Hugh Masekela Quotes

I arrived the day that Castro left the Waldorf to go and live at the Theresa Hotel, and it was a couple of days after Khrushchev had banged his shoe on the lectern at the U.N. and said, "We will bury you!" Lumumba was here, and Kennedy was campaigning against Nixon for the presidency. It was the time of Martin Luther King and civil rights and Belafonte, one of my sponsors, was the greatest fund raiser for civil rights. It was the time of the emergence of Malcolm X. And I came here right into the golden age of jazz, when you could go to the Apollo and see a whole gospel or Latino show, and you could go to Wells and see Abby Lincoln and Mel Waldron, and come downtown to Birdland and see Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and go to Basin St. West and see Sarah Vaughn and Count Basie, and go to the Half Note and see Coletrane and Miles, and then cross over and see Horace Silver and Les McCann at the Village Gate, and at the Jazz Gallery it would be Monk and Dizzy, and across the street at Five Spot would be Max Roach and Charlie Mingus. It was that kind of a time. You could go to the Coronet in Brooklyn. And you'd do all this if you were a student on like less than twenty bucks. Today, twenty bucks doesn't even get you into a club.
Hugh Masekela