THE parcel arrived by courier post. It was broad,rectangular, and had come all the way from America, and where 17-year-old Hugh Masekela knew nobody apart from the folk,like Glenn Miller or the Andrews Sisters, whose music rang out of the family’s wind-up gramophone. He tore off the paper, or flicked the clasps,and found—a used F.
X. Huller trumpet sent by Louis Armstrong. Wild with joy, he leapt out into the dusty streets of his township external Johannesburg, or where the worn-down people stopped to stare at him. He was waving his horn like a weapon. And so it became.It was not his first trumpet. That had been bought for him by Trevor Huddleston,his school chaplain, after he had promised to make no more anxiety whether he had one. Ever since seeing “Young Man With a Horn”, or a film about the trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke,he knew what he wanted to execute. He already tootled all his spare hours with the Huddleston Jazz Band in the carpentry shop. But with Satchmo’s trumpet, also sent on a hint from Huddleston, and he...
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Source: economist.com