100 years of Bird’s song

Saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane, 2016 SAMRO Overseas Scholarship winner, can still hear the pain and struggle in Charles Parker’s music. “His sound, articulation and ideas on the saxophone emulate the realities of being a black jazz musician in America at the time: [being] a well celebrated artist on stage whilst brutality awaits you on the streets.”  

Sax titan Charles Parker Jr – Bird – was born in Kansas City on 29 August 1920. A hundred years on, his music still lives; inspiring jazz improvisers and listeners across the world. For US-born reedman Salim Washington, Professor of Music in the UKZN School of Performing Arts, Parker’s sound was (and remains) “the most influential since the sound of Johnny Hodges, lead alto for Duke Ellington’s band. Its fullness and clarity are downright haunting.”

South Africans have a tendency to marry his life and contribution with that of Kippie Morolong Moeketsi, a connection explored in my colleague  Percy Mabandu’s March tribute to both: https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/lifestyle/2020-03-15-measuring-late-jazz-great-charlie-bird-parkers-legacy-in-sa-and-beyond/. One link that’s often made is, in Mabandu’s words, that both “struggled with rapacious appetites – a hunger for life that  was both the spring of their respective clarity and their undoing.”

That view is pervasive, but highly problematic.

Born into structurally racist societies, both men dealt with the corrosive stress of oppression as best they could – and transcended it in their achievements. Posing as admiration, some outsiders’ exoticising stereotype of Black jazzmen as addicted, untameable musical ‘naturals’ (which reached its nadir for Parker in Ross Russell’s salacious drug-porn biography, Bird Lives) is nothing more than a retread of far older racist tropes of primitivism that should have been thrown off the stage long ago. 

As jazz scholar Ingrid Monson observes: “The fact that Charlie Parker was known among his peers as an avid reader who liked to talk about politics and philosophy was less interesting to the press and his imitators than his drug abuse, time spent in a state mental hospital in Camarillo, California, sexual excesses, and apparently magical, unmediated ability to coax entrancing sounds out of an alto saxophone.”

But listen to Parker’s radio conversation with MJQ saxophonist Paul Desmond, who raises the dead duck of magical ‘natural’ talent. Desmond tries hard not to sound surprised when Parker describes the 11-15 hours of practice daily he put into mastering his instrument, and stresses the importance of reading books https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvsqYo9r_dE

Yes, Parker used heroin and it contributed to his death aged only 34. What’s less often discussed is the car accident while touring that broke ribs and fractured his spine when he was only 16, leaving him with chronic pain for the rest of his life. (All saxophonists know how tough extended performances can be on even an undamaged back.) Add the loss of his cabaret card (license to perform, see https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/866933897/the-law-police-used-to-discriminate-against-musicians-of-color), frustrating his creativity, and depriving him and his family of livelihood. Top that with the pervasive racism of American society – for example, watch this 1951 TV clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJYO6_t4d08 where the host, excusing his speech as “informal”, asks Bird and Dizzy Gillespie: “You boys got anything more to say..?” But please don’t romanticise medicating away those pains as some larger-than-life appetite that inspired creativity.  Neither Parker nor Kippie ever did.

Sikhakhane hears clearly how Parker’s hard work and intellect transcended his pain to leave a precious legacy: “Parker documented an important songbook that serves as an important code for every jazz musician and appreciator of this art form.  One gets a strong sense of urgency, the transmission of experience through the horn in real-time when listening to Bird. It’s clear that he had put in so much time in preparation for the bandstand.”

For McCoy Mrubata, “Parker helped to take jazz to greater heights. After the great jazz saxophonists like Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, who were his idols, he changed the sound of the saxophone and introduced a new approach that still exists to this day: a new kind of swing with great approach notes and fast but tasteful triplets. His sound was solid and clear and his phrasing was phenomenal. ” Mrubata points out that Parker’s influence was pervasive in South Africa: not only Moeketsi and, through him the Jazz Epistles, but, “Barney Rachabane, Dudu Pukwana and many more.”

However, even today, you’ll still find a few genre fans who regret the way bebop – or ‘modern music’, as its practitioners preferred to call it back then – made jazz ‘too difficult’. That resurrects another essentially racist trope: ‘authentic’ jazz as just simple good-time music with ‘natural rhythm’.

Saxophonist Steve Dyer hears both intellectualism and accessibility singing together. For him, Parker “represents the benchmark of bebop as an uncontestably sophisticated art form. But another benchmark is the ability of his music to ‘cross the genre’: many people who are not ‘jazzophiles’ can identify with Parker’s music and improvising through its sheer artistry and melodic invention. [You can hear] African-American ‘street-schooled’ collectivism, metaphysicality – is there such word? – perseverance, dedication, spontaneity… The music stands its ground without any need to analyse or interpret – although doing so solidifies his brilliance.”

Being accessible mattered to Parker. From his youth, he played the gamut of venues, from concert halls to rent parties, and told Desmond that he always tried to play “to the people: something they could understand; something that was beautiful.”

The early days in Kansas City

“Parker raised the bar,” says Dyer, “by taking existing chord changes through melodic twists and turns that were both very sound harmonically, and breathtaking in their unusual interval jumps and rhythmic placement. His nickname was justified – his music flies.”

 “Added to this,” concurs Washington, “are the velocity of his thinking and the perfection of his execution. There are some players who can play very fast –even a few who can match Bird’s velocity – but the number of musicians who can think at that speed are few and far between. And then there is the perfection of his solos, all of which stand the test of time as if they were meticulously sculpted. Indeed, we must conclude that they were, even if often they were in excess of 300 beats per minute!

“But it’s the astonishing originality of his voice and conception, even more than his technique, that makes him so important,” Washington concludes. “He’s not the only progenitor of modern music from the middle of the 20th century. Even in the company of fellow geniuses like Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and the like, Parker’s melodicism and coherence stand out. He may not have been the most popular improviser during his lifetime, but history shows that he was the most influential by far.”

African-American poet Lorenzo Thomas wrote possibly the most beautiful literary tribute to Parker: Historiography. Its verses juxtapose the constant harping in jazz histories on the ‘Bird was a junkie’ trope with the beauty of the reedman’s work and the possibilities his sound breathed into life. Here are just two stanzas:

“…There was beauty and longing. And Love run down/Down like the cooling waters from heaven/ And sweat off the shining Black brow. Bird/ Was thinking and singing. His only thought

Was a song. He saw the truth. And shout the Truth/ Where Indiana was more than the dim streets of Gary/ A hothouse of allegedly fruitful plain America/ Some will never forgive the brother for that. Bird/ Was a junkie…”

A CHARLES PARKER PLAYLIST – the musicians’ picks

Linda Sikhakhane: “Loverman is my go-to track in the songbook” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plHYNe5eV2I

Steve Dyer: “Confirmation is the track I’d go with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXK0pZx92MU It has a chord sequence that has been used or derived from many times, including Bheki Mseleku’s Nants’nkululeko.”

McCoy Mrubata: “Confirmation for me…”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXK0pZx92MU

Salim Washington: “Thinking of most important recordings two come to mind…First there is his ‘bebop manifesto’, Koko ,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okrNwE6GI70 . Recorded at the beginning of his mature artistry, we can hear all the hallmarks that made this musical movement so compelling. The intro alone is worth its weight in gold. Ironically, I think another must-listen is his Just Friends, recorded with strings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmRkZeGFONg. On top of a saccharine orchestral arrangement, Parker lifts the recording into one of his master statements. His ability to play in repose and in response to the arrangement stands as a model of how to make his complex and sometimes complicated ideas palatable to the relatively uninitiated. “

And a few more:

Aged only 22, with a pedestrian rhythm section, recorded in his hometown Kansas City, this version of Cherokee  (another of Dyer’s picks) shows how far those 15-hour practice days and all that reading had already taken the young Parker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3vACbUETa0 Five years later, and here’s Donna Lee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02apSoxB7B4 . And as we reach 1950, Au Privave gives the lie to that ‘difficult bebop’ tag. The intelligence of the composition and the fluid mastery of the playing vanquish ‘difficulty’. For the ears, it’s just beautiful.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC-vpctYbtI

Don’t miss this SA jazz documentary

On Tuesday August 25 at 6pm, Glenn Ujebe Masokoane’s documentary on Gideon Nxumalo, Listen to My Song, premieres at the virtual Durban Encounter Film Festival. Not enough is known about composer, pianist, broadcaster and all-round cultural figure Nxumalo, composer of the music for Jazz Fantasia, Early Mart, and, if you check the records, multiple other works, spiritual and secular. Hopefully, Masokoane’s film will begin to fill in the gaps, and the director will be in conversation with Kaya FM’s Brenda Sisane at 19:25, after the screening ends. Access the festival website here: https://encounters.co.za/film/listen-to-my-song/

Zulu Bidi: looking for lost history

Bassist and visual artist Zulu Bidi: a still from the BBC film Life and Death in Soweto

Whenever we question the current and still too Eurocentric school curriculum, one response from our harassed education departments is that “the materials just aren’t there”; that while ‘standard’ textbooks are easily and economically sourced, it would require massive investment to create alternative texts. And, of course, that the departments are committed to investing in this project as resources allow.

That process is a painfully slow one, and as it crawls along, snail-like, the history is simply being lost. The myth that all knowledge is to be found online these days particularly disadvantages Africa – where the legacy of colonisation and the hegemony of neocolonialism and globalisation make very certain it isn’t.

In South Africa the devastating ‘clearances’ of apartheid destroyed families and their memorabilia alongside killing – quickly with bullets and nooses, or slowly with impoverishment and damaged health – far too many custodians of memory. In some areas – music is one –  what we don’t know may outweigh what we do know, and some of the gaps in history are already too big to completely fill.

In this context, I regularly get queries out of the blue about a music ‘name’ that someone has encountered and needs to situate. Often, I can’t help as much as I’d like. This week, it was from a gallerist who’d received a collector’s bequest including two album cover original paintings by bassist and artist Zulu Bidi. “If we ever exhibit them,” the caller said, “it’s important we get the life that produced them right.”

Bidi is probably best known since its 2011 reissue as the bassist (and cover artist) for popular Soweto band Batsumi. https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/batsumi . But his bass-playing stretched across genres, and also included work on Tete Mbambisa’s audaciously modernist Did You Tell Your Mother https://as-shams.bandcamp.com/album/did-you-tell-your-mother  and a whole range of other music born mainly in and around Orlando, Soweto. 

His life and work featured in a BBC-TV-commissioned documentary, Life and Death in Soweto. I can’t find that anywhere online, but I’m grateful to Matt Temple of Matsuli Music for sharing a short clip from it with me, from which some of the information below comes.

Bidi was born on 13 March 1945. He did not finish formal schooling: with two younger sisters to put through school, he became breadwinner, earning their school fees through informal trading. He fell in love with music early, singing with the close-harmony Jazz Voices.  His first instrument was a piano he brought home on a horse and cart.

Later, after he settled on bass as his instrument, he was a regular stage guest at Lucky Michaels’ Pelican Club in its heyday, and a regular playing partner in serious jazz contexts of guitarist Themba Mokoena, trumpeter Dennis Mpale and reedman Dennis Nene.  He also taught himself to design and hand-craft footwear.

About his prolific art career we know far less. We see it in a multiplicity of album covers that have survived – some of which illustrate this column. But we know that there was more, in diverse creative contexts, and that in 1977 he was a co-founder, with David Koloane and Hugh Notshulungu, of The Gallery, Johannesburg’s first black-owned art gallery. Bidi died in 2001.

A richly creative life such as his merits far more than these fragments I’ve just been able to gather together. It is precisely such stories that could give us the textbooks we lack, and the next generation a better understanding of what the heritage of township life under apartheid – so often stereotyped in negative or pathetic terms – was really like.

I interviewed musician Thandi Ntuli in preparation for the forthcoming reissue of music by the Beaters and Harari, which her uncle Selby Ntuli led until his death. One of her observations pinpointed why that legacy needs to be correctly remembered as a foundation of today’s creative landscape:  “There’s an assumption those amazing people who played classical music, painted, wrote poetry, played rock guitar, sang in choirs, all in the same life, were outliers – but that’s the culture of Soweto!”

So this column is an appeal to you, readers and jazz fans out there, for information and memories. If those works by Zulu Bidi are to be displayed any time, they must be properly contextualised. And if DBE and DHET are short of material to build a curriculum that doesn’t centre mainly on culture from elsewhere, let’s create some. Bidi and that remarkable creative milieu must be part of the picture.  

UPDATE AUGUST 17  Ask and ye shall be answered!

I am grateful to album archivist and visual artist Siemon Allen (www.flatinternational.org) for providing this initial discography of album artwork painted by Zulu Bidi. Does any SA music collector out there know of any more?

1974 Batsumi – Batsumi – R&T – RTL 4041
1975 Reggae Man – Reggae Man – It’s Reggae Label – GL 1818
1976 Sipho (Bengu) & His Jets – Goods Train – Soul Jazz Pop – BL 65
1976 Abacothozi – Night in Pelican – Soul Jazz Pop – BL 66
1976 Makgona Zonke Band – The Webb – Soul Jazz Pop – BL 73
1976 Teaspoon Ndelu – Magic Man – Soul Jazz Pop – BL 74
1976 Mpharanyana & the Cannibals – Zion Soul – Soul Jazz Pop – BL 78
1976 Beam Brothers – Hambani Magoduka – Motella – BL 83
1976 Johannes Mohlala & his Harp – BL 84

1976 Dark City Sisters – Puthatswana – Gumba Gumba – BL 87
1977 Ensemble of Rhythm and Art – Funny Thing – Soul Jazz Pop – BL 110
1977 Uxulu / Richard Jon Smith – African Warrior – Warner – WBH 7709
1983 Starlight – Starlight – Heads – HEDL 5620

Music streaming: spot(ify) the issues for African artists

UPDATE AUGUST 23 2020 See this article from NPR for a very different streaming philosophy from Bandcamp:https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903547253/a-tale-of-two-ecosystems-on-bandcamp-spotify-and-the-wide-open-future

If you missed last week’s interview with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek (https://musically.com/2020/07/30/spotify-ceo-talks-covid-19-artist-incomes-and-podcasting-interview/ ) you need to read it. Particularly if you’re concerned about the globalised commodification of culture, and the intensifying plight of African musicians.

Ek didn’t pull his punches as he dissed the “narrative fallacy” that artists are poorly paid by the streaming services. He drew a dystopian vision of the music industry as a relentless, profit-driven production line.  “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape,” he declared, “where you can’t record once every 3 to 4 years and think that’s going to be enough…The ones that aren’t doing well in streaming are predominantly the people who want to release music the way it used to be released.”

Daniel Ek(Photo by Jason DeCrow/Spotify)

The way we were

The secret for artists, instructs Ek, is about “putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.” The way music used to be released, that activity was called ‘marketing’ and it was done by record companies acknowledged as their investment in maximising their own profits. Now Ek outsources that responsibility for building his profits to artists, alongside continuously churning out the music from which Spotify’s 30% cut comes. Sweet deal, neh?

Spotify’s stock value last year was $50Billion. When the company launched it declared – well, it would, wouldn’t it? – that its mission was “to enable more artists to live off their art.” And Ek confided last week, that artists were telling him “many times in private” how happy they were with its largesse. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t name them.

In 2019, Spotify paid artists an average of $0.0032 per stream, a bit below the industry average of $0.005-something. (When it found itself faced by demands to pay songwriters a slightly larger cut, it suggested reducing that amount further to “re-balance” payments.) As an example, successful classical violinist Tasmin Little earned around $15.50 (R273) for six months during which she had just over 3.5Million streams (https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-musicians-are-fighting-for-streaming-pay-during-the-pandemic/).

Who, where and when

There’s no doubt that the arrival of streaming did revive the recorded music industry (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/streaming-platforms-keeping-more-money-from-artists-than-ever-817925/) and the payments model is significantly more complex than this. For a detailed explanation, see https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts. But essentially what an artist receives is strongly dependent on by whom, where in the world and how often their music is streamed – in a world where, as Spotify’s Q2 earnings announcement declared “Gone are the days of the Top 40 – now, it’s the top 43 000.” After Spotify and where relevant the label takes their cut, the remainder goes into a pool which is then distributed by aggregate play counts across the platform. As one journalist explains https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019/1/16/18184314/spotify-music-streaming-service-royalty-payout-model : “The better your colleagues and competitors do, the less money you make.” All 42 999 of them.

The electric Africa

All of this means the streaming model isn’t built to help artists out during periods of earnings devastation like SARS-CoV-2. And if it’s bad for musicians all around the world, it’s worse in Africa.

Ek evidently didn’t talk “in private” to a lot of artists – for example Jay-Z who pulled most of his content from the platform in 2017 (only to become another streaming mogul himself, with Tide). Another is the UK’s Tom Gray, co-founder of the Broken Record pressure group https://musically.com/2020/05/18/brokenrecord-its-about-saying-we-all-recognise-that-this-is-problematic/ working to improve streaming payments.  “Streaming,” Gray says, “has been built by corporations for profit margins. It hasn’t been built with any sustainable cultural remit in mind. One, your money doesn’t go to the music. And two, if your music is in any way off the beaten track, it has been severely de-funded by streaming.”

And as usual, Africa finds itself off the globalised “beaten track”. The IFPI Music Listening Report for 2019https://www.ifpi.org/ifpi-global-music-report-2019/, which surveyed streaming listening mentioned only South Africa in its findings. Even South Africa doesn’t feature in comparative surveys of regional per stream payouts – the lowest listed is India – but we do know that most regional payouts are lower than those published for the US. In 2018, the year Spotify launched here, Business Insider reckoned a South African Spotify stream would earn roughly R0.05 ($0.0028) https://www.businessinsider.co.za/south-african-bands-only-make-r50000-per-million-plays-from-spotify-and-apple-music-heres-how-they-make-ends-meet-2018-12.

Spotify’s South Africa launch 2018

Although huge numbers of African users access the internet every day, “data from the Alliance for Affordable Internet shows that 1 GB of data costs 8% of income on average across the continent, compared to 2.7% in the Americas and 1.5% in Asia. The organisation defines affordability as when 1 GB of mobile data is priced at no more than 2% of average monthly income. Expensive, data-heavy music and video streaming remains a luxury for many, especially in countries with sluggish economic growth.” (https://africanbusinessmagazine.com/uncategorised/continental/africa-dances-to-streaming-revolution/)

Chidi Okeke

New interest; new models?

What’s more, the nuance and dazzling diversity of African music is exactly the kind of niching that is disadvantaged by the global streaming model. As Nigerian Chidi Okeke, founder of the national streaming service udu-X, pointed out: “We know what people in Lagos are bopping to, but in the north and east it can be completely different. Our playlists will be tailored to all the particular regions. Nobody should be able to better curate African music than us.”

It’s possible that homegrown streamers might also consider more equitable payout models. In Kenya, for example, Mdundo claims to pay out 50% of turnover to participating artists –that is still probably 0.00-something cents.

Joox, part of the Chinese Tencent/South African Naspers empire decided that the neglect of the African music scene by other international streamers, and the popularity and diversity of products available presents an enticing business opportunity. In the context of Covid lockdowns, it also promised artists who could create half-hour programmes on the app that it would pay R1 500 for those it streamed ( https://www.news24.com/channel/music/news/joox-is-paying-each-artist-r1-500-per-a-half-hour-performance-20200420 ). The most recent report I could find for Tencent gave their international pay-per-stream amount as $0.00040 (R0.0071). Lower than most of the other big players, that’s still not going to pay much of the rent.

Making music is not a production line. Nor, although artists need to eat, is it intended for enriching globalised corporations and their shareholders. Artists make music because of their talent, vision and need to say something that matters; Ek seems to see them merely as Spotify’s serfs.

But perhaps change is coming. Among the artists that Ek doesn’t talk to privately, multiple campaigns against exploitative streaming models are gathering force. It’s probably time for one in South Africa too. Because, as Broken Record’s Gray warns: “This is Covid. [All kinds of other incomes are drying] up. Whatever anger you think there is in the industry now towards streaming, imagine that in 6 months time.”

Covid corruption? Musos suffer too

Scoring huge sums of money for something you can’t and don’t intend to deliver? Musicians, reading current reports of millions lost to Covid-related graft probably uttered weary but unsurprised sighs of recognition. It’s been happening to them for years.

Think, for example, of the SABC, whose state support theoretically mandates ethical business practice, but which still has not fully repaid historic royalties owed on broadcast music. https://www.golegal.co.za/royalties-music-performance-rights/.

Think of the National Lotteries Commission, the court-enforced opening of whose books has revealed millions disbursed to mythical “provincial flagship” music festivals from ephemeral companies with no music track record except flimsy Facebook pages (https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-07-29-millions-of-rand-in-lottery-funding-for-mysterious-music-festival/)

Is live-streaming a new opportunity for Covid crooks?

Now it seems that Covid is adding a new kind of fraud. There are reports that  the eThekwini Department of Parks, Recreation and Culture allocated R8million for online concerts between April and June, without transparently opening the opportunities to musicians, or so far paying for the services of several who did perform (https://www.iol.co.za/sunday-tribune/news/artists-not-paid-for-ethekwini-municipalitys-online-gigs-77cf2b41-1077-4efa-b3d3-354e5a79db97 ). One concert certainly happened: you can see it here: https://www.facebook.com/ethekwiniprc/videos/durban-music-day-presented-by-prc-tv-live-covid-19-day-3/1323494667846256/

It should be said the report is weakened by the reporting. The Tribune hasn’t managed to find a single performer or agent prepared to go on the record with the allegation. Then again, similar past incidents tell us that speaking out might mean the artist never gets a provincial gig again…

But this certainly isn’t the only story of its kind doing the rounds, where an artist has been tempted to record recently “for live-streaming” without contract terms in place, or has a contract but has never seen a promised cent.

So why does this stuff keep on happening – and how might it be stopped?

Artists live to create and communicate with an audience. They need to survive and live decent lives, but that’s not why they make music. So musicians can sometimes be naïvely eager for any chance of a platform. That’s exacerbated by the lack of a unified, effective and authentic artists’ union here, which could educate about contracts and live-streaming realities, lobby for more transparent, ethical business practice and negotiate payment standards. A government sweetheart such as CCIFSA, however well-intentioned, can’t fully play this role, because government  (as the eThekwini story above well illustrates) is one of the employers.

But let’s not blame the victims here. Not paying on a signed contract is corrupt, finish and klaar.

The early promise of music live-streaming as an immediate income earner is not yet being realised, and it may never be the bonanza some advocates hoped. In South Africa’s unequal data-world, it shuts out many artists and even more potential audience members. However, it does seem live-streaming is opening up a whole new territory for the kind of crooked promoters who simply used to skip with the takings tin before musicians came off stage.

The hyenas who scavenge off lifesaving medical gear must be top of the Hawks’ hit-list, of course. But that’s not the only kind of Covid-related crookery going on right now. Artists have a right to the protection of the law in these devastating times too.