WITH all the fuss surrounding the vuvuzela, music fans will be glad to recapture the real sound of South Africa as the mighty Hugh Masekela announces a date at Lighthouse, Poole on November 19.

Still a jazz icon at the age of 71, Hugh recently performed at the World Cup concert alongside Alicia Keys, Black Eyed Peas and Shakira; and again at the spectacular World Cup opening ceremony.

A militant ambassador for six decades, Hugh Masekela has been an outspoken figure in the struggle for civil rights on both sides of the Atlantic and spent his career pushing musical boundaries. He is one of jazz’s greatest horn players, able to adopt township jazz, funk and hip-hop into his music.

Inspired by the anti-apartheid activist Trevor Huddleston, his school chaplain, Masekela was a teenage trumpet prodigy whose instrument had been a present from Louis Armstrong himself.

Career highlights include being part of the orchestra for the King Kong musical that first brought South African culture to the outside world in the 1950s; appearing at the Monterey pop festival in 1967 and becoming the first African to top the American singles charts (with 1968’s Grazing In The Grass, which he played at the Word Cup concert); the Graceland tour with Paul Simon and Miriam Makeba in 1987; and the four-month tour of South Africa in 1991 that celebrated the end of both apartheid and his exile from his homeland. Despite the demise of that political regime, however, his most recent album, 2009’s Phola, is one of his most important statements to date, an attack on the failings of the current South African government that proves his fire burns as ferociously as ever it did.

As well as his soaring and joyful trumpet sounds, fans can also see the doyennes of Zulu mbaqanga jazz, the Mahotella Queens – Hilda Tloubatla, Nobesuthu Mbadu and Mildred Mangxola.

From the early 1970s to the mid 1980s, they were one of South Africa’s foremost acts and after apartheid, became one of the country’s most important cultural exports.