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An icon in jazz and a hero in his homeland, South African trumpeter HUGH MASEKELA is in classic form on Phola, his 35th recording as a leader and second for the Four Quarters label. Produced by the talented multi-instrumentalist Erik Paliani, it features Masekela’s fluid, warm-toned flugelhorn work and distinctive vocals on a collection of relaxed, engaging vehicles that blend aspects of jazz, R&B, Afro-beat and township music. From buoyant instrumentals like “Mwanayu Wakula” and the grooving “Moz” (a number ever bit as catchy as his 1968 breakthrough hit “Grazing in the Grass”), to stirring vocal numbers like “Ghana,” “Bring It Back Home” and the autobiographical “Sonnyboy,” Masekela delivers with old school charm and youthful enthusiasm on Phola (a South African term meaning to get well, to heal, to relax and chill). Yet another typically grooving, politically-charged offering from South Africa’s elder statesman of jazz, Phola is a rhythmic-melodic manifesto that provides plenty of food for thought as it compels listeners to dance. Born on April 4, 1939 in Witbank, South Africa, Masekela began singing and playing piano as a child but he picked up trumpet at age 14 after seeing the Hollywood film Young Man With A Horn, in which actor Kirk Douglas portrayed the legendary American jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke. After being given a trumpet by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, the anti-apartheid chaplain at St. Peters Secondary School, young Hugh immersed himself in the 78rpm recordings of such American jazz stars as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Jordan, Billie Holiday and Charlie Christian. By his late teens he began patterning himself after bebop trumpeters like Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown and Kenny Dorham while also absorbing the influence of Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Bud Powell, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Chet Baker. After learning the rudiments of trumpet playing, Masekela joined the Huddleston Jazz Band, South Africa’s very first youth orchestra. He went on to play in other dance bands led by the likes of Zakes Nkosi, Ntemi Piliso, Elijah Nkwanyana and Kippie Moeketsi; then by 1956, he joined Alfred Herbert’s African Jazz Revue. At the end of 1959, he formed the Jazz Epistles with pianist Dollar Brand (later known as Abdullah Ibrahim) and began the first African jazz group to record an LP. By 1960, Masekela escaped the Apartheid state of South Africa and relocated in London, where he studied at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music. Two years later he released his first album as a leader, Trumpet Africaine, on the Mercury Records label. In 1964, Masekela married South African singer Miriam Makeba and the following year he recorded his breakthrough album The Americanization of Ooga Booga. By 1966, the trumpeter relocated to Los Angeles and recorded The Emancipation of Hugh Masekela, the title of which may have been a sly reference to his divorce that year from Makeba.

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