It’s always risky to credit a musician as the “inventor” of a style. Music scenes are communities, where multiple professionals share – and talk about – the same concerns, insights and inspirations. But Lee “Scratch” Perry, who died yesterday aged 85, was the man whose remixes put dub out in the public arena and changed the reggae scene forever. Dub discs had the A-side vocals removed for a ‘B’ side enhanced with instruments and effects to create a democratic space over which any DJ could (and can) toast.
His contributions were many. He was a fine performer in his own right. He was also the studio architect of Bob Marley’s roots sound; his Afro-futurist worldview was every bit as self-aware and defiant as Sun Ra’s; his genius with found sounds prefigured the work of younger lions like Scientist and were as intellectually daring as anything on the European avant-garde scene.
But dub sowed the seeds of so much. It was a beautifully subversive move: freeing the minds and words of a whole generation of inspired strugglers. Dub gave the DJs at the heart of London’s Black house party scene, for example, a sonic pulpit to turn A-side love songs into revolutionary exhortations and spiritual explorations (and vice versa). And despite the more seamless sophistication that more advanced technology brought to his work, the track below reminds us where it all started (and, incidentally, what close brethren the Jamaican jazz and reggae scenes were). Sadly, Django won’t return this time. Walk good, Mr Perry.
Some good news. It’s hard to believe that it’s nearly 11 years since Matsuli Music first reissued percussionist and bandleader Dick Khoza’s groundbreaking 1976 Afro-jazz album Chapita. The music was a revelation for a generation of South African jazz lovers too young to know just how innovative the musical tastes of the Soweto Uprising generation had been.
Dick Khoza at the drums (courtesy As-Shams)
Now US label Tooth Factory, re-visiting the As-Shams label’s archive master tapes, is releasing an exclusive vinyl special edition in the States at the end of August (https://www.juno.co.uk/labels/Tooth+Factory+Music/ ), with regular vinyl and digital downloads available from the As-Shams Bandcamp site (https://as-shams.bandcamp.com/ ) from Friday 3 September.
The US edition is ‘special’ in all the usual ways (colour vinyl, special booklet and all that). What makes the whole 2021 project special is the inclusion of the original sleeve notes drafted by Khoza himself.
The anonymous 1976 As-Shams sleeve notes were fairly perfunctory. They lifted a few facts from Khoza’s account, but were mainly written in the vivid, stereotype-reliant, celeb journalism style of the era: “proudly pitch Black, big, barrel-chested and tough-looking…pounding with amazing fierceness anything from congas to bongos”, Khoza is described. Matsuli’s Matt Temple honoured Khoza’s recollections faithfully for his notes on the 2010 reissue, so you won’t find different facts. But for the first time you’ll access Khoza’s own words.
Accounts of Khoza’s influence on the South African jazz scene pop up everywhere: at least half the veterans interviewed for Lars Rassmussen’s 2003 Jazz People of Cape Town (https://www.booktrader.dk/books.html ) for example, allude to him in some capacity. From these accounts we know he was a superb musician, a shrewd organiser and entrepreneur (though some thought him too much of an operator) and a great spotter and encourager of talent in the raw. What we’ve lacked until now is insight into how his musical language and vision were formed.
Khoza’s Malawian parents had settled in South Africa when he was very young. In 1944, he quit school: “I told my parents that ..I was going to try my luck somewhere else. Yet, my intention was to go and study music.” For a Black South African without the means for overseas college, that meant studying at the feet of established musicians. By the ‘50s he was working with the Four Yanks in East London https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxd664n6wWiWsEzhh5U38FA , and then with Christopher ‘Columbus’ Ngcukana in Cape Town. From vocals and percussion, he took 14 months to master the drum-kit, while working with bandleader Lucky Malakana. By 1962, he can be heard as part of Eric Nomvete’s Big Five at the Cold Castle Jazz Festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m6mBUZnlsQ. He had met Nomvete during the reedman’s residency at the East London Bamboo Club.
For a time, Khoza had held a day job back in Durban: he served for three years at Point Military Camp (the Natal Command base). The army paid his wages, “but I decided to sleep during working hours” and he spent his nights at a jazz spot by the tram station called Ematremeni, listening to jazz greats like Dalton Khanyile and Alfred Nokwe with Tom Ndaba’s Swingsters Jazz Band. Of course, he was eventually busted out of the force.
With basist Sipho Gumede, whom he had met while organising young musicians’ workshops at the Durban YMCA, Khoza eventually landed in Joburg and into a job stage managing Lucky Michaels’ newly-opened Pelican Jazz Club in Orlando.
But it was the 1974 death of his father and his subsequent return to Malawi to visit the grave that shaped the sound of Chapita.
“It was while in Malawi during the independence ceremony when I learned new sounds. I found out that these were the sounds which were played by groups like Osibisa. They were not playing the real African sound but something similar. I told myself that this was what I needed to change the music scene back in SA. I came back after touring Zambia and Dar-es-Salaam, bringing this sound back to our black brothers and sisters’ ears as I felt this was the only sound to dig.”
Khoza was known to Rashid Vally of As-Shams through Joburg’s jazz circles and had been part of the label’s release, Tete’s Big Sound. And Vally was convinced by the drummer’s pitch for an album revisiting African musical roots. As-Shams didn’t use Khoza’s full sleeve notes, but they did accept his decision about the album cover image: a migrant worker wearing a blanket. And the title track’s lyrics, in Chichewa, one of Malawi’s national languages, reflect the pain of a migrant assuring his fellow-countryman encountered on the streets of Joburg that he can tell the family back home “everything’s fine” – when he knows in his heart it isn’t.
Khoza took what the 1976 liners describe as “the Pelican house band” (which he christened The African Peddlars) into the studio for the session. That’s only broadly true. The Pelican house band was always a core of Orlando-based musicians, augmented by whoever else was in town right then. For this session, it also encompassed Cape Town musicians touring with Richard Jon Smith, including old friends like tenor-man Ezra Ngcukana.
Khoza’s notes, in the Courier font of their original typing, tell us so much. Their chronology jumps around. Temple’s 2010 research, realigning them with the confirmed dates of other gigs and sessions, creates more of a temporal straight line. The originals use the memory-links of community and friendship to create a different pattern: an intricate, rich musical network – a much more densely populated scene than we might imagine under apartheid oppression. Who, outside their home towns, knows about the Ematremeni spot and the Bamboo Club today?
Above all, Chapita in Khoza’s account underlines the pan-Africanism of progressive politics in the struggle era, when a song about migrants, led by a South African of migrant heritage, spoken in his own language, could make a hit. Xenophobes, take note: you are not our history.
And by the way, as I said when it reappeared in 2010, it’s pretty powerful music too.
When we talk about the devastation wrought on the music industry by Covid, we think mainly of the loss of live performances, artists and venues. We barely mention composers and songwriters.
But if work isn’t performed, composers suffer too: they don’t earn royalties. The impact is more delayed, because reporting and payout through collection societies take time. That’s made it even harder for songwriters and composers to demonstrate they fit the ridiculously narrow criteria for Covid relief set by DSAC. There’s been no provision for their needs in any funding round, and their organisations have not been included in discussions.
South African composer Michael Blake (l) and Ugandan composer Justinian Tamusuza
Chair of the Music Publishers Association of South Africa (MPASA), David Alexander, has described to me his organisation’s attempts to engage: a letter to DSAC in 2020 which received only a formal acknowledgment; then two email and one in-person follow-ups, which received no response at all. None of that is surprising in our context, but no less depressing for that. MPASA is sending a further letter.
Additionally, the International Confederation of Music Publishers has issued a worldwide appeal to governments, pointing out “the wave of the commercial crisis caused by COVID-19 is only beginning to crash on our sector now… it means the effects will last long into 2022 – late next year will be the (non)payment period for the impossibility of business activity early this year…the music sector is the first hit and will be last to recover from this crisis. Left unsupported in the coming months, the sector faces nothing short of catastrophic harm to jobs, prosperity, trade and culture.”
Getting public sympathy behind the composers’ cause might be harder than for performing artists. In South Africa, we don’t even know who most of our composers are. Even original South African popular music is covered in the media too little; other varieties are covered hardly at all.
But it should be. The landscape is rich and diverse. If you want to know just how rich, try visiting The South African Composer Archivehttps://soundcloud.com/user-368144305 . In this podcast archive, you’ll find all kinds of music creators discussing and demonstrating their music in conversation with composer and violinist Matthijs van Dijk. It includes several of the names I mentioned last week (about whom I’ve had lots of inquiries), and ranges across genres from contemporary concert music to jazz, including Lungiswa Plaatjies and Reza Khota.
Flautist Esther-Marie Pauw
For concert music, keep an eye, too, on the AOI Edition label, the imprint of the Africa Open Institute based at Stellenbosch University. That has just released its second CD, Too Late for the Prayers: two works by Ugandan composer Justinian Tamusuza and two by South African Michael Blake, played by flautist Marietjie Pauw and the vibraphone/marimba Duo Infinite of Cherilee Adams and Dylan Tabisher. The title derives from what Tamusuza said as the recording wrapped up – it reflects a sentiment universal among musicians from every genre about the finality of that last studio take.
South Africans have known composer Blake as the founder of New Music South Africa and the helmsman of multiple composing and performance initiatives at the then-Grahamtown/now Makhanda National Arts Festival and since, including The Bow Project (https://www.cdroots.com/tutl-044.html ). They might know Tamusuza, who teaches at Makerere University, from his composition Ekitundu Ekisooka , released in 1992 on the Kronos Quartet’s internationally successful but not uncontroversial Pieces of Africa (https://music.apple.com/us/album/pieces-of-africa/322027808 ).
Too Late for the Prayers, though, is a very different kind of project. It’s the culmination of working encounters and a relationship developed over a long period of time between the two composers, with Blake’s 2015 solo flute piece Umngogqolo inspired by and responding to Tamusuza’s 1995 OkwanjulaKw’endere (Introduction of the flute): the latter inspired by Kiganda idioms and ceremony; the former by the bow and overtone music of the Eastern Cape.
You can find the two composers discussing their work and collaboration here: http://www.thejournalist.org.za/art/musical-masters-fuse-western-and-traditional-music/. Their album refuses classification. Gorgeously played – Pauw’s flute technique is astounding – it’s certainly not ‘fusion’ in any crude sense of elements from different traditions superimposed on one another or awkwardly glued together. But it does represent composers taking ownership of materials from multiple sources to create something new: “I make Western instruments speak my language,“ Tamusuza says. Blake’s Shoowa Panel translates visual and intellectual inspiration from Congolese raffia weaving, with its subversion of repeated patterns, into sound. Tamusuza’s Naakutendaga Emirembe Gyonna (I will Praise You God Forever) is a celebratory hymn evoking the communal joy of worship.
Duo Infinite
Genre labels really don’t matter. Miles Davis once said (or maybe some other player; quotes like these are hard to track back) “There are only two kinds of music: good – and the other kind…” Too Late for the Prayers is definitely the former.
So with those tuneful marimbas ringing in our ears, let’s hear it for the composers. Without them, performers who don’t write would have nothing to play or sing. And judging from the stony silence MPASA has so far had from government, somebody has to start making noise about their plight.
It’s the Ninth Anniversary of the Marikana Massacre. Surviving families still struggle against poverty, no murderers have been brought to book, and important recommendations of the Farlan Commission languish on the shelves. We still, for example, don’t have a demilitarised police service. So listen to this:
From July 1, Icasa granted the 1997-founded, genre-specific station permission to change its designation to “old skool and R&B”, flighting classical sounds only in the graveyard radio shift between 7pm and 5am as a selector playlist.
The broadcaster, as violinist Waldo Alexander quite correctly observed to MusicinAfricahttps://www.musicinafrica.net/magazine/not-so-hot-classical-music-sa-suffers-another-blow-classic-fm-revamp, was never what it should have been. “They, already from an early stage, opted not to provide a platform for most of what South Africa has to offer, particularly in terms of the enormous amount of culturally diverse contemporary classical music that has been produced over the last century.”
Instead, the station offered a profoundly reactionary, Eurocentric, vision, with “the world’s most beautiful music” (a slogan borrowed from the equivalent UK station) narrowed for most of the time to the products of a few northern European countries during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
In those early days, it was a joy to occasionally – very occasionally – catch a track by Mokale Koapeng, Michael Blake, Kevin Volans or Paul Hanmer. But mostly it was two B’s and an M (Bach, Beethoven and Mozart) on repeat, sometimes played by South African performers and leavened with “light classical” or film score trivia.
Andile Khumalo South African classical composer
Even from Europe, early music and the concert music of the contemporary era got short shrift. Forget any acknowledgment that the rest of Africa (e.g. the court musics of Uganda; the griot music of the West, the oud music of the Arabic-speaking North) and the world (e.g. the Mughal courts) might have nurtured equally beautiful classical traditions.
Over the years, the station didn’t improve, as resource constraints shrank the number of presenters and therefore the taste palettes reflected. So why worry about what feels like an inevitable end?
First, for precisely those reasons. It didn’t have to happen. Instead of sticking to an already tired British formula, a niche music station leveraging the potential of worldwide digital listenership for a distinctive playlist heavy on original African composed content (and certainly with space for African interpretations of the European repertoire) might have stood a chance. You could have called it – oh, I don’t know… how about Fine Music Radio? What? That name’s been taken? Well, how about Something New Out of Africa?
(More conservatively, ClassicFM could have become a choral station for 2/3 of the day. That’s the biggest audience in the country and a demographic that research tells us definitely still listens to the radio. If you did it well – not a buried choral hour once a week, but featuring knowledgeable Black choral stars as presenters, new choral compositions and insider insights – and gave it inspired marketing, you could have scooped the pool without offending your classical listeners’ ears quite so profoundly. But maybe advertisers demanded a format they believe appeals to a more monied demographic?)
Second, because unlike some other places in the world, not everybody here can turn to the web for the classical music they might want (or need – for example for music exams) to hear. Depending on whose statistics you look at, just under or just over half of all South Africans can’t rely on, before we even discuss afford, easy digital access.
Emily Motsieloa (l): legendary classical music teacher
Third, because of the nature of the formatting change. The station’s Lance Rothschild said the decision was based, among other factors, on “looking at where audiences were under-served.” And they came up with Old Skool and R&B? Surely nobody can possibly argue that Gauteng needs yet another variety of Dad Radio? Flip the tuner right now, mid-Sunday morning, and you’ll find it’s almost impossible to escape the kind of music the older members of your family think is still cool. (Thank goodness for Brenda Sisane!)
But one central idea has survived: the mission to “ensure that all South Africans have access to a wide range of high-quality communication services at affordable prices.” Yet the ClassicFM decision has a) reduced the range of available content; b) cut off from certain content South Africans on the wrong side of the digital divide; and c) erased a potential, even if unrealised space for high-quality content for the sake of more boring, middle-of-the-road, largely American, pop commodities. As well as cutting off royalty revenue for performers, composers and music publishers at a time when the industry is bleeding, and eliminating the serendipity possible when some kid, somewhere, just happens to get their ears caught by something different on the radio that they like.
Clare Loveday South African classical composer
An affection for European classical music was part of township life long before Buskaid, despite what many media stories imply. It lived and thrived alongside all the other musics there and created astounding, edgy cross-fertilizations: listen to Für Elise sneaking into this 1974 Batsumi track if you doubt me https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/track/itumeleng. Don Mattera enjoyed opera while he was still a Sophiatown skollie https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/memory-is-the-weapon … Michael Moerane, Mzilikazi Khumalo, Khabi Mngoma, Sibongile Khumalo, Kolwane Mantu, the Khemese Brothers, Volans, Jill Richards, Hanmer, Clare Loveday, Blake, Phillip Miller, Bongani Ndodana-Breen, Neo Muyanga, Koapeng, Cara Stacey, Phelelani Mnomiya, Andile Khumalo… I could fill books with composers and performers past and present-day: more than enough to start programming a unique music platform even before we bring jazz into the mix…(which, of course, I hope we would) And Icasa’s just rubbed out that radio space. Thanks.
It’s Women’s Day today. As usual, reactions to the event are split. One the one hand there’s gushing sentimentality made even more distasteful by commercial pink-washing. On the other, critical voices rightly point out that the day does absolutely nothing to change the real situation of women living under patriarchy.
The Women’s March: behind the names we do know, all hail the thousands we don’t!
But while the latter view is more accurate, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate the day. We celebrate it to mark the heroism of the women who marched to Pretoria to challenge the structurally gendered apartheid regime. The day has nothing to do with pink roses, perfume, motherhood or apple pie. Its message is about the necessity for continued struggle, carrying forward the efforts of the marching women whose names we know – and the thousands whose names we don’t. So: Women’s Day – a luta continua!
Patriarchy, though, isn’t just about men oppressing women. It’s also about men commanding power over other men, and the deference sycophantically offered to a ‘chief’ – in families, organisations, communities and political structures.
Such as, for example, government departments.
Last week, the Department of Sport, Art and Culture went on the offensive, presenting a #FortheRecord virtual “public engagement” in which DSAC Minister Nathi Mthethwa defended https://www.news24.com/citypress/voices/opinion-accounting-for-care-and-support-given-to-creatives-20210806 the department’s record over assistance to the arts and culture community during the pandemic. A slick graphic displayed monies disbursed, accompanied by an attack on those peddling what the minister called a “fictional tale” that the Department has been uncaring and unresponsive.
There’s absolutely no reason to suggest the minister is reluctant to assist his own sector, and I’ll leave it to others to unpick any problems there might be with the figures presented. (see, for example, here: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-08-10-an-artists-response-to-nathi-mthethwas-alternative-facts/ )But the “engagement” was a classic smokescreen: a tactic to divert attention from the things it didn’t discuss.
First, for years – long before Covid – the department has operated on a mistaken business model biased towards formal structures and “jobs”, when the reality of the creative industries landscape is about short-term, project-based “work”. That made it difficult for many – perhaps the majority – of cultural workers to assemble the documentation necessary to even apply for Covid relief. Second, there is much credible testimony from cultural workers that they did experience uncaring and unresponsive treatment from representatives of arts and culture structures when seeking relief. (Didn’t somebody, for example, dismiss the nadir of Covid impact with a statement that SA theatre was “alive and well”?) And, of course, third, there was absolutely no explanation of the inexplicably confused, incompetent, questionable — and according to the courts, probably illegal – PESP disbursement farce at the National Arts Council.
To add insult to injury, the “engagement” prefaced this more than usually flimsy diversion tactic with an accusation that cultural workers are ungrateful: “[I was told] that support provided by the minister and department (…) is warmly embraced. But even so, it should be expected that even by the next day, if not sooner, the same beneficiaries could publicly proclaim victimhood and go on an onslaught against the department and its political heads. At the time, this counsel felt like an unlikely possibility. But as they say, time is a teacher of note.”
So, same old, same old from DSAC, this time with added victim-blaming.
Still, on a day celebrating courage in struggle, we can’t end on such a cynical note. While patriarchal bureaucrats continue to deny everything, those ungrateful cultural workers continue to create exciting, moving, beautiful music.
New Horizons1 might have been a hard act to follow – if the South African jazz scene hadn’t been so rich and creative despite its struggles even to survive. As it is, the compilation has managed to bring together some music that is already known, plus tasters of other work that you might have missed. Some albums were simply pressed in short runs when they first appeared; others, released in 2020, suffered from lockdown and thelack of live launches.
Examples of the better-known include tracks from Sisonke Xonti’s uGaba, the ZAR Jazz Orchestra’s Into Dust/Waltz for Jozi and Afrika Mkhize’s 2015 Rain Dancer. The chosen tracks are all worth hearing again and – as I noted when I reviewed Volume 1 https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2020/10/06/new-horizons-a-starry-compilation/ – hearing them juxtaposed with new company (one of the strengths of Okapi’s ears as producer) makes you listen to them in a new way.
So, hearing Xonti’s track in the company of music from Muhammad Dawjee, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Mthunzi Mvubu and Linda Sikhakhane makes you realise that there is a fresh sax voice emerging in South Africa. It owes a lot to the giants like Mankunku, Khaya Mahlangu, Rachabane and more, and the idiomatic South African reed attack is still audible – but it’s also paying dues to a bigger worldwide tradition, with the modal journey as important as finding the way “home”. You can join similar dots thinking about piano styles, vocal approaches and trumpets (though it’s a pity we don’t hear Ndabo Zulu’s horn, just his composition).
The selection of freshly discovered, or rediscovered tracks is a delight. Drummer Ayanda Sikade’s album as leader, Movements, became scarce as hen’s teeth almost as soon as it arrived in 2019, so did Sikhakhane’s 2017 Two Sides One Mirror. Pianist/vocalist Siphelelo Ndlovu’s Afrikanization suffered from a 2020 lockdown launch, but his magnificent set at Makhanda underlined the quality of his music. Muhammad Dawjee’s Otherness only made it out as single in 2019, but we definitely need to hear the rest of the album soon.
It’s clear from the innovation, originality and lyricism on New Horizons 2 that, if anything, gratitude is owed in the reverse direction. Wouldn’t it be nice if – while they were still alive – the department dropped its passive-aggressive posturing and just said to artists: thank you for the music?
Ninety-six years ago last week (the biographies disagree on whether July 25 or July 27), saxophonist Jeremiah Morolong “Kippie” Moeketsi was born. To mark the occasion, Canadian label Wearebusybodies reissued the long out of print 1977 As-Shams album Blue Stompin’ https://wearebusybodies.bandcamp.com/track/blue-stompin.
Not surprisingly, vinyl has already sold out, though the digital reissue remains available.
The headliners play together – recorded as part of a 1974 US State Department-sponsored jazz tour – only on the first, title, track, supported by Singer’s American rhythm section, Gus Nemeth on bass, Alain Jean-Marie on piano and Oliver Johnson on drums.
The remaining three tracks are a showcase, in various combinations, for As-Shams’ stellar South African jazz stable: Barney Rachabane and Duku Makasi on reeds, Pat Matshikiza and Jabu Nkosi on keys, Sipho Gumede on bass and Gilbert Matthews on drums.
Liner notes were by Drum magazine’s then jazz editor Joe Tholoe; the cover photograph of a pensive Moeketsi cradling his horn inspired artist Thami Mnyele’s later graphic representation of the musician.
This has been the cue for some overseas reviewers to rehash all the tired Moeketsi mythology (see, eg, the London Financial Times at https://www.ft.com/content/03c8a833-ccb9-46f5-b749-ed692e984030 ) about the reedman’s drunken belligerence and years spent in an “alcoholic haze”.
Myths are based on real events. Nobody denies that Moeketsi drank too much. Few of the re-hashers, though, tell the other parts of the story. Moeketsi’s proud and articulate nationalism, his refusal to stay silent about exploitative working conditions, and the fact that the electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), administered as “treatment” when he was with King Kong in London, seriously messed with his mind for years after. (Even with today’s far more sophisticated applications, MIND, the UK mental health charity reports “loss of creativity…difficulty concentrating” as possible long term ECT side effects https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/drugs-and-treatments/electroconvulsive-therapy-ect/side-effects-of-ect/ )
The story of that ECT, in Kippie’s own words (Staffrider, November 1981 https://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sites/default/files/pdf_files/stv4n381.pdf ), and an English doctor’s philistine diagnosis of the stresses felt by a creative Black South African surviving under apartheid, is so heartbreaking it’s hard even to read.
“One day, the doctors took me to a concert…They suspected that I thought too much musically…that my liking of music could have been one of the causes of my sudden illness that made me to be not quite normal” When Kippie was driven, cheering, to his feet by the quality of the playing – no surprise: it was the Oscar Peterson Quartet with Ella Fitzgerald – “The doctor said ‘No, Kippie, I think you’re still not awright’… I was discharged having been given treatment – like electric shock – three times. That thing can make you stupid, man. It makes you become forgetful. Even now, I’m like that, forgetful …But the doctor said it would do me good…I would eventually become insane if I kept on thinking too much about music.”
Kippie Moeketsi (centre) reimagined by MEDU artist Thami Mnyele
Those were among the demons Moeketsi spent subsequent years battling. As Tholoe wrote in the original liner notes:
“[I]nto this story some will read a curve: from Kippie teaching himself music by imitation, to a climax of artistic achievement and renown in this country, and then the decline… Others will read a lifetime of involvement, in spite of personal problems. Count me among the latter. A life-time of involvement: Kippie was among the few who understood bebop while the rest of us were still doing the jitterbug to the sounds of swing. In his way he made us see what it was all about. He has seen a generation of colleagues go to join the Orchestra Up Yonder, or merely leave their horns to spiders and their webs while they got on the straight and narrow path of grandfather-hood and six to six jobs at factories. Kippie continues on the wide, wide – often unappreciated – road, creating music.”
The rest of Blue Stompin’ is a lovely album that adds lustre to the reputations of all the South Africans who contributed. Moeketsi alongside Singer in the ensemble plays sweet, bluesy, but fairly restrained. He had those old-school bandstand manners, those who remember him told me: if you’re welcoming a horn guest to South Africa, you give his music the space.
But the first one minute 20 seconds are like nothing you’ll ever hear again.
They are filled by an unaccompanied fanfare from Moeketsi’s horn. Anguished and impassioned, it tells his story and the stories of all our jazz heroes who resisted oppression. This is who I am, it sings. Listen and you’ll hear it all: apartheid’s attempts to crush the creative Black spirit, the levels of musical attainment he nevertheless achieved, and that British mental hospital’s attempt to torture the music – often the only thing that kept Black artists anywhere near sane under such ugly conditions – out of him. For that gigantic, intelligent, beautiful and moving fuck-you alone, you must hear this album.
sisgwenjazz 