Spirits Rejoice African Spaces reappears – but there’s still little archival space for Russell Herman

Arlene Rosenfield’s cover artwork for African Spaces

So many reissues of vintage South African music are now appearing that it’s not surprising some slip through the cracks. That’s the case with the Matsuli Music reissue of the Spirits Rejoice debut album, the 1977 African Spaces, whose digital edition appeared on March 30 https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/african-spaces , with vinyl scheduled for August. What is surprising is how patchy is our knowledge of some of the contributing musicians, and in particular guitarist, vocalist and composer Russell Herman.

The album first. Primarily the brainchild of drummer Gilbert Matthews https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2020/07/06/where-are-the-flowers-for-gilbert/ the band brought together the supergroup who had formed the house band for the Lindbergh musical Black Mikado with some of their peers to develop a sound that could make a South African response to the modern jazz sounds represented overseas by bands such as Weather Report. The group included guitarists Herman and Enoch Mthalane, reedman Duku Makasi and Robbie Jansen, brass players George Tyefumani and Themba Mehlomakhulu, bassist Sipho Gumede and for a time Bheki Mseleku on keyboards, later replaced by Mervyn Afrika.

The band’s innovative original music won plaudits and fans, and for younger players such as saxophonist Khaya Mahlangu who joined one of its later incarnations, was an inspiring learning experience, impelling him and Gumede to explore whether an even more African-sounding response to jazz fusion was possible by founding Sakhile.

Behind the scenes, as Francis Gooding’s liner notes recount, the sailing wasn’t quite so smooth.

Spirits Rejoice

Mthalane was fired because the band’s white management could not accommodate his proud assertion of his home language, isiZulu; Mseleku’s later departure echoed those same politics. Though the music on African Spaces was recorded during October 1976, no South African label was interested in such innovative jazz; a stance reflecting their commercial imperatives (and political timidity) at a time when radio was the best way to promote records, but the SABC’s ethnically segregated stations were wary of boundary-busting music they could not comfortably fit within a language-group slot.

It wasn’t released until the band’s management took it to WEA, and came out on the Atlantic label in 1977. After that, another enthusiastic supporter, musician Dave Marks – then running the Market Café – worked hard to find ways of securing some radio play.

Nevertheless, none of the Spirits Rejoice survivors Gooding interviews feels the album found adequate space for effective promotion on a largely pop oriented landscape, even though the band secured a ‘Jazz Band of the Year’ title. 

Heard today, though, the beauty and challenge of the sound stands out. The poppier tracks, which utilise the voices of Herman and Joy’s Felicia Marion, are still underlaid by an intricate mesh of band work that is far from three-chord formula playing; the lyrics of Makes Me Wonder Why are a clear political challenge.

As with so many of those 1970s releases, Gumede’s stature as a bassist who could combine subtle complexity and rock steady walk, absolutely shines. There’s adventurous composing on both Herman and Africa’s Savage Dance and African Spaces, and Makasi’s more deceptively melodic Minute Song and an irresistible rhythm groove on Joy. Makasi and Tjefumani make no intellectual compromises in their playing whatever the ostensible character of the tune. For fans of any of these artists, it’s a must-have addition to the collection.

None of them is adequately remembered in either the media or the scholarly record. But the lack of archive for Herman’s work is perhaps the most tragic. Born in District Six in 1953, he worked not only with Spirits Rejoice but with other experimental  jazz groups of the era including Oswietie and Estudio. When he and drummer Brian Abrahams found conditions in South Africa too intolerable, they left for the UK in the early 1980s.

Russell Herman in London with District Six

There, Herman continued playing and composing. He worked in the groups District Six (with Abrahams) and Kintone (with another SA exile, tenorist Frank Williams), and can also be heard on Jonas Gwangwa’s London-recorded Flowers of the Nation, Winston Mankunku’s Jika and flautist Deepak Ram’s Flute for Thought. As a composer, he contributed to multiple albums. Gorgeous compositions South Africans may not know include Sivela Kude on the District Six album Akuzwakale (whose music has no trace online) and Freedom Song on Kintone’s Going Home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsTyz5_Yeww .

Herman also did impressive work as a producer. He worked on three of Mseleku’s albums: Celebration, Meditations and Timelessness and was also another rock of friendship and support when the pianist was in London.  Additionally he was part of the Melt 2000 production team for Moses Molelekwa’s Genes and Spirits and Vusi Khumalo’s Follow Your Dream.

Herman died tragically after a heart attack in 1998. He was only 44.

It’s unjust that an artist who made such a significant contribution to South African music here and overseas is so little remembered in any accessible record. But it’s not unusual. Once more, the history that Google presents when we search is massively incomplete – and yet it’s what South African youngsters doing research often mistakenly believe comprises all the knowledge in the world. It’s time we started writing more of our own. 

PS: See this blog from Patrick Lee-Thorpe on another musician of that era, Robbie Jansen, and his later recording: https://wifidead.blogspot.com/2020/07/making-records-with-robbie-jansen.html

Andile Yenana and Khaya Mahlangu live at the Market Theatre: the many visions of tradition

19/04 SEE UPDATE ABOUT SOURCING THE CDs BELOW

For some of us, it was the last substantial event before Covid closed jazz down: the January 2020 weekend of Living Jazz Giants concerts at the Market Theatre staged by Ike Phaahla’s Collaborative Concepts production house, featuring an evening each led by Khaya Mahlangu and Andile Yenana.

Khaya Mahlangu

Now, 15 months later, both double albums are out. They’re the first planned instalment of an extensive documentation plan that also includes DVDs and transcriptions.

I reviewed the performance now released as Khaya Mahlangu and the Liberation Orchestra: Visions, at the time https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2020/01/19/kaya-mahlangu-at-the-market-a-giant-legacy-for-jazzkind/  Everything I wrote then about the music and performances remains true. It’s a tribute to the production team at Peter Auret Audio that the CD faithfully retains the feel of the live show, itself beautifully engineered by Friederich Wilsenach.

The Yenana set, Andile Yenana and Azania Dreaming Big Band: One Night at the Market Theatre is introduced by Phaahla with a tribute not only to the players but to the two arrangers.  Why, becomes clear when you hear, for example, Siya Makhuzeni’s sensitive, lyrical expansion of a Zim Ngqawana piccolo theme for 15-piece band, or Afrika Mkhize’s 18-minute re-visioning of Tembisa with its polyphonic call and response. We tend to think primarily of those two as performers, but the arranging skill on display in this set is formidable. 

So is the musicianship. This is Yenana’s first CD as leader since We Used to Dance , and you may have missed his 2018, five-track solo contribution to the Durban Piano Passion Projecthttps://pianopassionproject.bandcamp.com/album/piano-passions-double-album , some of whose material is reprised with this big-band

For that reason, hearing him make his keyboard and voice entry on Kuyasa on this new album is almost like a sigh of relief – where have you been?

The pianist is joined by a powerful ensemble. Makuzeni is one of four trombonists, the reeds are Mthunzi Mvubu, Phumlani Mtiti, Sisonke Xonti, Sydney Mnisi and Muhammad Dawjee; the horns, Mandla Mlangeni, Sakhile Simani, Sibusiso Mkhize and Thabo Sikhakhane; with Tumi Mogorosi on drums and much-missed, normally US-located, bassist Jimmy Mngwandi. Not counting all the inspired solos that line-up makes possible (and it does), even the chorus and ensemble work shimmers with quality.  

Seven of the nine tracks are Yenana originals, plus Zim’s Tune and Mnisi’s Tembisa: that latter a song now thoroughly identified with both of them, so often has Yenana interpreted it.

Listening to both CD sets, it becomes clear that South Africa doesn’t only have – as is now almost universally acknowledged – its own jazz tradition: it has several. Some are explicit, in tunes titled in tribute to legendary bandleaders and music organisers. There are the marabi and mbaqanga structures that Mahlangu nods to on Emjibha and Kwa Guqa, and the modern jazz and fusion flavours of his Spirits Rejoice. There’s the still-underestimated South African indigenous hard bop feel of the 1970s and ‘80s period, whose voice sounds at multiple points on both outings; Yenana’s draught of deep community roots on Itshoba Lenkomo, and the unchained freedom of his Exit Left , carrying the contemporary improvising spirit of Pukwana, Moholo-Moholo, McGregor, Ngqawana and more.  

Yenana once asked Who’s Got the Map? and these two performances actually provide a pretty good cartography of the sources whose confluence sounds through South African jazz players today.

Andile Yenana

The CD sets are presented in nicely-designed gatefold packages, though for overseas listeners – who should hear these – captions to the line-up photos and a note of soloists on each track would have been useful additions. We instantly recognise, for example, Sydney Mnisi’s sax voice; they may not.    

Perhaps the only real criticism is that the music is not yet on any of the digital album access sites, though Phaahla assures me that’s coming soon. For now, contact the following numbers to buy the CDs: Mandela Malambe on 078-285-6895; Andile Yenana on 064-216-1756; or Khaya Mahlangu on 082-531-8109.

The Living Jazz Giants Project is one of the initiatives that the National Lottery Fund got right. This kind of project, which establishes consistent legacy archive for the future, certainly makes more sense than the scattershot approach often seen from DSAC.

As April comes to an end, there are Jazz Appreciation Month events everywhere (see for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cst8HU4yUoE ) Jazz certainly still matters. As scholars Ingrid Monson and Gerald Early point out in an article with that title https://www.amacad.org/publication/why-jazz-still-matters : “ Jazz improvisation remains a compelling metaphor for interrelationship, group creativity, and freedom that is both aesthetic and social. Improvisation transforms, one-ups, reinterprets, and synthesizes evolving human experience and its sonic signatures, regardless of their classical, popular, or cultural origins.”

But if you want to know what that actually sounds like – listen to these albums.

Blessings and Blues: Neil Gonsalves’ southern migration to a space called home

“I’d  much rather just pitch up for the gig to play,” confesses Durban-based pianist Neil Gonsalves. “But then I’d be betraying the music, my band, my students, teachers, peers and audience. I have to engage more.”

It’s true.

Earlier this month, Gonsalves launched his fourth album, the trio outing Blessings and Blues (https://neilgonsalves.bandcamp.com/). Yet despite those albums, a playing career that has seen him share stages with, among others, Busi Mhlongo and Johnny Clegg, a distinguished teaching record at UKZN and a role as Director of that institution’s Centre for Popular Music and Jazz, until Blessings and Blues came out you’d have been hard-pressed to find any substantial media coverage of him online.

That’s not only a consequence of Gonsalves’ own preference for simply getting on with the music, of course.

As I’ve noted before, music made outside the metropoles of Joburg and Cape Town gets even shorter shrift from a South African media already largely cold-shouldering original local jazz. That’s despite the active and increasingly nationally important jazz scene around UKZN, which also hosts Salim Washington and Sibu “Mash” Mashiloane (among others) as teachers, and has produced many remarkable young players including reedman Linda Sikhakhane, bassists Dalisu Ndlazi and Ildo Nandja, drummer Riley Giandhari – of whom more later – and more.

The dozen tracks of Blessings and Blues, however, are beginning to attract radio play, currently the best route around newspaper indifference. It’s worth learning more about the man behind the notes. I talked to Gonsalves via e-mail this week.

Neil Gonsalves

Though his family weren’t musicians, and most music came into the home via radio, “My mum tells the story of my infant self instructing her to play records , turn them over, and play them again, before I could speak, “ he says. “[And] I remember sitting in my dad’s car, listening to King Curtis’s Memphis Soul Stew (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Loy55z4GpA ) over and over again until my dad warned me that I was running the car battery down! I was fascinated by the instruments and how they entered and fit together as King Curtis called them out.”  

After that early excitement, his music studies took a more conventional route. His father, an educator, brought library books about music home. The young Neil had lessons on the family organ, and at school – “I was a horrible recorder player” – then played with the folk choir at his local Catholic church. Through friendships formed there, he began listening to friends’ jazz records.  “Only when I heard Andrew’s (Nair) record collection and had the social experience of focused listening and our subsequent jam band was I able to reconcile my solitary [music lesson] experience with the fun to be had from music-making as a communal thing.”

A career-focused attempt to study computer science – “the idea of playing music to make a living was implausible” – bombed out. With the support of family friend, pianist Melvin Peters, “who was doing just that”, Gonsalves auditioned for the Diploma in Jazz at the then-UND. 

“I walked through a door that Melvin had opened,” he says.

All Gonsalves’ recollections are peppered with tributes like this to those who’ve helped him build his musical identity: to Centre for Jazz and Popular Music studies founder, Darius Brubeck; to pianist Bheki Mseleku; to fellow students and band-mates, trumpeter Feya Faku and bassist Lex Futshane.

Sandile Shange. Pic: Rafs Mayet

“I’ve been thinking recently,” says Gonsalves, “that my seminal music influence is the late, great guitarist Sandile Shange.( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9RVSpAyZnY ) I played a lot with him when I was a student. I remember playing My Favourite Things: he had an arrangement; I was reading the chart from the Real Book.  He showed me the chords he was playing, and explained why he had changed them – it was for the emotion he was going for. I’d never had music explained this way before, and I can’t remember if I knew we were allowed to do this, but I see the connection in my practice. Sandile was also a great composer . All the sass and elegance of the township poured out of everything he did, but so much musical sophistication too. It’s what I aspire to.”

That open, practical approach is how Gonsalves aims to teach, too: “I prefer to operate in the classroom as a musician who’s interacting with younger musicians…In this way I find myself to be constantly learning and appreciating new perspectives.”

It’s in collaboration with two of his former students, Nanja and Giandhari, that he has created Blessings and Blues, a collection of originals that he says, address directly the question of “realizing a musical world that’s more directly rooted in a South African music aesthetic.” For a long time he says he’s been moving gradually further away from simply “adding conventional jazz practice to South African standards… (…towards giving…) more space to hear and phrase the melody in a way that felt more rooted, and with a cadence that was of home.”

We hear that simplicity very directly on the second track The Musician’s Wedding (inspired by a real one: that of Bongani Sokhela) right from the opening thoughtful, melodic hook. That number also reflects the important role Nandja plays. Gonsalves says he’s begun writing independent parts for the bassist, so he can set up “another conversation in the bass and tenor range.”

In any case, his composition process often starts, he says, with melodies followed by bass lines. “I record and document everything on my phone. Besides serving as short-term memory, it’s a useful way to chart the compositional process  and can provide fascinating insight…especially over a longer period of time.”

From this, in collaboration with bass and drums, Gonsalves builds what he calls “a system of interlocking parts, typical of African music”.

Ildo Nandja

The pianist values what his rhythm partners bring to the enterprise. Nandja’s earlier background in traditional music, he says, “brings him additional resources in terms of how he opens things up (…) I don’t need or want him to be the kind of bass player that is content to lay things down and be the foundation. These groove-oriented tunes can make for quite rigid structures, and we’re all seeking to find our freedom within this.” As for Giandhari, Gonsalves characterises him as “a painter at the kit [who] plays with colour and texture and breaks things up …a wonderfully orchestral player who provides the full dynamic range.” The compositional sensibility of bassist and drummer, he says, helps create “a very conversational and negotiated music-making experience.

For a listener, that all comes together beautifully on the track African Time, where complex patterns underpin what starts as a catchy melody, then dissolves into a much more unchained exploration that nevertheless keeps returning to its invocation of drums and the patterns of the dance.

The album offers much more than this: lots of syncopated, leaping rhythms; some sonorous churchy-feeling organ voicings in the title track; some really catchy tunes ( Let’s Do It Again stays in the memory); the Latin café feel of Southern Migration; as well as a few different, lighter and more lyrical excursions, including the gentle closer, Quantani , which, says Gonsalves, was one of two tracks not initially conceived around a bass line. (In mood, that track is reminiscent of the feel of Paul Hanmer’s Water and Lights album)

Riley Giandhari

But it’s the overall atmosphere of Blessings and Blues that is most engaging: the intimate interchanges between three musicians shaping and reshaping sonic spaces in process as they play. It also serves as an excellent introduction to the work of Nandja and Giandhari if you don’t know them already. (Both have albums of their own out: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/riley-g/1491501267; and https://music.apple.com/za/album/paz-a-todos/1084226658 )

It seems, as he discusses his music, as if Gonsalves’ musical journey has been one long Southern sonic migration.

He’s freely confessed (https://ukvibe.org/archive/interviews/2021-interviews/neil-gonsalves/ ) to being initially foxed by the rhythms of Futshane’s Xhosa-inflected compositions back when he was a student, and having his ears challenged and transformed working with Clegg, Mhlongo and Brice Wassy. Those experiences led to his “hearing jazz differently: hearing ingoma as swing and maskandi music as the blues,” and that sensibility is what he brings to this outing.

“I was wondering the other day,” he reflects, “if the natural progression is to become a mbaqanga musician?” After Blessings and Blues, the answer feels increasingly like, why not? 

International Jazz Month: let’s welcome back onstage – Feya Faku

April is International Jazz Month, culminating on April 30 in the International Jazz Day initiated ten years ago by Herbie Hancock and adopted by UNESCO.

On March 4 this year Feya Faku played a live streamed set with Plurism in Switzerland; this picture shows a previous NAF gig with the same outfit

2020 was supposed to be South Africa’s time to host the event, but Covid halted that. However, you can still watch last year’s IJD discussion forum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJpZzHhAjao – now doubly poignant, because of the participation of the late Sibongile Khumalo.

The 2021 calendar of events https://jazzday.com/events/ is still going to be pandemic-constrained, but a significant number of events will now be virtual, giving those with internet access and funds for data the opportunity to participate in a genuinely international day – given time zone variations, it should be possible to programme a solid 24-hours of round-the-world jazz watching.

But that opportunity is not available to all South Africans. Close to half are still not connected; more than half don’t have spare cash for the data required for private viewing of a stream; many can’t access a reliable electricity supply – and that’s before any potential load-shedding.

If, as seems likely, we emerge into a post-Covid world where many activities and processes have migrated permanently to virtual platforms, then closing the South African digital (and electricity) divide must become a people’s demand, and not merely a tech preoccupation. If not, whole worlds of opportunity – cultural, economic, academic, health-related and more – will increasingly become even more inaccessible to multitudes of South Africans.

And if that demand is not granted, peoples’ initiatives need to develop self-reliant work-arounds. There are South African events already on the IJD site – but where are the safer, open-air or well ventilated large venues offering free public screenings so more people can access them without cost?

After the much mourned death of Chick Corea in February, there are already multiple events on the IJD calendar featuring piano tributes, including one from South African pianist Avzal Ismail and Time Zone.

But one of the most welcome South African IJD events will be taking place far from home, at the Birds Eye Club in Switzerland https://birdseye.ch/ where the day will  be celebrated with a concert led by South African hornman Feya Faku.

For those of you who don’t know, Faku was laid low by serious illness for a significant part of 2020. His work to recover his health was hard, determined and courageous. And successful: by March, he was able to travel to Switzerland to play with one of his regular collaborations, Plurism, with reedman Ganesh Geimeyer, drummer Dominic Eggli and bassist Raffaele Bossard.   

You can catch the band’s March 4 Basel live stream here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8HcR7NWJ4 . It’s truly joyous – in a year dominated so far by sad jazz news – to hear again that intelligent, soulful horn voice. The Plurism gig offers nearly an hour of intense, contemplative work together. Beautiful music, and a welcome return for one of the powerful creative forces who have shaped the sound of today’s South African jazz. Despite all the snags, it provides a genuine reason to celebrate International Jazz Month.