Google doodle celebrates Hugh Masekela's 80th Birthday

Hugh Masekela – The grand old man of South African contemporary music

Hugh Masekela was a South African trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer and singer who is also known as 'The father of South African jazz'. Today search giant Google is celebrating the trumpeter birthday by dedicating a colourful doodle. The Doodle shows the legend playing the trumpet in a very colourful way.

Hugh Masekela has combined African rhythmic patterns and mbaqanga strains with Western swing and jazz to create his "hybrid style" of popular music. Mbhaqanga, as Masekelaclaims in his autobiography, "was the dominant music of the townships in South Africa," and consisted of traditional chanting and drumming with jazz (Masekela and Cheers 2004, 3).

Masekela's career started in his hometown Witbank when, as a 14-year old, he saw Kirk Douglas in the musical film Young Man With a Horn. He developed an obsession with jazz and followed the expansive development of jazz music in the fifties from Dixieland to Be-bop. In 1956 he became a member of the African Jazz Revue, and in 1959 he formed his own outfit, the JazzEpistles, who were to become the first African jazz band to release a full- length album. Touring the whole of South Africa, the Jazz Epistles quickly gained recognition and popularity.

Early in the 1970s, he returned to Africa – both physically and musically. Living in Liberia, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria, he started fruitful musical collaborations with other African musicians, recording several albums where jazz is combined with traditional African music. Moving to Botswana in 1981, he founded a music school and hence acquired the role of lecturer for a new generation of African artists. When finally Apartheid terminated its state of emergency in 1990, Hugh moved back to South Africa and celebrated with a nationwide tour, performing his anti-Apartheid anthem Bring Him Back Home to enthusiastic crowds

On April 9, 2015, Hugh Masekela received an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University in Grahamstown for his expansive career and commitment to the music of South Africa.

Masekela died in Johannesburg on the early morning of 23 January 2018 from prostate cancer, aged 78