The Beaters and Harari: Black History on the dancefloor

It’s fitting that to close Black History Month, next Monday March 1, Matsuli Music reissues two albums that tell us a great deal about how young Black South Africans in the 1970s demonstrated solidarity with African-American and African continental legacy, aspirations and struggles.  The albums are Harari by the Beaters, and Rufaro/Happiness, the first release after that band changed its name to Harari. https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/harari-2  ; https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/rufaro-2 .

I have to declare an interest here: I wrote the new liner notes and was paid for it, so this blog might be somewhat diminished in credibility. But the two albums do matter as something more than pieces of pop ephemera, and it’s worth saying why. I wouldn’t have written those liner notes if I didn’t think so.

First, of course, we have to say that despite its market positioning as pop music, and the extreme youth of its principals (drummer Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse, bassist Alec ‘Om’Khaoli, and keyboardist and founder Selby Ntuli) both Harari and Rufaro/Happiness featured their fair share of jazz legends, and those musicians are an important part of why the albums are so central to the cultural landscape of the time. 

As well as Hotstix Mabuse on drums and flute, the earlier album has in its backing line trumpeter Dennis Mpale, reedman Duku Makasi and others from the distinguished crew who hung out around Dorkay House, while the second includes reed icon Kippie Moeketsi and guitarist Themba Mokoena. Those South African players all admired the work of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and their peers. They understood the hardships American racism imposed on their counterparts’ lives and avidly consumed news of events such as Gillespie’s 1964 presidential campaign, which both light-heartedly satirised conservative politics – his campaign song was “Vote Dizzy” to the tune of Salt Peanuts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTBEGimnjMI   – and seriously advocated change.  

But that jazz contingent was equally serious about their own legacy, South African identity and Black rights: the late bassist Victor Ntoni recalled Moeketsi as defying “all the rules of the then government by moving wherever he wanted because he was a son of the soil and no-one can tell him where to go…he used to be able to relate things to local ethnic sounds and be modern at the same time.”    

As for the albums’ “Afro-rock” categorization, the constraining marketing categories we fetishize today really didn’t matter either at the As-Shams studios where they recorded or at Dorkay House where their jazz colleagues gathered. A gig was a gig – apartheid restrictions and the re-tribalisation policies of Radio Bantu already made those scarce enough. 

Good music was good music. Moeketsi certainly respected the musicianship of the youthful Mabuse and bassist Om Alec Khaoli , calling them twice for jazz releases, Pat Matshikiza’s 1975 Tshona  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXioDRXNX0s and Dennis Mpale’s 1977 Our Boys are Doing It https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0_dbEpRH-E .

When I talked to Mabuse in compiling the liners, he traced the paths between America and Africa and the emerging shape of the Harari sound.  He noted how the bands had their roots in the Soweto Soul movement, which drew its stage style and fashion from US soul bands, but of course “that political influence was coming too, from America and from what was happening here, along with the music.”

Sipho Mabuse now …

This was also the era of Biko, Black Consciousness and student rebellion, “People were clued up. Martin Luther King was happening, Black Consciousness was just beginning to develop, Steve Biko was founding SASO (the South African Students Organisation),  there were cultural and political groups happening at lunchtimes and after school – all the things that became the movement behind the 1976 Soweto Uprising, and we were gradually getting caught up in that,”  he remembers.

And after the schoolboy musicians who started their lives as The Beaters spent an extended stay in Zimbabwe (then still Rhodesia), “We had been restless and curious youngsters … The liberation struggle in that country was intensifying. A groundswell of Black Consciousness influence was pervasive. In Harari we rediscovered our African-ness, the infectious rhythms and music of the continent. We came back home inspired! We were overhauling ourselves into dashiki-clad musicians who were Black Power saluting and so on.”

…and then

You can hear all that history in the music on these albums: in chants and drums reminiscent of Osibisa on the Beaters’ track Harari and in the classic Soweto Soul of Love, Love, Love that immediately follows it (with a fierce, tight closing mbaqanga break from Mpale), both sitting quite comfortably on the same disc as the teenage grind of Push it On and the bump jive of What’s Happening. You can hear it in the mbira opening on Rufaro’s opener, Oya kai   and the updated exploration of traditional chants, stamping and whistles on the closer, Uzulu.

It was the intersections, fusions and updates of all those sources, thinks Mabuse, and their transformation into something that was both a highly political assertion of identity and a powerful social incitement to dance that made the outfit so successful: “The parallel cross-influences of the Black Panther Movement and Black Consciousness via African-American soul music and Soweto Soul contributed to the way Harari became purveyors of all the musics we today call Afrosoul, Afro-pop, Afrojazz and so on in this country.”

That, they unarguably did. Harari graduates can be found everywhere on the Black popular music landscape of the 1980s and beyond: Umoja, Chess, Kabassa, Stimela, all Mabuse’s subsequent bands, all the beneficiaries of Khaoli’s studio production style, and even the jazz explorations of Spirits Rejoice.

History books can sometimes send you to sleep. These two volumes will likely have the opposite effect. And if you want to swim in the heady cultural cross-currents of young Soweto in the uprising years, I can hardly think of better introductory texts.   

Soweto Soul; Soweto style. Alec “Om” Khaoli (l) and Selby Ntuli (r)

‘Unchain my art’ – Eugene Mthethwa and sorting out the royalties tangle

Trompies: Eugene Mthethwa right of pic

There is really only one music news story this week: the protests by musicians Eugene Mthethwa (Trompies) https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/kwaito-artist-eugene-mthethwa-chains-himself-inside-sambro-offices-in-braamfontein/ and EFF MP Ringo Madlingozi  ( backed by a statement from his political party https://twitter.com/EFFSouthAfrica/status/1362651862835597312 ) against the South African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) concerning alleged delinquency in paying royalties.

 This coincides with a Facebook post by vocalist/composer Ziza Muftic  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=550474993 – supported by multiple followers in the music profession – about the user-unfriendliness of the current SAMRO website, and the perceived breach of natural justice in placing an expiry date on live performance submissions, when the performances have happened and SAMRO has presumably collected on them.

SAMRO’s Mark Rosin

I have not examined the documents related to the Mthethwa/SAMRO dispute. SAMRO’s Mark Rosin has denied https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/entertainment/2021-02-19-samro-disappointed-and-alarmed-by-eugene-mthethwas-sit-in-protest-over-unpaid-royalties/  wrongdoing and suggests there is a broader context of dispute including monies allegedly due from Mthethwa to SAMRO. I do follow the logic of Muftic’s Facebook post; it makes sense to me. I’m not a legal expert or an actuary, and it’s up to experts such as those to untangle the rights and wrongs of specific cases and practices.

This column is not about these individual cases. It’s about the broader issues: that severe relationship problems clearly persist between the country’s largest royalties collection agency and its constituency at the very time when musicians are most desperately in need of revenue; and that, once more, the government department tasked with overseeing the sector remains silent and apparently unknowing about it all.

I say ‘persists’ because the elephant in the room when discussing anything to do with SAMRO is the organisation’s negative history during apartheid. Established in 1961 under Dr Gideon Roos the organisation became (whether deliberately or not is less relevant in 2021; it was unarguably unjust whatever the intention) a vehicle for all kinds of abuses perpetrated by the white-controlled music industry against black artists, from white producers assigning themselves or their designated stooges as the owners of Black creativity, to the classification of much popular music as “traditional”, which erased the creativity and denied the financial rights of its modern makers.

We cannot blame the current SAMRO administration for that – but it lurks as a malevolent shadow over any interactions with artists today, even when nobody mentions it.

The first step towards setting relationships with artists on a better footing would be an honest, impartial, transparent reckoning with the past. Establish a mini-TRC for the recording and rights industry; hear testimonies; report findings and develop a reparations mechanism, whether financial or in the form of scholarships or other investments in the future of Black South African music. However large (and they probably won’t be), such reparations can never be adequate against the psychic pain caused, but they would represent an important acknowledgment.

Prompted by the Facebook entry, I looked – with advice from a registered musician friend – at parts of the current SAMRO website.  It certainly is user-unfriendly: clunky, hard to navigate, and written in far-from-plain language. Another aspect of repairing relationships would be to correct that as quickly as possible. And we do, of course, have more than one official language, with great music made in all of them – why force everybody to operate in English?

In July 2020, ConcertsSA (an organisation often associated with SAMRO) commissioned a survey of live streaming activities in South Africa: Digital Futures https://www.iksafrica.com/reports/Digital-Futures-online.pdf  . Among the recommendations respondents made were some directed at collective management organisations in general, and some directed specifically at CAPASSO and SAMRO. Repeatedly, the need for simple, transparent and accessible systems and processes, and forums for meaningful constituency input were foregrounded by respondents, alongside making faster, more accurate payments. 

Complaints about the justice and effectiveness of royalty disbursements are by no means a uniquely South African issue. A quick Google will turn up dozens of articles on the topic, covering all aspects of intellectual property (IP) administration, and most countries. (See, for example, https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-future-of-digital-performance-rights-management/  ; https://blog.digimarc.com/ArticleDetails?UrlName=Fixing-The-Music-Industry-s-Royalty-Payment-Problem   ;and  (generic IP) https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1208&context=ilr  – a tiny sample from what’s out there.) In South Africa, as I’ve noted above, the issue is further poisoned by historical injustices.

The lack of comment from DSAC is concerning. This blog has noted before that the Department prioritises ‘creative industries’ aspects of the arts, and thus is often more distant from other kinds of debates. But these issues – the practices around IP and collecting and distributing royalties; the earnings of artists – are central to a creative industries perspective. A few days have passed since Mthetwa and Madlingozi’s protests – but far, far longer since this and related rights and royalties controversies began bubbling. DSAC’s silence remains deafening. Even the usual routine statement – in line with the Department’s responses to various sports body scandals – noting events and appealing to all involved to get their acts together, would have been a minor improvement on nothing. 

Even if the Trompies star’s chains aren’t quite as weighty as those brandished by SAPOHR’s Golden Miles Bhudu over the past 20 years https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/golden-miles-budu-of-the-south-african-prisoners-news-photo/1228116843 , his protest should remind us that all is not well with royalty administration in this country, and that nobody can afford (in the case of our musicians, literally) to let it fester unattended for much longer.

Bassist Jesse Mogale asserts the heritage of African jazz

A pernicious but pervasive myth suggests South African modern jazz moved overseas in the decades after 1960, and nothing much happened at home until the exiles returned. Reissues of original sounds from The Drive, Spirits Rejoice, Batsumi, Black Disco and more are hailed as “discoveries” – but they’re really only that for overseas listeners or generations too young to have encountered them.

That sound of that era at home was instantly recognisable. It shared some features with US hard bop: catchy themes and solid, bluesy grooves underpinning risk-taking, harmony-based improvisations. The inspiration and tone colour came from home roots, among them the repeating grooves of marabi, the pipes and patterns of malopo, Africanist church vernaculars and the drones and overtones of uhadi and umruhbe.

That sound still lives; your ears can spot its lineage everywhere on the South African jazz landscape.

But every now and then an album emerges where the line of descent is much more explicitly declared. Mandisi Dyantyis’ 2019 Somandla was one such. Now, bassist Jesse Mogale’s Heritage from an African Continent  https://music.apple.com/us/album/heritage-from-an-african-continent/1537561758 is another. 

The reason we don’t know those sounds so well, or recognise the lineage so easily, is that post-76 repression meant music happened mainly in its neighbourhoods. The record of its existence has to be discerned from the crowded lists of active cultural groups on the pages of Staffrider or the multitudes who came out of South Africa for the Culture and Resistance conference in Botswana. But the music was very much alive, nurtured in the same cradles as revolt: in Mannenberg, Mdantsane and Mamelodi. There – every bit as much as in the MK bases of Angola and Zambia, the ANC cultural committee rooms of London and Lusaka, or the overseas club stages where exiles guested – defiant musicians and their communities were shaping the sound that declared: this is South African jazz. 

That’s where Mogale’s music fits.  When I spoke to him – for an interview in New Frame here https://www.newframe.com/for-jesse-mogale-the-music-is-above-all-of-us/ – he described the politics that nurtured the music, and also the cosmopolitan sonic inspiration of Tshwane, cradle of marabi. “[It] has its roots in Tshwane. That’s alluded to by Abullah Ibrahim in the documentary Brother with Perfect Timing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb31DFIfpao , where he mentions that marabi comes from Marabastad on the outskirts of Pretoria. Back in the day Marabstad  was a place to hang-out for people like Eskia Mphahlele, Can Themba and so on. You can imagine Abdullah Ibrahim playing with the likes of Soulkie Moosa, and Ernest Mothle ,” Mogale says.

Lefifi Tladi

On Legacy from an African Continent , Mogale works with players who appreciate that legacy, including his brother, the guitarist Moss Mogale, who also contributed one composition, and the rootsiest of our modernists, reedman Sydney Mnisi.  But there are also much younger players – 0ne drummer, Manqoba Manku, was only 14 when the tracks were cut – with whom the tradition has been shared through Mogale’s community music education initiative Cafca (Committed Artists for Cultural Advancement: see this tribute from US pianist Helen Sung http://helensung.blogspot.com/2009/05/cafca-music-school.html . Another guiding presence hovering over the work is painter and poet Lefifi Tladi : still every bit as much the Mamelodi rebel as he was in those struggle days. Tladi has contributed cover art to the album as well as two poems, one of which he reads himself. Mogale remembers Tladi , half-joking, warning, “Hey Jesse, feel free to call me – but once I get involved you might find some people won’t call you!”

As a tribute to the legacy, the album contains a beautiful, faithfully-rendered duo version of Mackay Davashe’s Lakutshon’Ilanga featuring Mogale and pianist Tshepo Monareng. There, we hear Mogale playing a plangent, plucked solo improvisation and beautifully-judged walking lines to underpin the piano. Those are two of the musician’s bass faces: the third is arco (bowed) bass, heard to stunning effect on several tracks including the moving, bluesy Homeless Child and the contemplative closer: another duo, Tranquility.

The other ten of the album’s dozen tracks are Mogale’s original compositions, but still they explore facets of legacy. His fraternal Tribute to Bo’ Moss is shaped as a kwela with just the right kinds of solos from Mnisi, Moss Mogale, and trumpeter Ntsikilelo Mcwabe. Lullaby for an African Child nods towards loping malopo beats, the feel perfectly caught by Mnisi’s flute, while the irresistibly danceable Harvest Song recalls marabi roots and their successors in bump jive with fat horn choruses and a stylish little conversation between Mnisi, Mcwabe, Mthunzu Mvubu on alto and Kopano Mashile on  ‘bone. Marabi, says Mogale, is something he plans to explore and research much more deeply.

This isn’t history in a glass case, however.  Mogale writes extremely catchy melodies for ears of all generations. His music can be soaring on Short Stories with Tladi’s evocative Afrofuturist words; Afro-soul jazzy on  Nakana ya Mokhura (with soaring voices from the far-too-little heard Octavia Rachabane and Daisy Mangwato); and lift into an airy contemporary theme for Things Finally Get Better that starts waltz and then really takes off.

Jesse Mogale plays arco bass. Pic: Morris Matsobane Legoabe

One problem with South Africa’s Cape Town and Joburg-dominated commercial jazz scene is there are far too many excellent players around in other cities whose names you rarely hear. If you don’t already know some of these players, you may be surprised – in a very good way.

Heritage from an African Continent works on multiple levels. It’s a showcase for all the nice things the contrebass can do and for Cafca’s remarkable work nurturing young musicians in their communities, outside Amerocentric university jazz curricula. It benchmarks a decade or so of Mogale’s own compositions, and demonstrates today’s possibilities for historic South African forms. In doing all this, it says loudly and proudly: Remember? This is who we are.

Chick Corea returns to forever

In a year already scarred by tragic deaths, the passing of pianist, composer and innovator Chick Corea at the age of 79 adds to the sadness. He was described this morning by one of his collaborators as “the best improviser I have ever known.” Here’s Return to Forever to remind you of the scale and scope of his imagination. May his spirit rest in music and peace.

Remembering Khumalo and Gwangwa: only action matters

The memorial service for Sibongile Khumalo 6 February 2020

“Remember me,” sang Sibongile Mngoma. Her richly expressed Dido’s Lament was one of many heartbreaking moments in Mam’ Sibongile Khumalo’s memorial service at the Market Theatre yesterday. But it also posed a question for many of us: how can we adequately remember cultural titans such as Khumalo and Ntate Jonas Gwangwa? What happens after the ceremonies and speeches are over?  

It’s all very well to read out a bureaucratically-authored, occasionally inaccurate, official tribute speech – but then, all too often, our cultural heroes are relegated to a dusty pantheon on some memorial wall; their names invoked on heritage days, but nothing practical actually done to carry forward the work they began and that the speech lauded. Who’s picking up the spear?

The lives of Gwangwa and Khumalo enacted the liberation and decolonisation of music learning, production and reception. They didn’t just compose, play, sing and teach; they did it for an explicit, beautifully articulated reason.

Meanwhile, the official structures that generate those speeches, daily enact an entirely contrary discourse of elitist, “world-class” and commoditising cultural policy that disdains grassroots arts communities and their needs.

So here’s an idea. First, we ourselves must remember them: in everything we do, write, play and paint. Recall what they stood for and in our own work and practice, in our own way and voice, we can keep it alive. Self-reliance matters when the powers that be embrace global capital. But for those powers that be, how about spending some of the money that pre-Covid was poured into mega-events on the cultural commons instead? (https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/theory/item/2460-the-cultural-commons-belongs-to-all-of-us )  In other words, shape arts policies and spending to make the creation and enjoyment of music, visual art and literature accessible to as many people as possible? (We used to call it ‘opening the doors of culture’.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA7kH4QpQas

That has many aspects, at many levels.

It could involve investing to close the digital divide, so that live streamed South African theatre and music are accessible to their core audience here at home. Let creators access officially-controlled spaces (state theatres, the SABC studios)  to create content – after all, when artists are able to earn, their taxes contribute to the upkeep of those places. Include digital tickets in relief packages, and you build audiences, help decolonise consumption patterns – and make it possible for artists to earn again.

It could involve improving support for the brave community music schools all over the country that have struggled on, largely dependent on the whims of external donors, and for arts activities in community centres.

And if you want something that sounds fancier – for Departmental annual reports and such –how about endowing a few music and arts scholarships and chairs at universities? There are two caveats. First, the chairs must be open to organic as well as Western-qualified intellectuals, so that the people’s professors of image, word and music do not perish before they pass on their intellectual riches. Second, the study paths for scholarship students and teachers must encourage fresh, people-centred subject-matter.

Gwangwa, for example, was entranced by the expressive possibilities of music theatre. Outside America, there are relatively few chairs of music theatre – the Netherlands established its first only in 2019 – but South Africa ought to have one in his name. Khumalo strove to open the doors of music production to young women, so how about a chair in music production in hers – with investment in new curriculum development and scholarships encouraging non-conventional applicants for both?  

*****

Oh yes, and another good way of remembering music greats is to ensure their successors can afford to feed their families. DSAC has just launched the third phase of its Covid relief funding http://www.dac.gov.za/content/minister-sport-arts-and-culture-launches-3rd-phase-covid-19-relief-fund-step-towards-sector . This is welcome news. The announcement document also makes welcome acknowledgment of issues such as access, and “marginalised” communities and art-forms. (We can talk later about the current – not only historic – reasons why such “marginalisation” exists.)

Unfortunately, the  document isn’t exactly in accessible plain language (which, we should remind everybody, is a Constitutional requirement). Long sentences, impersonal constructions, unclear passives plus an imperative, occasionally hostile tone make it less likely people will apply. The continuing refusal of the conditions to acknowledge that South African cultural workers must often work several jobs, not all of them in creative sectors, will exclude many more.

• Most offensive is the imperative to “Provide honest and accurate information and note that misrepresentation of information may lead to your application not being considered.” The tsotsis and tenderpreneurs will blithely ignore this instruction – they don’t even care about selling fake medical gear that kills, so this isn’t likely to deter them. For everybody else, it’s just hurtful.  I’ve talked with people involved in disbursing other, non-government, relief to artists. What they’ve found most striking and moving is the scrupulous honesty of applicants, who often request just tiny amounts to cover shortfalls in meagre and almost certainly previously inadequate incomes.

Still, if it benefits even a minority of recipients, DSAC’s continuing relief for the sector is welcome. If you think you qualify, please try to apply.