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Resounding horn-notes from history

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Sometimes, to employ an analogy from filmcraft or painting, a small but sharp sidelight can revealingly illuminate some much bigger picture. That basic trick lies at the heart of much good journalism. And this week it was practiced redemptively by correspondent David Margolick, who once looked bent upon a somewhat deviant path by leaving the New York Times for the glossy but often tacky Vanity Fair magazine, in the wake of some voluminous reporting he did on the O.J. Simpson case (that's last decade’s Simpson case, of course).

In the Op Ed columns of both his old paper, the Times, and its Paris-based offspring, the International Herald Tribune, Margolick captured the edgy inching-forward of American civil rights history. He did so by marking the 50th anniversary of Little Rock’s school desegregation in a completely tangential fashion.

 

He reconstructed the events, not in Arkansas or Washington DC, but in the apparently unrelated locale of North Dakota. That was where a freelance reporter named Larry Lubenow (actually a 21-year old journalism student moonlighting for his local paper – who significantly was a jazz-fiend, too) gained some “face-time” with Louis Armstrong (above left) during his 1957 tour of the Great Plains States. Despite an overall ground-rule of “No Politics”, Lubenow in fact got Armstrong to comment on the resistance of Arkansas’ Governor Orval Faubus to federal US directives insisting on desegregation.

 

Satchmo said memorably: “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country”. He also criticized President Dwight Eisenhower for a lack of guts in enforcing the federal law, calling him “two-faced” and also an obscene expletive which, with Lubenow’s cooperation, he modified for quotation in a family newspaper, so that he ended up describing the President as “an uneducated plow-boy”.

 

Family values may have been satisfied, but political nervousness was not, and the local paper simply wouldn’t carry the Armstrong interview. But the Associated Press would, and did – though only after it ordered Lubenow to double-check the quotes with their famous utterer. The jazzman firmly re-approved the message.

 

Satchmo’s words made it big on the national TV networks’ evening news shows, and a media storm erupted. While Sammy Davis Jr distanced himself from the anti-Eisenhower remarks, Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, Jackie Robinson and Sugar Ray Robinson all supported them. Jet magazine did too – reversing its previous dismissal of the trumpeter as an Uncle Tom.

 

And within a few days Eisenhower sent in troops of the 101st Airborne to escort black students into school.

 

All in all Margolick's tangent rounded out a telling episode of the time – and of a public figure of the time, an entertainer who interestingly claimed: “I don’t get involved in politics. I just blow my horn.”

 

 

 

I HAVE MY OWN SATCHMO STORY, FIGURING AS A SIDELIGHT on another historic freedom struggle. That would be South Africa’s long fight against apartheid, and I first heard the tale as a 21-year old freelance reporter myself (barely graduated from college, though not in the subject of journalism). It came from one of my then-living heroes, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, a valiant leader of the world-wide Anti-Apartheid Movement.

 

In the 1950’s he had been plain Father Huddleston, a parish priest in Johannesburg’s Sophiatown township (later brutally bulldozed out of existence, though the name was much, much later reinstated by Nelson Mandela's majority government). Huddleston organized poor youths in the district into a jazz band – with the aim, in part, of keeping them out of trouble with the apartheid police.

 

One star performer was Hugh Masekela, eventually to be known globally as a giant of jazz trumpeting, with a lot of cross-over recording success, and a strong identification with South Africa’s cause. His companion - and wife for two years - in the 1960s was to be that glorious singer of African anthems, and of much else too, Miriam Makeba. And Hugh's slightly younger sister, Barbara Masekela, became Mandela’s first Ambassador to Paris, and then to Washington.

 

Trevor Huddleston had bought Hugh Masekela his first, second-hand and battered trumpet when he was fifteen, and arranged his weekly lessons with a local brass band leader. Soon this natural musician’s talent and dedication vastly outgrew his humble instrument.

 

But in early 1956 Huddleston was recalled by his Anglican order in Britain. He had become a notorious trouble-maker for the white supremacist authorities. Furious, but bound by a vow of obedience, he left his beloved South Africa, his beloved parish, and his beloved jazz band, now somewhat rudderless.

 

He traveled to the United States on a speaking tour to alert the American public to the outrages of apartheid, and forged a friendship with Dr Martin Luther King Jr. His connections gained him a back-stage visit with Louis Armstrong after a concert in Rochester, NY.

 

He told Satchmo about the genius young player with poor equipment back in a South African slum, and Armstrong offered to send him one of his own trumpets. He thought briefly of buying Masekela a new one, and then changed his mind: “I figure he’d rather have a horn I’ve been drawin’ a few of those notes on than a new one,” Huddleston recalled him saying.

 

Sure enough, the package arrived to Masekela’s disbelieving delight at Sophiatown’s Polly Street Community Center in April 1956. In the intervening years that have seen so much dramatic change - and included Huddleston’s death nine years ago, at age 84 - I’ve checked this story verbally with Masekela to my journalistic satisfaction. But imagine my delight, too, on seeing Masekela’s autobiography recently published by Crown, under the title Still Grazing, and learning that there is also a visual record of that magical moment in both artistic and activist history.

 

The book - blurbed by singer-composer Paul Simon as “a wild tale as forceful and engaging as a Masekela trumpet solo”  - carries an image on its cover of a 17-year old Masekela (above right) literally jumping for joy with his highly-charged new possession. The picture was taken, it’s thought, by a Johannesburg Star photographer and preserved by the Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, which used to be housed -  through all the years of the anti-apartheid struggle - in north London, and to which I’m grateful for enormous help with my films and magazine articles during that time.

 

The Star’s headline on its 1956 story was: “LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S TRUMPET ARRIVES! Hugh cannot believe his luck – a trumpet from the “King” himself”.

 

And the now 68-year old Masekela today says: “This horn was my connection not just to Armstrong, but to a long, powerful tradition that had criss-crossed the Atlantic from Africa to America and back.”