound of the late musician's homeland. Yet, the sound that he heard from Davis never left him; it lingers, lives on in his own work today. 

"How Miles Davis became a very significant and important role in my career was because he was one of those artists who came about with some level of innovation that worked for him. From the bebop era, playing with Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillepsie and all those people, to the funk influences. I knew I was gonna be one of those artists who learns from the greats. I happened to transcribe a lot of Miles Davis solos, and followed his works," he says. 

His favorite period of Miles' is the Kind of Blue era, a line-up that included Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Adderley on alto saxophone, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums — all musicians who were on the verge of major breakthroughs in their own careers. The album itself was recorded over two sessions in 1959 and became one of the landmark albums that shaped the sound of the next decade — from Davis' own reconfiguration of modal jazz to Coltrane's ascension into the free jazz movement. The 1960s also heralded a period of independence from colonial rule in several states throughout the African continent. 

"I love the fact that it was an era where there was a lot of freedom with the music, and Miles David showed us how important space was. His trumpet sang, but also left a lot of room for emotions. It's something you can easily hum. We've got to understand space and freedom, you could go outside the box and express yourself as much as you can," says Ubong. 

Madondo notes that Davis "has always been seen as a symbol of Black resistance and pride, but not really as spiritually connected with the continent or even South Africa as the John Coltrane and the Free Jazz avant-garde artists were." 

It was only in the 1980s, as he was coming out of a period of silence, that Davis began making work that spoke directly to the Black South African condition: Tutu (1986) and Amandla (1989), both produced by a young Marcus Miller, during a period when Davis was again surrounding himself with younger musicians, as he had in the sixties and seventies. 

The two albums functioned as both a critique of apartheid and, inversely, of American systemic supremacy, and resonated with the same plugged-in Black demographic that gravitated to Stevie Wonder, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Marvin Gaye, and Earth, Wind & Fire; music that pointed at systemic racism while also offering beauty and pride, serving as what Madondo calls "a cultural bridge between, specifically, 'Negroland' and Mandela/Bikoland, in life, imprisoned or assassinated." 

The musicians' visual style, he adds, was their own interpretation of African exuberance, and even when they got it wrong, "it did not matter. It was their aesthetic interpretation. It's the thought and commitment that mattered."