Spaza: Uprize – free sounds without freedom songs

A South African documentary film about the 1976 uprising risks calling up some blindingly obvious sonic ingredients – freedom songs, right?

Apart from the a-historicism of the freedom song approach (many of the liberation lyrics we now know best actually post-date the events of June 1976) it has also become a rather tired cliché.

1976: the images we all know

The 2002 documentary Amandla, A Revolution in Four-part Harmony is the poster-child soundtrack https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/amandla-a-revolution-in-four-part-harmony/id252225815 for the freedom song approach. It’s crammed with every possible liberation lyric you can conjure. In the process, however, while both moving and entertaining,  the film’s discourse smothers the nuances of the struggle with a lorry-load of stirring music.

Unlike Joshua outside Jericho, South Africa’s young revolutionaries did not simply need to make music for the walls of apartheid to come tumbling down. What’s more, some of the walls – and certainly too many of the statues – still stand.

A different sonic approach is needed to convey a more complex history: not only in Soweto, but national; not one day, but over the ensuing years; not a march scattered by police gunfire, but a movement gathering strength.

And a different sonic approach is what we get on Spaza:Uprize, the soundtrack to Sifiso Khanyile’s 2017-released documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aghdd9e_ccM. The soundtrack’s second single is out this Friday (October 2), with the whole album set for release on October 16.

Cover art for Spaza: Uprize

Khanyile was well aware of the cinematic cliches imperilling any fresh re-telling of 1976. As he told the Mail&Guardian https://mg.co.za/article/2017-06-09-00-powerfully-unpacking-of-conditions-that-led-to-june-16/ when the film premiered at DIFF: “I didn’t want to show black people running away from the police, fallen bodies on the ground. I wanted to show people fighting back, running towards the camera and the police.”

Kanyile’s video collages the testimony of young rebels of the ’76 generation: Fatima Dike, Duma ka Ndlovu, Harry Nengwekhulu, Zelda Holtzman, Sipho Mabuse, more, with previously unseen newscast footage. Together, these elements unpack the multifacetted nature of the ‘76 movement and the key role of cultural work (“very rebellious plays”, as one apartheid spokeman puts it in the film) linked to Black Consciousness in catalysing rebellion on the streets.

So it’s appropriate that some of today’s most thoughtful cultural workers created the soundtrack.

Spaza is a creative space not a group: on a project basis, it brings together like minds to make new improvised music. For this outing, the group comprised pianist, trombonist composer (and painter) Malcolm Jiyane, vocalist Nonku Phiri, percussionist Gontse Makhene and bassist Ariel Zamonsky. They put the soundtrack together as the film developed, watching rushes projected onto to the wall of a Yeoville apartment living room, with the music directed, engineered, edited, mixed and produced by Dion Monti and the minds behind the Mushroom Hour label, Nhlanhla Mngadi and Andrew Curnow.

Like the film’s visual language, the sound is collaged and layered, with the spoken words of protagonists serving as accent threads, pulled to the front of the sonic weave then threaded behind the music again. Only on Bayasiphazamisa – where ambiguous textures might be sirens and cries –does the soundtrack attempt anything like a programmatic approach to the sounds we think we know of ’76: chants, hymns, gunshots and the like. Sometimes, rather, the light and shade of the score evokes mood, as in the gently moving tribute to Mangaliso Sobukwe and the sombre elegy for Xolile Mosi, who fell to police bullets in the Cape. At other times the playing enters into dialogue with the spoken words, with instruments  – often Makhene’s expressive percussion – responding like a listener to the explanations and anecdotes of speakers and the mood of the crowd. Sometimes it echoes the rhythms of speech; sometimes it expands the heterophony of protesters’ voices. You won’t hear toyi-toyi rhythms on Banna ba Batsumi (the hunters’ children) but you’ll hear something equally urgent and impassioned.

The Uprize ensemble: (l to r) Zamonsky, Jiyane, Phiri, Makhene

Yet there are historical allusions in the sounds. Jiyane’s keys hint at the texture of then-Dollar Brand’s 1970s piano (Manneberg was released in 1974); Phiri’s voice against them recalls the headspace of Sathima’s Afrika (1976): subtle, understated and moving.

Shorn of visuals, Uprize becomes a tone-poem about the meaning, memory – and living legacy – of 1976. With musicians on stage, it could be a chamber concert, and form the basis of a compelling live stream.

Like Mushroom Hour’s earlier 2020 release Buffering Juju , Uprize has already been selected as the UK Guardian’s Global Album of the Month for September 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/25/spaza-uprize-review-record.  That accolade indicates how effectively the album transcends the ‘soundtrack’ envelope.

But when journalists asked legendary film composer Ennio Morricone ( The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) about the secrets of a successful score, he declared: “It starts with an idea.” If that’s true – and Morricone should know – then Spaza: Uprize is also firmly within the soundtrack tradition: the secret of its beauty starts with its ideas.

Heritage Day: remember our unsung jazz heroes

It’s Heritage Day. This year’s theme is  ‘Celebrate South Africa’s Living Human Treasures’.  But maybe it’s time to stop with the Jerusalema dancing already, turn down the flames on our contribution to National Culinary Carbon Emissions Day and think about what celebrating the makers of our heritage would really mean.

Basie ‘Count’ Mankge

It took a German jazz clippings service, the Darmstadt Jazz Newsletter (https://www.jazzinstitut.de/news/?lang=en ) to alert me – yesterday, too late, after his burial – to the death of Free Sounds pianist Basie ‘Count’ Mangke on August 18, aged 72.

As with too many of our jazz-related heroes – recently, internationally acclaimed drummer Gilbert Matthews and formidable jazz photographer George Hallett – only silence sounded from the national Department of Sports Arts and Culture to mark his passing. As with almost all of our jazz-related heroes, there is nothing about him online, where our kids are deceived into believing they can find all the knowledge they need. To my shame, I do not know his personal story, beyond how important an outfit the Free Sounds were. The late Mangke gave more than 50 years of his life to music, passing on the legacy to his son, pianist, guitarist and harmonica player Lollo Rollins Mangke.

The word ‘treasure’ unintentionally dehumanises human beings – makers of their own history – with precious stories to tell. It implies inert objects to be placed on a museum shelf and taken down for a perfunctory dusting every September 24.  (Metaphorically, of course, that’s exactly what’s happening. )

Those who struggled to forge a cultural heritage in the fires of oppression should be honoured every day, not just today, and while they still live, by:

• Identifying the jazz heroes, male and female, still living, often quietly (Mankge had entered the building trade) in our communities.
• Learning their stories. Schools could assign their students to interview grandparents and community elders about the music they made and heard. Local papers could publish, – the news of Mankge’s passing came from the Brakpan News – and radio stations could broadcast, the information so collected, so we are no longer surrounded by quite the heritage desert we now inhabit.
• Besieging Wikipedia. When we learn these stories, let’s write them and submit them, so the world can know them too. The continuing absence of any national website for such stories beyond initiatives such as SAHO, constantly struggling for resources, is another shame.

Hamba Kahle ‘Count’ Mankge. You were and remain part of our jazz heritage and with your passing another irreplaceable library of memories has burned. On Heritage Day, we should vow – and start taking action – to stop it happening again.

Singing with words: recalling the late Keorapetse Kgositsile

“Isn’t sound continuity/isn’t sound memory/loving care caress or rage/sticking our shattered and scattered pieces together?”(For Bra’ Ntemi )

In a month that has lost us the work and incandescent spirits of Myesha Jenkins and Achmat Dangor, today, Saturday September 19 we remember the birth, of another departed poet. 81 years ago on this date Keorapetse William Kgositsile (‘Kgosi”; “Bra’ Willie”), South Africa’s first Poet Laureate, revolutionary, feminist, Pan-Africanist, internationalist – and the writer who came closest to invoking the sound of South African jazz in rhyme – was born in Johannesburg. (It’s a birthday he shared, very appropriately, with AACM pianist, composer and teacher Muhal Richard Abrams.)

To recount all his achievements would be impossible. His formal accolades are well documented; perhaps less so the history in whose making he participated. 

I worked with Bra’ Willie in Medu in Botswana (https://mg.co.za/article/2018-01-12-00-beauty-in-struggle/ ) and the predictable thing to say would be that we all sat at his feet in awe. But Medu wasn’t like that and nor was our poet comrade. Praxis ruled. Do the work; engage in more-than-robust debates; do more work; let your words be debated; then do more work on them. Kgositsile was unsparing of himself and of the rest of us: writing and learning about literature and history are grounded in hard, disciplined work; so is waging effective political struggle. He’d have ridiculed the notion of anybody sitting at his feet in awe – the work was something we did together, and something we could all, however distinguished, learn from.

And what were those lessons? First, that any work of cultural creation is unavoidably ‘political’; that refusing to express opinions about how we live together and how we should live also represents a political choice. Second, that speaking out about important truths is a human duty. Third, that it’s equally a duty to do it well, with meticulously craft.

Charles Rowell’s 1973 interview with the poet begins with his reflections on starting childhood in the back rooms of his mother’s white employer: not spending time on the streets, he became a voracious reader and – because of his mother’s sheltering silence – largely un-intimidated by the racism that surrounded him. The most important book he read as a youngster was Richard Wright’s Black Boy, because it “made me realise that I didn’t have to sound like an English Poet…I could tame that English to speak my language.”

When he left white suburbia to attend Madibane High School – where one schoolmate was musician Jonas Gwangwa – he rapidly learned. “[T]ownship streets were full of bullies,” he remembered. “The regular ones and the regime ones under their cloak of being the police. And as far back as I remember I have always been intensely allergic to bullies.” And, for him, that had everything to do with being a poet, because “the production of (…) poetry is, like everything else produced by a people, rooted in and informed by human action and interaction.”

He wrote prose as well as poetry, as a journalist for the (quickly banned) New Age in the 1950s and later, in American exile, for many other publications, including the journal Black Dialogue at Columbia University.  He studied at Columbia University, earning an MFA and later taught at several US institutions, as well as teaching later at universities in Tanzania, Kenya, Yemen, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, as well as at Fort Hare back home.  

And he participated in making history: cultural and political. He was a leading voice in the Harlem Uptown Black Arts Movement and a co-founder with Amiri Baraka of the Black Arts Theatre. The Last Poets were inspired to coin their name by his poem Towards a Walk in the Sun, which foresaw a time of uprising when there would be “no art talk.”

Less-known, perhaps, is that he drafted Miriam Makeba’s 1963 speech to the United Nations, which won international recognition for South Africa’s liberation struggle and the ANC. He was part of delegations at both editions of the historic pan-African cultural festival, Festac: 1966 in Senegal; 1977 in Nigeria. He was a founder-member of the ANC’s Department of Arts and Culture in exile, and continued to work with the department and the movement when he returned home. But that did not stifle his 1992 criticism that his own movement had been “criminally backward when it comes to questions of culture and its place in society or struggle.”

Because although he was entranced by the beauty of music and could write deeply romantic poetry, Kgositsile never romanticised history, struggle or politics. He was dismissive of fantasies of some past African ‘golden age’ of peace, pointing out acerbically that all societies had experienced oppression and resisted their own feudal tyrants, as well as the colonialists. But he never lost his revolutionary optimism about the better future that can be if – again – we work for it. Kgositsile chose what would be three decades of exile, aged only 23, so he could begin that work. He knew it had to be a process, claiming, in Cabral’s words, no easy victories just because the apartheid regime had officially ended. And he knew that exile could be not just of the body from place, but of memories of struggle from a politics that sometimes found it uncomfortable to recall them.

Multiple awards and achievements are listed in various online biographies and book appendices; possibly the best short appreciation of his life and work is that by fellow writer Mandla Langa in the foreword to the comprehensive 2017 poetry compilation Homesoil in My Blood (https://xarrabooks.com/en/product/homesoil-in-my-blood/ ). A longer work by Dr Uhuru Phalafala is on the way.

But let’s finally get back to the words. “I approach the writing of a poem,” Kgositsile wrote, “the way a musician improvises a solo on the stage…I let my imagination reach into the depth of my feeling to bring out what I am most responsive to at the moment of playing my solo with language…”

Like this:

Soundman/that I have always aspired to be/my ear sees the tentacles/of our fragile voice/breaking through the walls of our exiles/as I remount the curve of evil times/to unearth my anchored memory. (from Renaissance)

Myesha Jenkins: poet of jazz and freedom

Poet, feminist cultural activist and jazzwomxn Myesha Jenkins died yesterday, Saturday September 5. San Francisco-born Myesha had lived in Johannesburg since she moved here from California in 1993. She was not just an observer but an integral part of our jazz scene: her instrument, rather than some machine-made construct of metal, valves and reeds, was the word.

The sounds of playing, the players and the particularity of the South African scene were all magicked into life from type on a flat page through her words, as in this vignette, Jazz Club, of the elders of the genre:

On Sunday afternoons/Old men sit under a tree/ Listening to their music/Laughing loudly/Sipping brandy of coke/Tapping their two-toned shoes/Remembering dreams of/ Red dresses and flying brown legs.

‘Magicked’, though, is the wrong word: like every good writer, Myesha worked damn hard at her craft. Having been writing for years, she found in South Africa the supportive company of other poets. With two others she met at a 2002 Port Elizabeth writers’ workshop,  Napo Masheane and Ntsiki Mazwai, she formed the Feelah Sistah Collective. “Men so dominated that space,” she said, “that when we got home we said: we have to do something about this. We phoned around again and again to get others to join us. Lebo [Mashile] was the one who turned up” and Feelah Sister became a trio, regularly augmented by the most interesting of other poetic guests.

Myesha in Feelah Sistah. Graphic: Judy Seidman

The mission of Feelah Sistah was the same one that Myesha lived on other stages and in other arenas too: “We want to claim a stage where women who are poets can speak to and move other men and women. We’re tired of ‘…and now the ladies are gonna come up’ – as though we are different to other poets,” she said at the time.

Her love of jazz had started early. “I’ve been a lover of jazz for over 50 years,” she wrote in 2017. “it started in college and saw me through my studies, marriage, divorce, travel and relocation halfway around the world. I was a waitress at a jazz club for several years, which gave me repeated exposure to the different varieties of that music as well as the men (mostly) and women who make it. It was urban Black classical music that reflected migration, urbanisation, anger, resistance, freedom. That was jazz to me.”

Resistance to racism, oppression, ageism and misogyny infused Myesha’s texts and the praxis of her life. Sometimes it was a subtle undertext; the freedom of jazz metonymic for greater freedoms; sometimes front and centre, as in In The Night:

Women are out in the night.

They are cleaning streets/some are walking streets/coming home from work/others are working/answering a call/rushing to the hospital/to bail someone out of jail/getting the forgotten loaf of bread/running from here to there/going to hang with the girls/enjoying the freedom of the club/relaxing from a hard day/of taking orders/sunny-side up by tomorrow in stilettos/dressed to kill with glistening lips/looking for kissers.

And some are just alone again in the dark/actually enjoying the moon.

What are you doing out so late, ma?/Being a woman, officer,/being a woman.

Myesha published two collections of her own work, Breaking the Surface in 2005 and Dreams of Flight in 2011, and also featured in various anthologies. In 2017, she united her passion for jazz and writing as shaping spirit behind the collection To Breathe Into Another Voice, https://www.amazon.com/Breathe-into-Another-Voice-Anthology/dp/1928341314 an anthology of South African jazz poetry. In 2013, Myesha was awarded the Mbokodo Award for women in arts/poetry.

At the mike: Out There

She brought poetry to the airwaves between 2011-2016 through the annual SAFM Women’s Month series Poetry in the Air, and more recently, even while struggling with the debilitating effects of cancer treatment, in the Kaya-FM podcast series (https://iono.fm/c/4409 ) Myesha’s Memoirs, Living with Jazz and Poetry. She brought poetry to the live stage through the monthly Out There jazz and poetry sessions she hosted at the Orbit Jazz Club. And she brought poetry into countless classrooms and workshops, including through her work with visual artists on the Arts for Humanity project. Having seen her teach, her ‘playing with words’ teaching approach was unique and uniquely effective, meriting far wider recognition. In just an hour, she got a roomful of hesitant women juggling language with freedom and delight. Again, it was serious magic: she worked hard to make sure her teaching served the collective of learners and worked hard to shape spaces where new poets could speak and create.

When we get back to the jazz clubs again, it will be impossible not to see that empty seat, close to the stage, where Myesha ought to be – listening intently, head tilted, half-smiling, eyes closed; sometimes, when the spirit of the sounds moved her, boubou-clad shoulders dancing.

Flying was a recurring metaphor in Myesha’s poetry: flying in the joy of physical ecstasy; flying on the wings of a transcendent solo; flying in shared freedom: flying always towards something better… It seems fitting to end with her own words, invoking all those kinds of flight, Endless Highway. Hamba Kahle.

Myesha listens. Pastel: Judy Seidman

You can take me for a ride/anytime, day or night/let’s get out of here/ride into the heavens./ We’re bumping across the mountains of the moon/ passing planets where the oxygen is thin/gliding onto Saturn’s rings/listening to the tinkle of twinkling stars./Yeah, take me for a ride/across galaxies/into another universe/discovering a new sky/surrounded by nothing we’ve ever known/clear open road./ Yeah, take me for a ride.