Nobody gets around like trumpeter and bandleader Hugh Masekela. In his sixty years, Masekela has traveled the globe and played with Nigeria's Fela Kuti, Zaire's OK Jazz, the Crusaders, Herb Alpert and Paul Simon, as well as many South African jazz and pop greats.

After anti-apartheid activist Father Trevor Huddleston introduced him to the trumpet, Masekela worked his way into the jazz scene, playing alongside trombonist Jonas Gwangwa, clarinet and sax man Kippie Moeketsi and later the great Dollar Brand. A self-styled "young man with a horn," Masekela played the townships with Father Huddleston's Jazz Band and then with the Jazz Dazzlers doing jazz covers and mbaqanga.

But fed up with apartheid's drive to curtail black music, Masekela left his place in the Jazz Epistles to go into exile in 1961. Harry Belafonte helped him settle in the US as a student, and Masekela set up shop in New York, recording a number of records in the late '60s and early '70s, including his 1968 number one hit, "Grazing in the Grass." In leaner years ahead, Masekela worked with other South Africans, including jive-gone-jazz saxophone luminary Dudu Pukwana.

Masekela spent six years exploring music in Senegal, Zaire, Guinea, Nigeria and Ghana. In Ghana, Fela Kuti hooked him up with Hedzolleh Sounds, a highlife fusion band with whom Masekela returned to the US and recorded what some critics consider his best records. In 1980, Masekela joined Miriam Makeba to play for 100,000 in Lesotho, and four years later he established a mobile studio in Botswana and recorded Technobush, an mbaqanga/funk fusion album featuring the Soul Brothers. When controversy stirred around the Graceland tour as a violation of the ANC's cultural boycott, Masekela, a participant, defended Paul Simon vigorously. Masekela's 1987 song "Bring Him Back Home" became the theme for Nelson Mandela's world tour following his release from prison in 1992. Masekela now lives in South Africa, though he travels often to perform and record.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre