Festival re-runs: sweet streams are made of this

Sankofa: well worth a re-run

Last night, March 27, saw the second streaming event of the JazzFix online series https://www.capetownjazzfest.com/single-post/cape-town-jazz-fest-launch-jazzfix-an-online-series-ft-jonathan-butler-and-many-more , which (thanks to Covid) is what we get this year instead of the Cape Town International Jazz Festival.

JazzFix plans to feature a streamed rerun each month of what the organisers have selected as landmark performances from festivals past, re-packaged with artist conversation and reminiscences about the event. The first two – Jonathan Butler 2019  on 27 February and then Judith Sephuma yesterday – were probably good choices to kick off a series. They were undeniably top-notch performances, but also firmly middle-of-the road in terms of audience appeal, likely to establish a broad audience among those who can afford the R80 ticket.

Cape Town – like all South Africa’s international festivals – also faces the problem that video footage of many of the international acts it’s featured over the years are governed by restrictions from those artists’ managements or labels, often seting tough limits or very high price-tags on any re-showing. So we may not get to see many of CTIJF’s previous international acts.

The late Zim Ngqawana: play his CTIJF set again, please!

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A second viewing ought to convince doubters (if any remain) of the incredible quality that South African performers consistently bring to festival stages. I hope JazzFix   still has the footage so it can bring us, at least, guitarist Themba Mokoena’s solo outing from 2016, something – anything – from Miriam Makeba or Winston Mankunku, the late Jonas Gwangwa’s roistering 2017 closer, Feya Faku’s 2018 festival gig, Project ELO’s 2016 outing, and Zim Ngqawana’s concert from 2012. I suppose it’s too much to ask that they might have preserved Moses Molelekwa’s set from 2000?

But I regret that I probably won’t get to see again one of the most perfect live performances I’ve ever seen at CTIJF: US bassist Ron Carter’s 2012 set with its sublime closing version of Seven Steps to Heaven.  

Ron Carter: let’s hear those Seven Steps to Heaven

And that got me thinking: if other South African jazz festivals adopted the JazzFix model, what should be the re-run choices?

When I posed the question to friends who’ve been longtime Cape Town attendees, Carter’s set popped up on many more memory-boards than mine. But several people also pointed out that for unfailingly interesting (often unique) South African jazz gigs, we ought to be pressing the rewind button on the Standard Bank Jazz Festival at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda. Even when the DSG jazz venue gets a full house, that’s still not as many people as ought to hear the kind of inventive, inspired sounds Makhanda often hosts.

A case in point – and it’s not the only one, but it is an excellent example – is the powerful 2019 Makhanda set from reedman Salim Washington and Sankofa. Shamelessly exploiting my journalist’s privilege, I got a chance to re-hear the performer’s tape of that one.

Sankofa is a moveable feast of a band: a judicious selection from the many musicians who relish Washington’s challenging material.  Afrika Mkhize is the pianist here (it’s often Nduduzo Makathini), with Ayanda Sikade on drums. They are joined by two other regulars,  altoist Phumlani Mtiti and trumpeter Sakhile Simani, and bassist Nhlanhla Radebe. The powerful Zoe Masuku (Zoe the Seed) controls vocals and spoken word.

Many of Washington’s compositions are familiar from the first 2017 Sankofa album: the stately Oshun, Imlilo, The Light Within and Charcoal, Clear, Beautiful All Over. On Uh, Oh, Masuku’s gift for inventive vocal swing creates a fresh texture, different from the album version. The ballad Afrika Love (not on the album) starts modal and then soars out quite Trane-ishly to the stars.

But Washington as leader always seeks material that speaks sharply to the times and his audience, and in 2019 that was a jazz re-arrangement of Lauryn Hill’s Black Rage; not only perfect for Masuku’s beautifully articulated declamation and wordless, churchy song over testifying horns. That’s typical of the combinations and juxtapositions characterising Washington’s ensemble sound. Sikade’s intelligent drum underpinnings and solo remind us why he’s so admired. The version stays faithful to the spirit of Hill’s original, but this Black Rage expresses unchained jazz anger.    

Uh Oh to Black Rage gives you the measure of Washington’s stylistic range, and as usual we hear him on more reeds than just tenor, including bass clarinet. But the richness of this set is also rooted in the tight, empathetic and, yes, joyful, vibe he can create with his ensemble. Simani is positively flying.

Miriam Makeba: encore please!

There’s also always something about the mood of a live performance with an audience that’s special –that’s another reason why the JazzFix idea is such a good one.

Streaming isn’t the only option for revisiting such memories. Sankofa’s Makhanda set could make a great Live at… album too. (In Washington’s case that’s long overdue, since although he has featured on other recorded work here and in the US, we haven’t had a South African album from him as leader for four years.)

And over the years, Makhanda, Cape Town and Joy of Jazz must have amassed many more performances equally worth revisiting. 

So tell me, whether you’re an artist or an audience member – what memorable jazz set would you want a South African festival to “Play it again, Sam” ? 

NOTE THIS BLOG WAS AMENDED ON 28/03 to correct personnel and attribution errors.

Human Rights Day – not quite time for dancing in the streets

It’s Human Rights Day now because it was Sharpeville Day first

Tomorrow is Human Rights Day – which designation many South Africans see as an erasure of the 69 Pan Africanist Congress militants murdered and hundreds wounded by the apartheid regime on 21 March 1960 in what has come to be known as the Sharpeville Massacre.

The principles of internationalism suggest it’s not negative to broaden commemoration of one atrocity into a day of solidarity with struggling people worldwide. But we must never forget that March 21 is Human Rights Day in South Africa precisely because it was Sharpeville Day first and that the Sharpeville atrocity was the catalyst for creating a worldwide human rights legal framework. Shamefully, a recent survey https://theconversation.com/survey-shows-ignorance-about-big-moments-in-south-africas-history-like-the-sharpeville-massacre-157513 revealed that only 19% of South Africans felt they knew enough about Sharpeville to describe the historical landmark to a friend. What the hell are our schools teaching?

And March 21 should still be a day of proactive solidarity, not just another holiday of jol and shopping. So here’s a playlist for tomorrow with songs old and new , from here and there, underlining emphatically that the oppressors don’t have all the best tunes.

Solidarity with Myanmar Human Rights

People of Myanmar defy the coup

Right now, as you are reading this, the people of Myanmar are being beaten, shot, tear-gassed, disappeared and tortured for peacefully protesting the February military coup. Still they courageously come out onto the streets. So let’s start by listening to their song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHRh0UawdY0.  (Kabar Makyay Bu: “We will not surrender till the end of the world”). For the history behind Myanmar protest music , read this excellent article https://www.khaosodenglish.com/opinion/2021/03/01/do-you-hear-the-people-sing-a-guide-to-myanmar-protest-music/ which has links to other songs, including the original version of Kabar Makyay Bu.

At home: Not Yet Uhuru

Here’s a song that Pan Africanist Congress militants were singing back in 1960, recorded in exile in Tanzania uSobukwe ufuna amajoni https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr3FgMrUC3c. We swore, perhaps over-optimistically, back at the dawn of liberation, Never Again, as the Prophets of Da City discuss at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr3FgMrUC3c. But Letta Mbulu clearly saw that it was Not Yet Uhuru/ Amakhamandela https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Js95topeKI , and Thandiswa Mazwai’s Nizalwa Ngobani https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSd1zWe7g_0 continued to warn us that as revolutionaries pass, the goals of the struggle can too easily be forgotten.

Just last week: Wits students protest education cuts and financial exclusion

Those goals inspired powerful sacrifices, as the young cultural soldiers of the Amandla Cultural Ensemble remind us with Sobashiy’Abazali https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk8t8j4f0TU. Amandla’s musical director, the late Jonas Gwangwa, clearly saw that partial realisation would not be enough: “Freedom for some is freedom for none”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA4gAy8_jTA

Salim Washington’s Tears of Marikana, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8SLxvv37AA with verses from Lesego Rampholokeng, marks one of the most egregious human rights violations of recent years. And still, after that, we haven’t demilitarised the police service in the interest of human rights.

But it would be equally a-historical to deny and erase the gains. South Africa’s Constitution and Bill of Rights – which some politicians who should know better are currently busy disrespecting – could, if fully lived in government and by citizens, serve as a fitting memorial for the martyrs of that first March 21^st. So let’s reclaim from bureaucratic official events the song that started all the trouble. In multiple versions it has served other African nations as well as us as a first post-independence anthem. Enoch Sontonga’s Nkosi Sikelel’iAfrica is a damn good tune with a genuinely redemptive message. Here’s a version you may not have heard, from the late Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gfp3jh7P74 , with a bravura solo from reedman Dewey Redman that manages both evocative riffs on the original melody and a fighting invocation of freedom.

Gender rights are human rights

Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey

Long before public discourse foregrounded GBV here, McCoy Mrubata was reminding us through his song title (and often what he said about the song onstage) that we needed to Talk About It https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsP-g0v5bXI . I wanted to include Scholtz’s This Can’t Be Love  here, from her 2005 album Zillion Miles – a searing deconstruction of domestic violence – but it isn’t online anywhere. The divine Aretha, of course, summed up first and best the grounding principle of gender and all other rights: R-E-S-P-E-C-T https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FOUqQt3Kg0 . But even before that, in 1925, Bessie Smith was asserting that principle in her lyrics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnssU3yAa5I.  DeeDee Bridgewater and Tata Kouyate’s Bambo/No More https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAIHXuiadxE takes women’s refusal to be silenced to the African continent. Tom Robinson, in lyrics heavy with irony, asserted the place of gay rights in human rights struggles in 1978, at a time of rampant homophobia in the UK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojnv3fegkfM . But back in the 1920s, Black, gender-nonconforming women were already fighting those battles, as Gertrude “Ma’ Rainey declared in Prove it on Me Blues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnssU3yAa5I . And bringing the music right up to date, women across Latin Americs in 2019 protest The Rapist on your Street https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB1cWh27rmI with an English subtitled version here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5AAscy7qbI

But where there is oppression, there is resistance

So what to do? Decide Which Side Are You On https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSZWslqjfPE . Then Get Up, Stand Up For Your Rights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhJ0q7X3DLM . Because We Will Win https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBjRot3CHYk And after that, we can really use March 21 to be Dancing in the Streets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdvITn5cAVc

And keep remembering Sharpeville

Sacking the Arts Minister won’t save the sector

The NAC sit-in

At time of writing, the sit-in at the National Arts Council continues. Messages on the Im4thearts https://iam4thearts.org.za/ Twitter feed suggest that at the heart of the PESP screw-up may lie something far more sinister, with NAC Board members found embroiled in organisations to which the NAC allocated funds. UPDATE 15/03: Yesterday the NAC held a Zoom meeting to say ‘Sorry’. In response to which it is tempting to channel (not a jazz artist, but the right song) Taylor Swift.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPdxiClFH7w

I’m4thearts is doing brilliant, admirable work in keeping this issue hot. They are asking all the right questions. They’ve also made it clear that the PESP fiasco is not isolated, but rather symptomatic of neglect, lack of understanding and at best half-hearted concern from the very highest administrative levels.

The buck for all that stops at the desk of the minister of sports, arts & culture – the buck for every problematic sector stops at the desk of its designated cabinet minister.  In case those ministers have forgotten, that’s what they get paid their R2.47M a year for. Im4thearts is dead right on all that. What’s less astute is the simplistic demand to fire the minister.

The buck stops here: DSAC Minister Nathi Mthethwa

The problems of the sector did not start with this minister. They are long-standing, political, systemic and societal. Demanding one individual’s head is a distraction.  Getting him fired – if it ever happened –  would just be one of those easy victories Amilcar Cabral warned us never to claim. It would allow government to signal responsivenness and bask in any ensuing kudos at minimal cost. But the only thing it’s likely to change is the portraits on DSAC office walls.

As many historians and cultural workers have noted, the ANC organisationally (though not its many highly creative individual members) came relatively late to the table of cultural struggle. Africanist cultural formations led the way in the ’76 era. The late Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile noted in 1992 that it had taken the ANC nearly 70 years from its foundation to establish a Department of Arts and Culture ten years previously, and “ even now it remains like a tolerated mischievous  stepchild…” Post-liberation, attitudes towards culture were often narrowly instrumentalist. The 1990-founded Federation of South African Cultural Organisations (Fosaco see https://asai.co.za/peoplesculture/federation-south-african-cultural-organisations/ ) was sidelined after it refused to align exclusively to the ANC. The progressive, democratically-canvassed recommendations of the 2000 Music Industry Task Team were largely ignored.

Sidelined: the debates of the Fosaco era

Today multiple genuinely grassroots arts formations are neglected in favour of the DSAC-patronised sweetheart CCIFSA (https://www.facebook.com/ccifsa/ ), whose silence about recent sector controversies has been deafening. The ANC 2019 election manifesto (see https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2019/01/20/emections-culture-commoditisation-made-manifesto/ ) dealt with the arts exclusively through a crude, commodifying  ‘creative industries’ lens. (And before we get oppositional about this, the other parties’ manifestos were mostly worse. Only the EFF gave the sector stronger consideration; but unfortunately as a series of diktats with no implementation strategies.)

That’s the climate within which a new DSAC Minister would have to operate, whoever he or she is.

Add to that Covid, whose recovery budgeting is in the hands of a covert acolyte of the austerity cult whose most recent budget-slashing means a terrifying, scorched-earth future for arts education.

Add endemic corruption: a decade of looting and the systematic undermining of all the excellent corporate governance principles established by the King Reports. If those had been in place and enforced, recent events at the NAC simply could not have happened. People of principle have been squeezed out of institutions; corruption and venality have become the dominant institutional knowledge.

Finally, remember that Ministers are rarely specialists in their ministry’s area; that they depend on bloated support teams of advisers and bureaucrats; and that the labyrinthine, Kafka-esque and exclusionary bureaucratic processes inherited from the apartheid police state have never truly been reformed  – they are replicated all the way down the DSAC food-chain. A new Minister can drown in all that as easily as the old one.

None of that means Mthethwa’s record merits praise.

His silence when action is needed (like now); some cringe-worthy utterances when silence would have been preferable (remember “South African theatre is alive and well”?); and the failure to progress the White Paper process have all justifiably been pilloried and those are by no means the whole hippo. The minister’s far more active and informed positions on some sports body problems suggest he could have given a better performance on the arts too – but didn’t. As we all feared when the two departments were merged, sports can do so much more for an ambitious politician’s career profile. That merger may have sealed the fate of the arts and culture sector. Few would weep if Mthethwa went.

However, all the energy being devoted to demanding one minister must go would be far more useful directed towards demands for:

• The reopening of the national conversation about the politics of arts and culture, giving the organisations of the people – sidelined since 1990 – voice and agency;
• The dismantling of departmental silos so that more knowledgeable structures (for example, the DTI) can support the creative trade and industry aspects of the arts;
• The identifying, firing and charging of corrupt and negligent individuals in arts and culture formations fast; and
• The reform of bureaucratic logjams to get money to artists who need it, before they starve and the entire sector withers.    

Arts & culture funding – totally NACkered

Two weeks ago it was kwaito veteran Eugene Mthetwa chaining himself to a Samro chair. This week, in a switch of genre and building, it was opera singer Sibongile Mngoma leading a demonstration at the headquarters of the National Arts Council (NAC). The ensuing sit-in was still going on as of Monday. UPDATE: see a list of artists’ unanswered questions here: https://www.newslink.co.za/2021/03/05/artists-are-seeking-answers-on-the-pesp-from-nac/

Sibongile Mgoma, vocal artist and founder of lobby group Im4theArts

Artists’ livelihoods everywhere have been devastated by the pandemic and its necessary restrictions. In South Africa, their hopes continue to be blighted by displays of mind-boggling ineptitude and disingenuous self-justification from those granted stewardship of their interests.

A storm of ethical question-marks

This isn’t the first time in recent years that questions have been raised about NAC administration.

There have been long-running disputes over the disposal of surplus funds from expired projects; the alleged bullying of whistleblower Mary-Anne Makgoka in 2018; discontent over the organisation’s paying the R596K legal bills of CEO Rosemary Mangope for an internal inquiry at which it cleared her in 2019; and related allegations of delayed and irregular funding in the same year. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of those individual matters, the very existence of such a storm of ethical question-marks in only three years suggests that some action from DSAC – of which the NAC is an agency – was overdue long before this latest farce.

And farce it is – though not so amusing if you are an artist with a family to feed.

The PESP saga

Suspended National Arts Council CEO Rosemary Mangope

In November 2020, DSAC designated the NAC to disburse R300M of Presidential Employment Stimulus Package (PESP) funds to the arts sector. This had two streams: for job retention; and job opportunities. Whether the amount was adequate was not discussed at the time, nor was the conceptual issue that ‘job’ funding is inappropriate for a sector structured around project-based ‘work’, and will inevitably favour big institutional players. At the time, the NAC smugly declared itself well experienced and capable of carrying out the task.

On January 20, the NAC found itself forced to call for regional partners to help distribute the PESP funds, as little progress had been made, DSAC was getting twitchy, and there was a March 30 deadline on utilising the money. Potential distribution partners were given five days to apply. No report was issued to the media about how that exercise went.

That’s the background to the late-February/ early-March convulsions. The NAC had received 2 486 applications for PESP funding. It had, by the time the situation became public, approved 1 374 and informed 613 potential recipients. And then, in the words of Council member and spokesperson for the Council, Sipho Sithole, the body found itself with the “sudden dilemma” of not having sufficient funds left in the kitty to pay out the remaining 716.

Surely simply adding-up the spending line during the allocation process would have forestalled this “dilemma” becoming “sudden”? It’s not exactly accountancy rocket-science – unless there was miscommunication or concealment about what was being allocated, or pressure from DSAC panicked the NAC into over-hasty, poorly documented decisions. (All of these would be equally culpable.)

The “solution”

NAC Council spokesperson Sipho Sithole

Initial funding was allocated on the basis of R25K for organisations and R16.6K for individuals per job. To deal with the “dilemma”, the NAC decided to withdraw those allocation letters – essentially, to break contracts – and reallocate the funds on the basis of a universal R10 895 per job. Sithole characterised this decision as the NAC exceeding its job-creation mandate, opening the door to not 14 000 but 21 249 potential jobs. Mangope praised it as spreading job creation “even wider”. 

Shortly after, she and CFO Clifton Changfoot were suspended. Ms Julie Diphofa was designated Acting CEO and HRH Princess Celenhle Dlamini Acting Council Chair.

Job funding: it’s not size, it’s what you do with it

The job-creation argument is totally disingenuous. Some are paper (projected) job numbers attached to projects it may not now be possible to start in time, In the climate of mistrust and disorganisation created by breaking original contracts they may not even materialise. The institutional jobs cost what they cost. If you originally budgeted each job at R25K and that was a realistic figure, cutting it to just under R11K may mean an institution can retain only half (or fewer) of its planned job-holders.

Some artists and project organisers report that even this reduced amount has not arrived yet. Some have already gone ahead with projects – remember, this was money that needed to be used by end-March – on trust, and incurred debt or been unable to pay artists and service providers. Job numbers may look good in the press releases, but are worth nothing to the artists if they remain unpaid. 

The real dilemma

The real dilemma is not the NAC’s failure at simple addition and subtraction. That’s just a disgrace. The real dilemma is what to do now.

It’s tempting to call, as some politicians have done, for mass firings and a halt to all disbursements while the mess is sorted out. But that will be even worse for artists, especially those connected to institutions, events and programmes that need significant advance planning and down-payments. Such a step could mean that 2021 – even if we all get vaccinated – could end up with no big arts events or programmes at all: worse even than 2020. The ripples from that, including driving yet more people and organisations out of the creative industries, will be felt for years to come.

But we can’t do nothing in the face of what – at best – looks like blundering incompetence. And again, this points back towards a Department tardy and laissez-faire in the extreme in responding to institutional and process stuff-ups that stop the arts from flourishing. NAC may have, by withdrawing those original contract letters, have broken the law. Even if the courts rule otherwise, it has damaged its own and DSAC’s reputation, destroyed any semblance of good faith in its dealings with stakeholders, and snatched food out of the mouths of artists and their families.

The average annual salary of an NAC employee is estimated at around R402 638. (A Cabinet Minister takes home around R2.47 million.) Perhaps that’s what the cheerful chap in this current NAC advertisement is smiling about? For the arts community, though, publishing that image at this time must feel like the worst possible taste. 

NOTE: This blog was updated on 8/03 to reflect the current situation of the sit-in and to correct the designations of current NAC acting office-holders. My apologies for the initial error and thanks to Theo Lawrence for the corrections.