The Horny Horns

He never sets eyes on her again.

As that anecdote portends, Masekela's autobiography, Still Grazing, is delightfully bawdy and profane. The legendary 65-year-old South African trumpeter is a boastful and blunt narrator, dispensing stories with a charming exuberance.

Masekela came of age just as white supremacy in South Africa was being institutionalized through apartheid. His love of music and women blossoms against a backdrop of humiliation and violence. At the premiere performance of his high school jazz band, gangsters kill 17 people. Shortly afterward, he receives a trumpet donated by Louis Armstrong. Masekela drops out of school and travels the country playing with various bands. He eventually scores a scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music.

This kicks off a four-decade bacchanal of drugs, booze, and sex. Masekela's anecdotes of (quite literally) the high life boggle the mind. Soon after landing in New York in 1960, he's smoking dope with Dizzy Gillespie and Jimi Hendrix. Then he's plotting with Marlon Brando to spring antiapartheid activist Robert Sobukwe from prison. Masekela's first LSD trip takes place at David Crosby's house. "His girlfriend had worked all evening on a sumptuous spaghetti dinner, and when we sat down to eat, the pasta began talking to me," he recalls. "I answered, 'You are so beautiful. I can't eat you.'"

With all the drugs and booze, it's a wonder that Masekela isn't as useless in the sack as--to steal one of his favorite phrases--a broke-dick dog. But his sexual exploits are positively Chamberlainian. After his first marriage falls apart, Masekela flies to Mexico for a quickie divorce. He ends up bedding down with two fellow divorcées during the trip. Billy Dee Williams, of all people, warns him not to marry Cab Calloway's daughter, Chris. "She is insane," Williams cautions.

The couple is so high when they go to tie the knot that they mistakenly throw away their marriage license. The relationship dissolves in acrimony.

A few years later, Masekela is hanging out with Mick Jagger and Ron Wood at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Don King is also staying there and they decide to pay a visit. Masekela recounts the bizarre encounter as if such incidents were routine.