Johnny "Mababa" Mekoa, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 72, was a legendary jazz trumpeter and founder of the Gauteng Music Academy.
He was born in Etwatwa township in Benoni on the East Rand in 1945 and was inspired early on by the township's vibrant jazz culture.
He developed a youthful passion for the trumpet from his elder brother, Mbuzi, who played it and the saxophone.
Through him he met his good friend, saxophonist Caiphus Semenya, who was to play an important part in Mekoa's life.
When he wasn't blowing the bugle in the local Boy Scout band, the young Mekoa listened to his brother, Semenya and fellow musicians and knew what he wanted to do with his life.
His trumpet-playing "career" — he didn't earn any money from it for 20 years — began when he was a teenager with the No Name Swingsters, a local group influenced by the big bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie.
Short, chubby and looking even younger than he was, Mekoa was nicknamed "Schoolboy" by the older members.Newport Jazz Festival
In his later teens Mekoa went through something of a personal identity crisis. His father was Tswana but his mother was coloured.
She wanted him to be classified as coloured because she said it would make his life easier, as it had for cousins of his.
He refused, which caused tension between them. He was light-skinned and hated that black people assumed he was not really one of them. He was constantly having to prove he was as black as they were.
He decided in 1962 to go into exile as many other black musicians were choosing to do.
But he made up his mind to stay after Semenya took him to Dorkay House in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, where he mixed with other musicians and began taking formal lessons in music for the first time.
In 1964 the Separate Amenities Act was gazetted. Black musicians were banned from white clubs and their opportunities to perform in public were severely limited.
If they were lucky they'd be smuggled in to these clubs under "white" names — Mekoa was "Johnny Keen" — but performances were often disrupted by police raids.
In spite of the difficulties, small jazz groups still found ways to survive. Mekoa joined the quintet of his mentor, the legendary drummer Early Mabuza, Big Five, with saxophonist Barney Rachabane, bassist Ernest Mothle and pianist Pat Matshikiza.Fulbright scholar
The great American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis came to hear them and told them he was disappointed. He'd expected them to bring something different and fresh to the US, he said. Instead they played the standard American stuff.
Jazz Ministers were also the first South African band to play at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
In spite of these successes, surviving financially as a black jazz musician in apartheid South Africa was well-nigh impossible.
Mekoa earned his living as a technician in an optometrist's shop in Benoni, cutting and fixing spectacle frames, while doing gigs for nothing at night.
In 1986 he quit his day job and, by this time a family man with children, enrolled at the University of Natal School of Music. Four years later he was the first black person to earn a degree in music there.
He studied mainly Western classical music but got involved in a newly established jazz programme initiated by Darius Brubeck, son of the illustrious jazz pianist Dave Brubeck.
Under Brubeck's leadership he formed the Jazzanians with saxophonist Zim Ngqawana, drummer Lulu Gontsana, bassist Victor Masondo and other highly rated musicians.
In 1988 they were invited to attend the Jazz Education Conference in New York, and went on to do a tour of the US.After graduating, Mekoa applied for a Fulbright scholarship.
"They wanted to know who is this old geezer that wants us to give him thousands of dollars to go and study music," he said.
He was granted it and studied jazz pedagogy at the Indiana University School of Music. After completing his master's, he returned to South Africa to do what he'd told the Fulbright panel he intended to: start a music school.
This was the Gauteng Music Academy, which he started in 1994 in a rundown building in Daveyton, the Benoni township next to Etwatwa.
As well as producing many celebrated artists, such as Malcolm Jiyane, Mthunzi Mvubu, Mpho Mabogoane, Nthabiseng Mokoena and Linda Tshabalala, the academy has hosted the Count Basie Jazz Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and local greats such as Prince Lengoasa, Barney Rachabane and Mekoa's mentor, the trombonist Jonas Gwangwa.
Mekoa, whose motto was "where there is music, you find no evil", is survived by his second wife, Matozi, to whom he was married for 42 years, and four children.
1945-2017..