Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
A South African trumpeter and musician who escaped apartheid, played with Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, and returned from exile at Nelson Mandela's invitation.
On the island
Eight records
LilizelaFavourite
Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens
But when I first heard this record, I just tears just came to my eyes. It was one of the most homesick and nostalgic moments.
Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden
It's one of the songs that I uh play almost a week doesn't pass by when I wake up in the morning, I go and play it and I just smile.
And uh he was called the clown of Bebob. But here's Dizzy Gillespie with Con Alma.
But all her songs were just about like the tragedies of love, but nobody expressed it better than Billie Holiday.
Franco, who uh is the king of Congolese music, you know, and one of the funniest and most generous people, he had a his own club called Anne de Trois. I was just in uh music haven one more time.
The Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir
To me it sounds like they deep out of the Utturi forest in the Congo.
When It's Sleepy Time Down South
Leon René, Otis René, Clarence Muse
And the most wonderful thing about Louis Armstrong is that he shared what so many great leaders have, the quality of generosity and never forgetting his beginnings.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:09So thirty years away from your home, Hugh, between the ages of what, twenty one and fifty one, you must during that time have thought you'd never see it again.
Oh yeah, no, it was the impossible dream. I think that by maybe my twentieth year, I had resolved in my mind very clearly that I would never see home again. I had been unable to go and bury my mother, who died in a car accident. That is like as far away from home as you can get. When we were told that uh we could go back, it was uh like the impossible dream.
Presenter asks
7:50How did you react when they [the Afrikaner kids] called you monkeys? I mean were you taught not to react?
We were raised to be very proud and extraordinary, and we knew that it was our land and that these were usurpers. We were cleaner than them, we were more dignified than them. And when we grew up, we'd learned to laugh at the oppressor. And I think in South Africa, the oppressor had a much more painful time than the oppressed.
Presenter asks
10:19Why did you suddenly think, Yeah, the trumpet's for me?
I chose music when I saw a movie called Young Man With a Horn and was the story of Big Spider-Back. In which uh Kirk Douglas played his part and in and and in the movie Kirk Douglas stood in front of the band, always played the solos, didn't take any rubbish from anybody, wore the snazziest kind of clothes and always got the girl. And I thought this m there's a brighter future in this than education, you know
The keepsakes
The book
Charles Dickens
because again, that's uh uh it it parallels my story very much of a boy I came from like deprivation to make it. I just enjoy his description of every character, especially Mr. Squeers.
The luxury
What if I can take a keyboard with me, you know, some kind of keyboard, even if it's a beat up piano? It'd probably be a great vacation for me because I'd just be able to write songs and have that time to write songs. And I write all my songs at the keyboard.
Presenter asks
14:16What did you and your friends think of [Trevor Huddleston]? I mean, here was a white man who was prepared to help and put himself on the line for you.
[Huddleston] didn't make you feel like you was a white man. [Huddleston] made you feel like it was a human being and made you feel like you were a human being. And it helped he helped to get us focused on the excellence of humanity. Our battle against apartheid wasn't against white people, because we have to realize that very many Africans collaborated with apartheid. Very, very many. And uh the most of the police were Africans. So it's ... not so much racial as much as it was the right thing against the wrong thing.
Presenter asks
26:01When did you finally kick it then? Both drink and drugs?
It was nineteen ninety seven. And I came to England to a mental health nursing home, yeah, with the help of my friends and my sister and everybody. And I came with the bad baggage. The psychology of addiction is something that I finally like studied later on. It's just something that happens from the fact that you are hiding a lot of hurt that you've never really expressed. I think from the time I was a child, because music was my main focus, to a certain extent it was an anesthetic against all the p pains of the violence in South Africa, violence in my family, the dysfunctional relationships, all my family, and the fact that most of my uh mother's side of my family all also died from uh from except for my grandmother and her sister, all died from alcoholic abuse.
“There is nothing as lonely as exile, especially when you're among the first group of refugees to leave your country. You missed many, many things. And the first time you hear music from home that you'd missed, it goes to your eyes right away, you know. It's nostalgia.”
“More miracles have happened to me in the five and a half to six years since I stopped than happened to me in the forty four years that I was addicted.”
“I think that for us now the new top is not making it overseas, is making it at home, because now we've got our freedom throughout Africa. We need to build an infrastructure within Africa where we reclaim like the entertainment and the cultural turf so that our musicians leaving Africa to come and seek fame abroad or education should be the exception instead of the rule.”