Not everything that matters is on the Web. In fact, much that matters about South Africa’s cultural creativity isn’t. As examples, the archives of the Star Tonight in its heyday, when it cared about the South African arts scene, have not been digitised; and anything from the short-lived Weekender is un-findable (and would be behind an exclusionary paywall if it wasn’t).
So here, from my interviews with her for those publication, is the voice of Sibongile Khumalo, explaining why a decolonised, feminist approach to African music is the only way to secure not only an accurate record of our past, but an open road to our future.
On decolonising minds: “I remember being on a plane and stopping over in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some Congolese army officers boarded and kept trying to chat me up in French. I lost patience: come on, speak English! And then they cracked up because I didn’t speak French. It struck me what great products we all were of our former colonial masters.”
On arts festivals: “There’s a danger in festivals being all things to all people. The festival market has grown enormously; for elite festival-goers world travel has opened up too. So for us to be talking about ‘world class’ [festivals] to mean merely copying international models or importing performers may not be sensible. ‘World-class’ suggests a need to be validated by what’s over there – whether or not it validates our goals.”
On the need to build new indigenous repertoire: “We need to reach a point where to be recognised as a jazz singer in this country, certain songs beyond Nyilo Ntyilo and Laukutshon’Ilanga need to be in your repertoire. Songs like Gloria Bosman’s Sombawo, Judith Sephuma’s A Cry A Smile A Dance, Victor Ntoni’s Theta. That isn’t ‘doing covers’ – this isn’t pop music – these are standards: part of our musical heritage.”
“We have wonderful standards in our repertoire, in every genre. We need to recognise them, rework them and use them as the foundation for new original compositions. Only when we reach that point will ‘African renaissance’ in music become more than a slogan.”
On working with drum legend Jack deJohnettein the band Intercontinental: “I had to think like an instrumentalist and take a journey inside the music…I did a lot of what I call ‘the duck thing’: above the water you’re sailing along serenely; under the water you’re paddling furiously to stay afloat….[But] six numbers for that show; completely free choice, all of us suggesting and deciding – and three of them end up from South Africa! How affirming is that?”
On waking up to African music: “[At the Funda Centre] we did a project called Melodi: Sounds of Home. That was a defining moment. Oddly, given my father’s background in the study of Zulu music, I found myself drawn to the complexities of Pedi sounds.”
On singing Princess Magogo’s amahubo in the song-cycle Haya Mtwan’Omkulu: I’m the child of an archivist, remember?…I grew up with that music and when I was very young I even heard [her] live at Kwa Phindangeni. But I grew up in Soweto a typical city girl and that influence and inspiration faded…Yet as I came to do more concerts and recitals, I realised that while I was singing these gorgeous German lieder, French chansons and so on, there was nothing in the repertoire from here.
“As an opera-trained singer – where you need a big, projected sound – I have to work out how to handle melodies which taper off. I need to project them without making them sound ‘sung’ in the operatic sense. It’s a compromise – no, a marriage – between [Magogo’s] musical spirit and the modern musical aesthetic. You find you need to go beyond the rigid boundaries of the bar-lines.”
On women as heroes in African history: “The tremendous creativity of [Princess Magogo ka Dinizulu] herself is evident. [Her] songs aren’t mere repetitions of older songs; they are her creations: full of enormous passion and lyricism and the praise-singer’s intelligent commentary on the society around her.
“The tendency of history is to make prominent women seem like exceptions. The war leader Mkabayi is another example. We hide the women’s part in decision making. And that leads to us minimising the importance of what our mothers and grandmothers used to do even in the home.”
Our sorrow at the passing of Jonas Mosa Gwangwa was compounded yesterday by news of the death of Mam’ Sibongile Khumalo after a stroke at the age of 63.
The official provincial funeral for Gwangwa takes place today, Friday January 29 from 09:00h . The link for virtual attendance is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYA5zdhL6FM
Sibongile Khumalo
Much will be written about the music career of Sibongile Khumalo, and much will elide all her achievements into the single, limited category of ‘singer’. Singer she was, no doubt, and a magnificent one, with a voice that melded honey, smoke and crystalline waters into a cascade of captivating sound. She resisted, throughout her career, the genre envelopes that critics laid on it. She did not set out to be an “opera singer” or a “jazz singer” and did not appreciate media coverage that tried to confine her within one of those boxes and assess her work based on its parameters.
Khumalo was a musician who had far more than the ‘Three Faces…’ of one of her best loved shows.
Her stated mission was to develop, through the programmes she developed, her arrangements and her interpretations in performance, an authentic South African vocal concert repertoire that spanned the amahubo of Princess Magogo through 1950’s pop hits like Into Yam’ to modern jazz classics such as Moses Molelekoa’s Mountain Shade – and even Weekend Special. Her career earned more than a dozen awards, national and musical, and produced seven albums as leader including the SAMA-winning 2002 Quest, plus countless collaborations.
But she was much more too. As a scholar, she researched the history of her own first teacher , vaudevillian and pianist Emily Motsieloa. As an all-round music industry professional, she perfected the production skills that supported her label, Magnolia Vision Records. She was music director for several stage productions. As an educator – as well as mentoring countless individuals – she was involved in nurturing the Khongisa Academy for Performing Arts which had been founded by her father, composer and teacher Dr Khabi Mngoma in Kwa Dlangezwa in KZN. She was a respected teacher, heading the Madimba Institute of African Music at Soweto’s Funda Centre, and teaching at the FUBA Academy. In those roles, she was a pioneer of decolonising the music curriculum, not by rejecting European music traditions, but by contextualising them and foregrounding the music education historically embedded in African societies.
“The music education available [here] at tertiary level is an extension of the Eurocentric model…In our culture, we also have music education,” she told journalist Mike Mzileni.
As an activist, Khumalo played an important role in musicians’ organisations and task teams in the immediate pre- and post-liberation period, asserting the role of grassroots artists and their communities’ needs, not globalised commercial imperatives, in shaping the nation’s future cultural policy. And as a human being, she was always there, for any young artist seeking counselling, support and advice.
Though extended ill-health had kept her off the stage in recent years, her spirit and achievements continue to be cited as an inspiration by new generations of young vocal artists, and especially young women. Through the foundations she laid, that will continue to be so, even though she has left us. Hamba Kahle, Mother of Song.
Joni Mitchell put it best in Big Yellow Taxi: “Don’t it always seem to go/ That you don’t know what you’ve lost/Till it’s gone.” So it is with the passing of Jonas Mosa Gwangwa. Only now, after a week of sadness and tributes does it even start to feel real that there will be no more new songs from the mind, voice and trombone that gave us Morwa, Diphororo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Oi3aDJUNUand Ulibambe Lingashoni https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2CMjldn5c.
Another sadness is how much of his recorded work South Africans may not have heard. Only fragments of the early material have been reissued, albums made in exile were never sold here – some, like Amandla, were banned – there was much uncredited work in America, and one of his most fruitful composing periods, with the Medu Arts Ensemble band Shakawe in Botswana, was never recorded in original versions.
So compiling a complete discography for his life story had, for me, aspects of a treasure-hunt, and moments that combined triumph and tragedy: getting another piece of the jigsaw to fit, and then talking to the composer and finding he hadn’t heard that music for decades. The nomadic life forced on the Gwangwa family by apartheid’s murderers meant too much had been mislaid along the way.
And, grooving along to Kgomo, it’s easy to ignore how damn hard a trombone is to play as beautifully as Gwangwa did. Not only could he shape those bellowing roars of protest and indignation whose emotional force is irresistible, but precision, delicacy and respect for space: the very things it’s hardest to do on that unwieldy brass construction.
We’re fortunate that Gwangwa’s first-ever composition, written as a St Peter’s schoolboy for the Father Huddleston Band, has survived. Last I checked, Misfhanehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owFRY6uXaVg was still available on a Gallo compilation, Township Swing Jazz Volume 1, along with two other Huddleston Band tracks on which he plays. Gwangwa found his first national fame with the jazz supergroup of its day: Mackay Davashe’s Jazz Dazzlers. He was scouted because his instrument gave the Dazzlers a distinctive front-line sound: “The Dazzlers,” he recalled, “were the top musicians of the land…the only thing they didn’t have was a trombone.” Other Gallo compilations alsocarry tracks from Gwangwa’s time with the Dazzlers: Diepkloof Ekhayahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_IuNC2VU38 and Hamba Gwi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZl–dXJH0E.
The Dazzlers had a far larger popular following than the small group of modern jazz intellectuals coalescing at the time around organiser Pinocchio Mokaleng’s Jazz at the Odin (Cinema) series in Sophiatown. But when visiting American piano teacher John Mehegan looked for collaborators to record with, those players were chosen, for Jazz inAfrica Volumes I &II, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2HU70zFxl8 ; on which Gwangwa is heard with trumpeter Hugh Masekela, reedman Kippie Moeketsi, the Shange brothers and drummer Gene Latimore. Most tracks are standards from the US songbook, with a few originals including Davashe’s Mabomvana; Gwangwa takes a great solo on Old Devil Moonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5kG-6st6Bo.
Those 1959 recordings are often confused (they were in the UK Guardian this week and they are on a majority of Google search results) with the legendary 1960 LP that followed them: The Jazz Epistles Verse One, with the same three hornmen plus pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, bassist Johnny Gertze and drummer Makhaya Ntshoko. Only 500 copies were pressed of this first South African 33 rpm recording by a Black modern jazz group of their own original material, including Gwangwa’s Carol’s Drive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEBjaj4UMso. “It was in Cape Town and I was left alone,” he recalled. “I was thinking: I can improvise, so why can’t I compose? I mean, improvisation is just spontaneous composition, right? I spent the whole day messing around on the piano and came up with that tune.” If you want to hear just how edgy, intense and accomplished South African jazz was 60 years ago, this is your disc.
Gwangwa plays in the pit band on the original 1961 cast recording of Todd Matshikiza’s jazz opera, King Kong –and that production’s London tour was his ticket out, eventually to the Manhattan School of Music. This promo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIHaNAwP3xk reflects all the distortions in musical arrangement ordered by London impressario Jack Hylton that Gwangwa hated so vehemently; the Joburg original is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE0GE5SpIrs
But at the same time he was creating club music drawing on the sounds of home that delighted dancers. With Letta Mbulu and her group the Safaris (a reunion with former KingKong vocalists from the London days) he composed and co-produced the 1966 single Walkin’ Around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7AcM533Fs4. With his own band, African Explosion he recorded another single, Goin’ Home/Africadelic,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7AcM533Fs4 for Decca in 1968. The next year, pianist Ahmad Jamal gave Explosion the chance to record an 11-track album, Ngubani? on his newly-founded Jamal label, with a spin-off single African Sausage/Szaba-Szaba https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry4zyI-JNWM. Ngubani? features reedman Dudu Pukwana and includes a tribute to Gwangwa’s mentor, saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi: two tracks based on Moeketsi’s Switchhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu0_uqSP-OM . “The recording was a jam session – no rehearsal,” Gwangwa recalled, “and the label wasn’t really set up to do promotion; people liked the music but getting gigs was still difficult.”
There were many other sessions too. “There were just people who used to come to the apartment,” Gwangwa recalled. “ ‘We’re doing a record – what do you think?’… almost accidental. A lot of my projects were like that, then…Sometimes there was money, sometimes not; sometimes you never even saw a record. We didn’t mind: we were in it together. There could be a lot of sessions from that time that I don’t remember, where you’ll find an un-credited trombone – and that was me!”
(As I type those words, I can feel the discography nerds stirring: good luck!)
Out of that period came the breath-taking Dragon Suite, recorded with the Marc Levin Free Unit in 1968 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlyct71DNVU. Multi-instrumentalist Levin is leader, Cecil McBee, bassist – but the performance is a tour de force of free trombone improvisation from Gwangwa. It is wholly recognisable as his voice, but a stylistic revelation.
For a colleague from the Belafonte sessions, Howard Roberts, Gwangwa co-arranged and played on Roberts’ chorale 1968 spirituals album, Let My People Go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOO-mFBBFNM. The trombonist also arranged and provided ‘bone overdubs for reedman Robin Kenyatta’s 1973 fusion album Terra Nova https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UirQOw3u_wo — unmistakeably a product of the Shaft era. Gwangwa recalled that South Carolina-born Kenyatta fitted in so well with the South African music crowd “that we all thought he must be from Africa too.” For the West African-oriented US label Makossa International, Gwangwa recorded the predominantly vocal single Yebo in 1976 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JjPa4sdmrY .
Gwangwa quit his jazz career in the US in the late 1970s, to dedicate his next decade to the Amandla Cultural Ensemble of the ANC. His last American recording, the 1978 Main Event Live (it wasn’t: the audience is dubbed in) with Herb Alpert and Hugh Masekela, reprised material that, on Alpert’s tour, had won the trombonist curtain calls every night for his barnstorming solos on his own Shame the Devil and Foreign Natives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYBw1q-tvbU. “They kept on clapping, and I asked myself: what’s happening?” Gwangwa remembered. “And he [Alpert] kept saying ‘Go out [on stage] again; go out.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Amandla’s two albums, the Swedish Amandla First Tour Live (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDoJ4SxXhCo and the 1982 Russian-label Amandla African National Congress Cultural Grouphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk8t8j4f0TU were of course banned by the apartheid regime. People caught with the precious cassettes faced prison. Equally hard to find these days is the recording he made with bassist Johnny Mbizo Dyani in 1984, Born Under the Heat. Gwangwa features on two tracks, Song for the Workershttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJzFFIITao4&t=370s (the trombone solo is at 4:04) and The Boys from Somafco – that last melody particularly poignant and personal since some of the young family he was parted from so often were studying at Tanzania’s Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College.
During the same period, from his family home in Gaborone, Botswana, Gwangwa developed the Medu band Shakawe. Around a regular core of Batswana and South African players, Shakawe made room for aspiring local Botswana Defence Force musicians and visiting South African stars alike.
Two aspects of Shakawe were important for Gwangwa: re-visiting indigenous roots to shape songs with a powerful social meaning, and a collective working style that gave everybody a voice, anticipating the kind of creative praxis that the arts in the new South Africa ought to have.
Shakawe saxophonist Steve Dyer remembers: “Bra’ JG was very generous with his knowledge. He gave other members of the band the space they needed to grow.” As well as “a beautiful and distinctive tone on the trombone, for him it was not about the notes. It’s not about the theory. It is about the feeling and emotion behind the notes… So when we played, people came to have a good time and they got entertained – and the message was still coming through. It is inextricably tied up with the struggle for freedom: this was freedom music we were playing.
Much of the music we associate with Gwangwa today came out of that time. But the trombonist’s fear of piracy meant none of those joyous Gaborone club sessions was ever recorded. However, some of Shakawe’s repertoire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34KPd9MsOho is reprised on the 1990, London-recorded, Flowers of the Nation. Made just after the Wembley Mandela concert, the recording included trumpeter Dennis Mpale, a former Shakawe member, alongside drummer Kulu Radebe from Amandla and a raft of UK-based and visiting South Africans. That, the Cry Freedom soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUemKZdQoxY , and the post-exile albums A Temporary Inconvenience, Sounds from Exile, Kukude, a Sony/BMG Best of…collection and the DVD Live at the Standard Bank International Jazz Festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTNYGdGp1hQ, are the recordings South Africans already know better. Cherish them – but some digital crate-diving will introduce you to fresh facets of a musician whose work only grows in power with re-hearing. As trombonist Roswell Rudd put it: “You blow in this end of the trombone and sound comes out the other end and disrupts the cosmos.”
The tragic death of trombonist, composer, teacher, cultural activist and comrade Jonas Gwangwa yesterday , only 17 days after the passing of his cherished partner Violet, has left a creative gap that we cannot yet even begin to measure. For my account of his life, see https://theconversation.com/jonas-gwangwa-embodied-south-africas-struggle-for-a-national-culture-135633. I hope later this week to attempt a survey of his extensive opus and discography for this blog: he was a great musician in international as well as national terms and across genres from music theatre to avant-garde free improvisation as well as the better-known music he recorded since the 1990s ; apartheid censorship made sure we didn’t know the half of it at the time.
Jazz is a tide that pours across South Africa, ebbing and flowing across time and place. The early foci of ‘modern’ popular music (you couldn’t call it jazz yet) were the pre-Land Act prosperous Black farming centres of the Eastern Cape; the mining camps and hostels around the diamond and gold fields; and the suburbs, both licensed and self-initiated, created by Black urbanites as cities were established and expanded.
Under apartheid, the commercial epicentre of the music shifted between Joburg and Cape Town, depending on which place, at any given time, was more repressive or more laissez-faire in its enforcement of repression. Meanwhile, the music was actually grown and played in many more places that receive insufficient attention in the histories: Pretoria, Bloemfontein, East London, Port Elizabeth, more. When the regime fell, the Sheer Sound label, Kippie’s, the Bassline and other magnets drew performers towards Joburg. As those attractions ceased their activities, the UCT College of Music and a new generation of venues in Cape Town pulled people back there. Then the Orbit made Joburg work prospects attractive again. Then…
And of course, the big question in all this is: where was Durban all this time?
We know there was a vibrant modern popular music scene there, from the days of Bheki Mseleku’s illustrious vaudevillian elders, General Duze, and countless other guitar maestros dismissed as ‘maskandi’. The emergence of Mseleku, Sipho Gumede, the musicians of Heshoo Beshoo and others tells us the tradition of elders nurturing young players continued to flourish. The late Shunna Pillay’s novel, Shadow People https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadow-People-Shunna-Pillay/dp/1919855688, describes hotel dance band players who explored more adventurous music after-hours. The photographs of the late Ranjith Kally show those musicians: proud and self-aware.
But that scene was never adequately documented. When Kally’s photographs were exhibited, most of those they featured could not be identified for captions. Comparatively few scholars have written about Durban, and most research has focused on a slightly more recent period and the important work of the Rainbow music venue.
But now a new generation of South Coast jazz sounds is emerging, and nowhere more distinctively that in the pianism of Sibu ‘Mash’ Mashiloane, whose fifth album, the solo iHubo Labomdabu, launched yesterday https://music.apple.com/za/album/ihubo-labomdabu/1547569161 .
Mashiloane teaches at UKZN, along with other highly accomplished musicians including pianists Andile Yenana and Neil Gonsalves, multi-instrumentalist Sazi Dlamini and US-born tenor saxophonist Salim Washington. Their efforts are already building a subsequent generation of inspired, rooted players such as bassist Dalisu Ndlazi.
So Mashiloane’s music matters for its place of creation, as well as what it says. But it also says a lot.
The 11 short tracks are the product of a period of intense introspection and meditation triggered by the conditions of lockdown. He reflected on his own life: a journey from the close, diverse community of Bethal through studies here and in America, and gigs in many places across Africa and elsewhere, to his current place teaching and doing PhD research at UKZN. In the interview linked above, he explains how the narratives this inspired shaped the music.
What I didn’t talk about there is how the album hits the ears. Mashiloane has a very personal voice married to impressively strong technique. Much as the rolling left hand of the first track, Sabela Uyabizwa, might remind you of Abdullah Ibrahim (as rolling piano left-hands always do), you’d never mistake this for Ibrahim; it’s another sonic concept entirely. Using only the usual two hands, Mashiloane can create the impression of music with lots more layers: the celebratory Injabulo Lasekhaya might almost be a timbila orchestra.
Sometimes, as on Ihubo Lasekaya, his song of home, the cyclical patterns might suggest New Music, although these cycles are inspired by a far older place. Elsewhere you’ll find a plaintive lyrical ballad, such as Uncertainty. World of the Free explores more conventionally jazzy ideas; not multi-layered, but pared back: an almost Ellingtonian travelling-light journey. (For some reason, I kept thinking about Ellington’s solo Reminiscing in Tempohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsGm0Y49-TA .)
They’re all short tracks – none much more than six minutes – and they’ll take on different lives onstage with co-players. (Mashiloane confesses he may in fact have to re-learn and revision them for that context, so intimate and spontaneous was his playing here.)
iHubo Labomdabu is an album to savour when you want music to think by, and to think about. It came out of meditation, and that spiritual intensity could open new doors of perception for listeners too.
UPDATE 15/01/20 15:30 The memorial service for the late Ma Mpumi Moholo will be live streamed on Sat 16 January from 10:00 am – midday (South African Standard Time). The link I have been supplied reads: a11radio.com. Video of the event will remain available for the following 14 days at twitch.tv/a11radio
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Covid-19 has stolen from us two great South Africans, each of whom played a vital role in the development of our historic jazz.
In Cape Town, Nompumelelo Ebronah (Mpumie) Moholo, beloved wife of drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo passed away; in Johannesburg, Violet Molebatsi Gwangwa, cherished matriarch of trombonist Jonas Gwangwa’s family, also left us.
Music historians often give too little space to musicians’ families. The pervasive, capitalist myth of the ‘heroic soloist’ erases all the others who make up a musician’s creative circle, whether in wider community or immediate family. Gendered stereotypes tend to relegate musicians’ wives to some distant domestic space unconnected to the music. (Some commentators on Abdullah Ibrahim do this even to the late Sathima Bea Benjamin, despite her own towering artistic status.)
But making music in an unappreciative, alienating or racist community depends for its sustenance on close, supportive ties and hard collective work. Both Moholo and Gwangwa have spent much of their lives in painful exile. Both – often and lovingly – have acknowledged the debt they owe to spouses who contributed far more than ‘support’ to their careers. Music is – as personhood is – ka batho.
Both women were strong, astute and tireless participants in their husbands’ music-making. Their hard work ensured households – and often bands – survived. They were archivists of the history. Their intelligent understanding and critique contributed to the growth of creative ideas. Their loss will be felt and mourned far beyond the immediately bereaved.
Sadly, I met Mpumie Moholo only once; and know far too little about her life. Her crucial role in Moholo’s creativity, however, is visible in the numerous musical tributes he paid: for example, the trio album Mpumi, and Open Letter to my Wife Mpumihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiVl_OsQkkY.
The late Mpumi Moholo, immortalised in the music
Through my time with MEDU in Botswana, I came to know Mam’ Violet rather better, and know that as well as all of the above she played a heroic, deep underground role in the struggle, hosting liberation figures as they passed through the country fearlessly and at great personal cost. Jonas Gwangwa dedicated the moving ballad Love and Patience from the album Kukudehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oal_EQEXxaU to her.
Hamba kahle to both powerful women: steadfast rocks of their households and communities – and our jazz.
sisgwenjazz 