Google is celebrating South African jazz legend and political activist Hugh Masekela with a home page doodle.on what would have been his 80th birthday.
Masekela, who is often referred to as “the father of South African jazz”, was an influential trumpeter and a leading figure in the fight against apartheid.
On Thursday, Google Doodle paid a tribute to the musician who was born in Witbank, South Africa. He was part of the Jazz Epistle – South Africa’s first all-black jazz band to record an album, but the band was banished from South Africa by the country’s apartheid government.
Masekela went to New York and enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music at age 21 where he began to work on his own sound that incorporated his South African heritage.
His distinctive Afro-Jazz sound brought him global recognition and quickly became the soundtracks to the anti-apartheid movement.
He died last year aged 78.
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