Jonas Gwangwa with Hugh Masekela and Kippie Moeketsi. Halim’s Photographic Service, Cape Town BAHA/Drum Social Histories / Baileys African History Archive / Africa Media Online hide caption

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Halim’s Photographic Service, Cape Town BAHA/Drum Social Histories / Baileys African History Archive / Africa Media Online

Jonas Gwangwa with Hugh Masekela and Kippie Moeketsi.

Halim’s Photographic Service, Cape Town BAHA/Drum Social Histories / Baileys African History Archive / Africa Media Online

Hugh Masekela was an up-and-coming trumpeter, all of 20, when he took an overnight train from Johannesburg to Cape Town to meet a pianist everyone was talking about in South Africa: Abdullah Ibrahim, then known as Dollar Brand.

Ibrahim, 25 at the time, was the forward-thinking figure needed to complete South Africa’s greatest bebop band of all time, The Jazz Epistles. On the morning that Masekela arrived at the Ambassadors club in Cape Town with two other formidable South African jazz players — Kippie Moeketsi on alto saxophone and Jonas Gwangwa on trombone — there were no arrangements for accommodation. Rehearsals started anyway, and for the first few nights, the three musicians slept on mattresses on the floor in the back of the club.

Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly known as Dollar Brand) before he left South Africa in 1959. Drum Social Histories/Drum Social Histories / Baileys African History Archive / Africa Media Online hide caption

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Drum Social Histories/Drum Social Histories / Baileys African History Archive / Africa Media Online

Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly known as Dollar Brand) before he left South Africa in 1959.

Drum Social Histories/Drum Social Histories / Baileys African History Archive / Africa Media Online

“There had never been a group like the Epistles in South Africa,” Masekela writes in his 2004 biography, Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela. “Our tireless energy, complex arrangements, tight ensemble play, languid slow ballads, and heart-melting, hymn-like dirges won us a following and soon we were breaking all attendance records in Cape Town. People would sit on the floor and around the edge of the bandstand at the Ambassadors when all the seats were filled.”

The story of The Jazz Epistles may be deeply engraved in South African cultural history, and perhaps even celebrated throughout the African continent, but for whatever reason this music and narrative never made it to the United States, even among the jazz intelligentsia.

“This story hasn’t been told because it’s a hidden history,” says Dr. Sazi Dlamini, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Kwazulu-Natal. “It’s waiting to be told. It can be told from so many angles. And it would take a really very focused research and attention to be able to tell it in its entirety.”

What it comes down to is this: Two of the greatest jazz legends of our time once played in a band featuring the top South African jazz musicians — all of them black — and were able to record one session together before the country’s brutally racist apartheid government forced them into exile. One recording was made, and with only 500 copies printed, it became a sort of Holy Grail. Then this remarkably fresh and modern recording from 1960 was buried, and almost lost forever.

Joining Ibrahim, Masekela, Moeketsi and Gwangwa were bassist Johnny Gertze and drummer Makaya Ntshoko. The name of the album was Jazz Epistle Verse 1. Gwen Ansell, the author of Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, and Politics in South Africa, calls it “the first all-black modern jazz album in South Africa.”

During this period, South Africa’s white nationalists in power were in the process of installing apartheid, one of the cruelest human experiments in modern history. They didn’t think too fondly of jazz. In fact, jazz was so forbidden that it spawned secret jazz listening parties, where people would travel long distances to hear, say, the latest Miles Davis recording. Jazz symbolized what the white nationalist government feared most: the social mixing of racial groups.

“At a time when apartheid itself was very backward looking,” says Ansell, “you had a collection of black musicians who were saying very defiantly: ‘We are here, we are modern-city people. There is no way you are going to exclude us from modern life.’ And that is the beautiful undertone in that music. Basically for the apartheid regime, this very kind of modern, non-tribal urban music was something they couldn’t cope with. It didn’t fit in to their perception of what Africans should be doing.”

Ibrahim, in a recent interview with Siddartha Mitter, put it this way: “The key was we had to play our own original music. And Kippie was the driving force saying that this was an affirmation of our culture and tradition. Some of the songs, he injected some of the traditional, dance music and integrated it in his composition.”

Moekesti also wasn’t afraid to acknowledge the oppressive legacy of apartheid in his music — as in “Scullery Department,” a brilliant original on Jazz Epistle Verse 1. “What Kippie Moeketsi was doing was describing the situation of musicians who were good enough to play for white patrons in a restaurant, but were only allowed to eat and sit in the scullery, in the back kitchen,” Ansell says.

Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela managed not only to escape South Africa in exile, but also to pave two awe-inspiring career paths. They achieved their stature independently from each other, but have been cosmically linked as worldwide symbols in the Pan-African resistance movement.

After being discovered in Zurich by Duke Ellington, and then signed to Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label, Ibrahim fast achieved global recognition. He went on to create an impressive discography that mostly featured his original compositions. Some of these, like “Mannenberg,” became popular anti-apartheid anthems.

Now 82, Ibrahim cuts an almost monk-like figure, with each new recording more focused then the last. Over the years, his music with the chamber ensemble Ekaya has only become quieter and more introspective, a far whisper from what he originally sounded like with the Jazz Epistles.

When Masekela found exile in the United States, he also seemed destined for success. He formed an early friendship with the politically active folksinger Harry Belafonte, and then made two early smash hits: “Up, Up and Away” (1967) and “Grazing in the Grass,” each of which sold millions of units. (In the States, “Grazing” was a No. 1 single.)

In a marked contrast to Ibrahim’s subdued approach to music and activism, Masekela succeeded with a brash and extroverted signature. His path to stardom involved musical alliances with pop stars like Paul Simon, notably on a 70th birthday concert for Nelson Mandela at Wembley Stadium, viewed by hundreds of millions worldwide. Many of Masekela’s massively successful protest songs, like “Stimela (Coal Train)” and “Bring Him Back Home,” are still in his repertory today.

The aesthetic and personal differences between Ibrahim and Masekela could hardly be more pronounced. These differences help explain why these two have barely played together in half a century. Over the years I’ve interviewed both artists multiple times, always bringing up the prospect of a Jazz Epistles reunion. Ibrahim, Masekela and Gwangwa shared a stage last year in Johannesburg, but I wanted to bring these artists together for a concert audience in the United States.

That dream came tantalizingly close to a reality this week, with a program taking place on Thursday, April 27 — Freedom Day — at The Town Hall in New York. Presented by the Town Hall and Le Poisson Rouge in partnership with WBGO and South Africa Tourism, this was conceived and originally billed as a reunion of the Jazz Epistles — the first concert to feature both Masekela and Ibrahim in more than five decades.

But just days before his trip to New York City, which would have kicked off a statewide tour of the reunion band, Masekela experienced further complications from a recent fall in Morocco, dislocating his shoulder. He released a video expressing his regrets, along with his hope to join Ibrahim and be back on the road in a few months.

Fortunately, we were able to make some last-minute additions to the concert, notably the formidable vocalist Dorothy Masuka, who will perform with a quartet featuring bassist Bakithi Khumalo. Masuka, a dear friend of the late Mama Africa, Mariam Makeba, as well as a close associate of Masekela, was also a South African freedom fighter forced into exile.

She’s one of the first openly feminist South African singers, and claims authorship of Makeba’s most famous composition, “Pata Pata” — a song that directly calls out physical sexual harassment against women. She was also blacklisted by South Africa’s notorious government agency, The Special Branch, for her anti-apartheid songs, including “Dr. Malan,” which minced few words, and drew the attention of government censors. She will hopefully be playing both of those compositions in concert.

Meanwhile, standing in for Masekela is the young South African trumpeter Lesedi Ntsane, who says: “This concert is very special to me. The Jazz Epistles are legendary. They are the blood of the soil. We all grew up on them. They gave us life and this is historic.”

Even without the realization of a Jazz Epistles reunion, Thursday’s concert rings of the present moment. South Africa’s “Fees Must Fall” movement and our own #BlackLivesMatter protests are both engaged in a battle against social injustice and the capitalist institutions that preserve them. It’s freedom fighters like Ibrahim and Masekela who first planted these seeds, gracefully addressing racism and social injustice as a global problem, and linking them together from opposite parts of the world.

Jazz Night In America and WBGO’s The Checkout will capture this concert in audio and video, for a future program.

Simon Rentner is a journalist, radio show host, and producer in New York City, who has traveled to South Africa on several occasions.

It all began with her voice. Everyone who heard it was immediately entranced. Her soft, crystal-clear tones would swing through dance halls, gliding up and down the scale.

As a performer, Ella Fitzgerald combined a certain childish naiveté and playfulness with feminine charm. With her unique talent, she first conquered audiences in New York, and later the whole world. One of the greatest jazz singers ever, she remains immortal.

Humble beginnings

It all began quite modestly, in the town of Newport News, Virginia, where Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917. Her father left the family shortly after her birth, so Ella’s mother Tempie bought her up alone.

At the time, millions of African-Americans were moving from rural areas to big cities as part of the Great Migration movement. The small Fitzgerald family also moved to New York in the early 1920s, where they settled in the suburb of Yonkers, near Tempie’s sister.

The house was apparently always filled with music. Little Ella soon discovered a passion for pop music, especially by Arthur “The Street Singer” Tracy and the Boswell Sisters.

She suffered from stage fright throughout her career

Tempie encouraged Ella’s musical talent with a few piano lessons, despite not having much money available to afford them. However, Ella Fitzgerald never had any formal music education.

The girl next door

The young Ella actually wanted to become a dancer.

In the early 1930s, she and her friends would watch street performers in Harlem. The girls also discovered the most popular Black musicians playing in larger clubs during the weekend. On weekdays, these concert halls, such as the Apollo Theater and the Harlem Opera House, invited amateurs to take the stage. During those amateur nights, musicians, singers and dancers could compete for the favor of the audience and win prize money, along with the hope of being discovered one day.

Ella dreamed of this, too, when she signed up to take part in one of those amateur nights as a dancer. It was quite a risk for the shy girl, as audiences wouldn’t hesitate to boo a performance they didn’t like.

When the curtain rose for her number, she was paralyzed by stage fright. She couldn’t dance, and her knees were like pudding. The audience was growing restless and Ella spontaneously decided to sing a song by the Boswell Sisters. As the orchestra started accompanying her, she became more and more confident and completed the song to the enthusiastic applause of the crowd.

The 16-year-old Ella Fitzgerald had found her destiny.

First steps

From then on, she regularly participated in such amateur nights and began attracting the attention of people in the music industry.

One evening she was offered the chance to sing for the drummer Chick Webb. He needed some convincing at first, because he didn’t want a singer in his band. Yet Webb was so impressed by Ella’s voice that he hired her. He quickly became her mentor; when Ella’s mother suddenly died, he took over the guardianship for the still minor singer.

Webb only progressively introduced his protégé to the music world, as he knew that sudden success could be just as quickly forgotten. At first, he restricted her repertoire to pop songs. In March 1936, Ella demonstrated she was capable of more when she replaced the already successful Billie Holiday to record a ballad with Teddy Wilson. From then on, her mentor agreed to let her sing ballads as well.

Becoming a jazz icon

When Chick Webb died in 1939, Ella Fitzgerald took over the direction of his orchestra for a while. She then started her solo career in 1941. During World War II, she recorded with several musicians, among which the Ink Spots.

Her career only really took off after the war. In 1951, she had the opportunity to record with her great idol Louis Armstrong, and her collaboration with one of the initiators of bebop, Dizzie Gillespie, was extremely successful.

In the 1950s, she found a new mentor and supporter: Norman Granz, the founder of the famous Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series. He became her manager and founded the record label Verve especially for Ella.

CD cover of “The Complete Song Books”

That’s where Fitzgerald finally wrote music history by recording through the mid-1960s her Great American Song Books, a series of eight studio albums in which she interpreted the classics of the American musical canon, with songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and the Gershwin brothers, among others. Ella Fitzgerald thereby contributed to intercultural exchange during the Civil Rights era.

A living legend

In the 1970s and 80s, the aging diva’s popularity was a strong as ever and she was showered with awards and honors. Fans also rediscovered her early works through new re-releases.

Health problems, however, imposed longer recovery phases in her otherwise tightly scheduled tours. Still, even a heart bypass surgery in 1986 couldn’t keep her away from the stage for too long: Her fans’ love was like medicine, she once said.

She gave her last concert in New York in 1991, in the city where it all began. On June 15, 1996, Ella Fitzgerald died at the age of 79 in her house in Beverly Hills.

The ‘Beauty and the Beast’ singer is workin­g on a new album titled Darkne­ss and Light

PHOTO: FILE

In the midst of all the chaos, sitting with his piano, crooning to his famous track, All of Me, John Legend gave the perfect distraction to the commuters at King’s Cross St Pancras.

Currently in London, the Beauty and the Beast singer is working on a new album titled Darkness and Light. Discussing his latest album, Legend said, “It’s a really interesting blend on this album, all very soulful, and it feels like really honest, truthful music for me,” reports The Independent.

Giving his two cents about the Grammy Album of the year this time, the La La Land star asserted, “Album of the Year should be hugely important albums –  that are high quality – and of course Adele’s was that, but for a lot of people Beyoncé made the most important artistic statement of the year, and she did it in a way that was hugely successful and groundbreaking and news-making.”

The key to success is love – John Legend

“Ideally, the album should be commercially successful; it should be a big impactful album,” he adds. “But we do have other awards that are strictly by the numbers – AMAs, Billboard… those are more numbers-driven.”

On his fun relationship with wife, Chrissy Teigen, Legend smiled as he said, “We have fun. When we’re on Twitter, we truly enjoy the interaction, it’s not some planned out publicity scheme. We don’t talk with our publicist about what we’re gonna say… They wish we did sometimes, probably.”

“When I’m sharing aspects of my private life it’s because I feel good about sharing it. So it’s all very natural and comfortable for me to do it, and I don’t feel like it’s an imposition because if I don’t want to I just won’t do it.” He further adds.

Legend also commented on critics believing that the artists are less vocal about political and social conflicts now, as compared to those in the 60s and 70s era.

“In the 60s and 70s it was much more common for artists to sing and speak about politics,” he says. “I think there was no sense of urgency until he got elected, and now people are genuinely worried about the future of the country. I think people had gotten comfortable. People will protest, they’ll write songs, people are engaged.

Donald Trump Jr challenged by John Legend after singer calls father ‘racist’

Discussing the significance of Black Lives Matter movement, the You & I singer remarked, “Sometimes you need that sense of urgency to spawn a creative renaissance where we really talk about these issues. And between the Black Lives Matter movement and Trump getting elected, BLM really impacted a lot of black musicians and I think Trump getting elected will impact an even larger body of musicians.”

“You see that reaction in some of these elections in the US and Europe,” he asserted, adding “Hopefully everyone will calm down and stop operating out of fear and be more accepting of each other’s differences.”

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Throughout his career, Prince played around with constructions of race, gender and sexuality. Rico D’Rozario/Redferns via Getty Images hide caption

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Rico D’Rozario/Redferns via Getty Images

Throughout his career, Prince played around with constructions of race, gender and sexuality.

Rico D’Rozario/Redferns via Getty Images

When Prince first signed with Warner Bros. Records, he didn’t want to be categorized as a black musician. This was the late 1970s, before music by black artists was widely marketed to multiracial audiences; before kids in every household in America were glued to their screens watching “Thriller” on MTV.

To avoid being boxed in — which for black artists often meant making less money and reaching smaller audiences than their white counterparts — Prince encouraged rumors about his identity, hinting at being biracial when both his parents were black. In the 1984 movie Purple Rain, Prince’s parents are played by an African-American man and a white, Greek woman. The fiction of his racial background endured throughout his career, even creeping into some of last year’s obituaries.

The way Prince worked to dissolve categories is one of the central themes that Ben Greenman explores in his new book, Dig If You Will The Picture. Greenman said that combining multiple, often conflicting identities, was integral to Prince’s work. And race wasn’t the only way Prince stirred things up.

“From very early on, he just shattered ideologies,” said Greenman, who has been a Prince fan since middle school in the early ’80s. “[His] process was to isolate two theoretically opposed aspects of a self, of a person — male-female, black-white, straight-gay, good-evil. And he played out that opposition in his work. Sometimes he resolved it to his satisfaction; usually he didn’t. And the tension between those two things powered the work. That was the engine at the center.”

That tension resonated with Prince listeners of many different backgrounds. In an article for Time, Touré (who also wrote a book about Prince), wrote that “Prince sits at the edges of race, gender, and sexuality and rejects all borders.” He said that in doing so, Prince was almost able to become “a genre unto himself sonically and interpersonally.”

According to Greenman, multiplicities played out in all sorts of ways — in terms of musical style, fashion, album art, even the members of his bands. Musically, it meant combining different genres, techniques and influences. Sometimes it even meant creating different identities, like his Camille persona, a higher pitched alter ego that he used in the 1987 song “If I Was Your Girlfriend.” The song begins with the lyric, “If I was your girlfriend would you remember to tell me all the things you forgot when I was your man?”

Then there’s the 1981 song “Controversy,” in which Prince delves into sexuality. In it, he asks, “Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?” Thirty-five years ago, that was a more fraught question than it might be today. “Playing straight-gay was [a] very important thing for that time, in the ’80s, when AIDS was a relatively new major issue,” Greenman said. “Here was this guy who was so flamboyant and nobody could really pinpoint or put their finger on his sexuality, and he didn’t really clarify.”

Years later, Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness, “and a lot of that early flamboyance and that early dissolution of category went away,” Greenman said. “Part of it was that he just got older and his sense of himself, I’m sure, changed. But that early period Prince went to great lengths to blow up everything.”

In blowing up everything, Prince made space for a new generation of artists. When Prince died in 2016, Frank Ocean posted a tribute acknowledging the ways in which Prince was a trailblazer. “[Prince] was a straight black man who played his first televised set in bikini bottoms and knee-high heeled boots, epic,” Ocean wrote. “He made me feel more comfortable with how I identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity.”

Behind the scenes, Prince was notoriously shy, and he didn’t do a lot of interviews. But when he did, he committed hard to the idea that he and his music were not to be put into a box. In a 1999 TV appearance, Larry King expressed confusion at what to call Prince, who at the time was not going by Prince, but an unpronounceable symbol. Later in the conversation, King asked Prince, “How would you describe your music? What idiom would you put it in?”

Prince responded: “The only thing I could think of, because I really don’t like categories, but the only thing I could think of is inspirational.”

Greenman said that the way Prince forced fans to reckon with their own notions of identity was a form of subtle activism. Later in life, that propensity to address social injustices became more overt, even as Prince himself tended to speak more conservatively. After he died, fans started learning about the scope of Prince’s philanthropy. Van Jones, an activist and commentator on CNN, has talked about the lengths Prince went to support causes he believed in, like green jobs initiatives, and teaching black kids how to code. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Jones said that in 2006, when he was working on George W. Bush’s Green Jobs Act, he received an anonymous check for $50,000. Later, he found out the check was from Prince. Prince also made direct reference to social issues in some of his later songs, like 2015’s “Baltimore,” which talks about the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray at the hands of police.

“A lot of the way [Prince] addressed social issues was revolutionary early on, and sort of slogan-based,” Greenman said. “He would urge people to educate themselves, or overthrow the existing order, or don’t listen to everyone … It was hard to imagine being a Prince fan in 1984, 85, 86, and not going through that process of reassessing beliefs all the time. Both because as a fan you had to follow him, and because every message was about searching and finding and questioning what you were.”