More ‘It wasn’t me’ from DSAC: rounding up news and views from Heritage Month-end

As befits the final week of Heritage Month, the past ten days have been buzzing with arts and music. There have been a flurry of live gigs, including a Covid-safer Joy of Jazz and some worthwhile conferences, including the big Theatre and Dance Alliance(TADA) Stand Together meet and the annual conference of the SA Society for Research in Music (Sasrim). Joburg’s Forge in Braamfontein launched the first https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh7RlYjfe7Q of a series of cultural events supporting political revival.

And then, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, DSAC held a press conference to announce the outcome of its forensic investigation into the PESP debacle.

Involvement in some of the above, and Zoom-watching others, is the reason for the lateness of this week’s blog. My apologies. But at least it gives me a chance to bring some of the stories above up to date.

The Sasrim conference was a sprawling two-and-a-half day event, with three streams of presentations running in parallel. It wasn’t possible to catch everything, but some important issues emerged. From the South African music history sessions that were my specific interest, what consistently reasserted itself was the existence of an important Black cultural intelligentsia whose connections, conversations and debates stretched across boundaries of genre, province and – come the exile period – countries. As the jigsaw-pieces of individual lives are excavated from the archive and from human memory, reconstructed and clicked together, a new ecology of music-making is emerging, sometimes unsettling the stereotypes that broad brushstroke histories have up to now permitted. There are lots of new jazz history books in the making.

George Lewis

The conference keynote address by composer and scholar George Lewis brought classical music face-to-face with the realities of racial exclusion in its own world and the need for decolonisation. That address isn’t online, but you can find an earlier version of its message here: https://www.sounds-now.eu/research/george-lewis-8-steps-to-new-music-decolonization/

The TADA Stand Together meeting wound up with a ringing set of declarations (see a full report at https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-09-27-covid-battered-artists-unite-in-call-for-stronger-ties-with-civil-society-and-the-education-sector/ ) including building bridges with other sectors of society and other struggles by “actively cooperat[ing], collaborat[ing] and build[ing] strategic alliances with broader civil society formations and campaigns that advocate for a better, more humane society; and educat(ing) the arts and culture sector about broader social issues and related advocacy campaigns such as the Basic Income Grant, and to mobilise the sector in support of such campaigns”

“The shortfall was this big…” Teflon Minister speaks

And then, yesterday, it was almost back to the depressing old normal as DSAC reported on its forensic investigation into PESP mis-spending https://www.gov.za/speeches/national-arts-council-nac-forensic-investigation-27-sep-2021-0000 . For the doubters who wondered if the investigation was even real, the very existence of the event was reassuring. Given years of denial and defensiveness by the Department whenever things went wrong, it was heartening to hear Minister Nathi Mthethwa reporting that misconduct had indeed been discovered, and that action will be taken to recoup funds. Maybe things really are moving in that department…

But, baby steps still. The full report has yet to be released, so we have to read between the lines of only a summary statement prepared by those who oversaw the PESP mess in the first place. Just as we were teased by the existence of a “dirty dozen” so-called insurrectionists in July – most of whose names and fates we still do not know – so the National Arts Council PESP investigative report speech teases us with the existence of a “fraudulent five” and no further information.

No regret  or responsibility have been expressed by DSAC itself, despite the fact that the now proven misconduct all happened on their watch. Rather, the statement is wrapped in self-justifying “spin” (as the TADA response, just landed, calls it; find their full statement and TADA’s own report on PESP mismanagement here:) about subsequent payouts and notional jobs created, with a remarkable lack of concrete, specific detail (except that the figure for job opportunities created has fallen by an unexplained 6 000+ from that proudly proclaimed only last month).

There is no discussion of longstanding system, process or organisational failings in the NAC’s parent ministry. There is outright and pompous obfuscation over the court-ruled illegal clawback of promised PESP disbursements, re-imagined as somehow “driven by the commitment to ensure that public funds were going to be disbursed based on principles of fairness, equity and administrative justice”.

It’s all another small step forward, followed by two somewhat more substantial steps back. The Teflon Ministry sings its familiar chorus of “It Wasn’t Me”. If I were Shaggy, I’d be hitting them for royalties.

A new album from Kyle Shepherd, and a new, Covid-safer kind of Joy of Jazz

It’s seven years since the last Kyle Shepherd album I own: his fifth, the 2014 Dream State. It turns out there was a sixth I missed in 2016: for Naxos, the recording of the SWR New Jazz Meeting 2016: Sound Portraits from Contemporary Africa with, among others, guitarist Lionel Louecke https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=JAH-468. Catch-up on that is next on my agenda.

Album cover: After the Night the Day Will Surely Come

Now, a seventh Shepherd release has arrived, on the Matsuli Music label: After the Night, the Day Will Surely Come https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/after-the-night-the-day-will-surely-come . The digital version is already available; vinyl drops on 11 October and, as is becoming the norm, there’s nothing for us CD dinosaurs. 

After the Night is a solo outing, something we haven’t heard since the fragile, incandescent Japan-recorded Into Darkness. It was worth the wait.

A solo piano recital by a South African pianist, in the form of a seamless medley of earlier compositions and new improvisations, will inevitably invoke the facile comparisons to Abdullah Ibrahim that have haunted Shepherd’s career.

If you’re going to be compared to anybody, Abdullah Ibrahim is a very distinguished comparison. And there are intersections and commonalities. Shepherd briefly studied under Ibrahim, who has become a reference point for many Cape Town musicians. So, too have an oceanic, rolling left hand and other elements of the shared Cape soundscape, such as the modal patterns of the Islamic call to prayer. And both men do often opt for similar small-group and solo formats.

Kyle Shepherd

But that’s where it stops. After the Night…, like the previous albums, sounds a highly individual voice and vision that isn’t “like” anybody else currently playing. His invention draws on broad references, including other sounds of the Cape, from lyrical ballads and hymns to club music, the cycles of contemporary concert music, and those of traditional Xhosa multivocality. Percy Mabandu’s sleeve notes rightly foreground the awareness  “of a shared musical inheritance.” Shepherd brings these inspirations together in ways that are sharply current (he’s still only 34) and experimental. In live performances he often includes conversations with visual material (he’s a soundtrack composer too). He liberates the string sounds imprisoned under the piano lid. 

The selection here opens with Shepherd’s For Keith, which takes on a particular poignancy after that pianist’s death a year ago left such a gap. There are several other compositions we’ve heard on earlier albums, including Desert Monk, the Sweet Zim Suite (Shepherd also studied with Ngqawana at the Zimology Institute) and Cry of the Lonely.

In this context, though, they are woven together differently and with new ideas to shape the narrative arc made explicit by the title. Recorded in 2020, the recital leads a listener through the emotional night that followed Jarrett’s passing, into the sickness, isolation and sadness of the Covid times that followed – and towards the light.

The second half of the recital, and particularly its culmination in a re-visioning of Dream State’s Zikr (an allusion to Sufism and immersion in the attributes of the divine) – re-heard through parts of the piano as a kora tune – is spellbinding and compelling. And, yes, genuinely does inspire hope.

The Uhadi Quintet: Badenhorst, Faku, Tsoaeli, Mrubata, Hanmer

Part of that hope for music comes from rising vaccination figures, and increasing ingenuity from organisers in creating safe musical spaces. In a month that in normal conditions would have seen the Joy of Jazz festival, the organisers merit congratulations for devising a new kind of event. From September 24-26 they’re offering car owners (maximum four in a car) live jazz concerts on the Sandton open-air roof parking area.

The concerts reflect exactly the kind of South African jazz diversity and quality that Joy of Jazz ought always to showcase.

Gloria Bosman

On Heritage Day, Friday 24, a double-header presents vocalist Ziza Muftic and her ensemble, followed by a tribute to Sibongile Khumalo from Gloria Bosman with the Uhadi Quintet: McCoy Mrubata, Paul Hanmer, Feya Faku, Herbie Tsoaeli and Justin Badenhorst.

On Saturday 25, veteran guitar maestro Themba Mokoena leads a guitar summit, and saxophonist Steve Dyer presents music from his album Genesis of a Different World with pianist Bokani Dyer, reedman Sisonke Xonti and more. (Dyer has a new album just out, Revision: see this commissioned interview I wrote here https://londonjazznews.com/2021/09/13/steve-dyer-revision/ )

On Saturday September 26, Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz Vuma Levin leads a new performance, The Throwing of the Bones, featuring three pianists: Thandi Ntuli, Mark Fransman and Nduduzo Makathini.

With tickets from R200 per car, this offers far more affordable prices than Joy of Jazz normally sets, for music that is among the best they’ve ever assembled. To maintain Covid-compliant numbers, advance booking is mandatory and you can find details here: http://www.tmusicman.co.za/concert

Heritage Month: no tears from DSAC as institutions crumble – and jabs alone won’t fix it.

September is Heritage Month. You’d think that would mean an increased official focus on preserving important cultural institutions. Instead, over the past few weeks, the historic Liliesleaf Farm Museum in Rivonia has closed its doors https://www.702.co.za/articles/426202/i-had-no-choice-but-to-close-liliesleaf-nicholas-wolpe, followed by the South African Book Development Council, responsible for National Book Week and increasing access to books and reading across the nation (see https://www.sabookcouncil.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/SABDC-ClosureStatement27August2021.pdf).

Liliesleaf Farm: closed

The response from the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture – where it has been visible at all – follows the pattern established by its August “public engagement” on artists’ relief: the Department is blameless; it’s the ungrateful victims who are at fault.

On Lilieslieaf, DSAC took a “dim view” of statements from the Trust, declared there was no reason for the museum to close  https://ewn.co.za/2021/09/02/mthethwa-there-s-no-reason-to-close-liliesleaf-farm and that the department remained committed to the preservation of the country’s centres of history, but that Liliesleaf had failed to account for R8.1M allocated to upgrade the facility. Liliesleaf claims it had to spend the money on just keeping the place going.   

Separately, it is a matter of official record that DSAC made full payment to the SABDC for National Book Week 2020. What’s absent from that record is that the budget had been slashed by 50% and that the payment had arrived in April 2021, seven months late. By this time, said the Council “infrastructure was no longer intact and it was too late to save it.”

It may be that there were difficulties and crossed wires in interactions between DSAC and these two institutions: I wasn’t privy to them and I don’t know.  Difficult interactions over funding are pretty well the norm – but with goodwill on both sides they are usually resolvable and that’s rarely the real issue.

The real issues that emerge from these closures are different.

First, where are the official expressions of regret for, or even understanding of the magnitude of these losses from South Africa’s cultural and heritage landscape? Just once, could a DSAC spokesperson please come out and say “We acknowledge that X, Y and Z have been lost and that it matters – and that whatever has gone wrong, we’ll make plans to repair the damage.”

Second, why does the Department still not understand that funding institutions on the basis of projects such as National Book Week, does nothing to keep the institution itself healthy?

Individual cultural workers inhabit a short-term, project-based landscape. For them, swiftly responsive project funding matters. Yet DSAC’s provisions for Covid relief demanded the kind of formal documentation that only institutions and their fulltime employees can provide and that’s one reason why so many creative workers could not qualify.

National Book Week: not happening again

By contrast, cultural institutions are the hubs for such projects. They must meet long-term infrastructural costs outside and between them. Without consistent, sustained support for those – as the demise of the Book Council illustrates – projects like Book Week that could create work for so many creatives will no longer have a home.

This weak understanding was evident again in the speeches delivered last week during an appeal for fans to get vaccinated so stadiums can reopen https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-09-09-vaccinate-in-order-to-return-to-stadiums-nathi-mthethwa-urges-sports-spectators/. Applause from the arts, culture and heritage sector for this vital initiative may be slightly muted because, as is often the case these days, sport not arts led the “Return to Play” story for the DSAC Minister.

It was left to Deputy President David Mabuza to slip in a kind afterthought for the arts: “If we so desire to return to our stadiums, to our theatres, to our concerts, to our fashion shows, it lies with us to go out and mobilise our people, our communities, to vaccinate. A vaccinated nation is what it will take to again open the stadiums for the popular Soweto Derby we know, our Cape Town Jazz Festival, to go back to Macufe, the Joy of Jazz, the Durban July.”

Except, again, that for the arts doubly-jabbed arms is not all it will take. Alongside that, the institutions making cultural events happen must have survived in a sufficiently healthy state to begin organising again.

The artists who perform at them must not have become de-skilled and demoralised because the desperate search to feed their families has shut them off from practice, writing and professional networking. Those artists must not have sold their instruments and equipment to pay school fees. The live music ecology sustaining artists – which is not at all the intermittent, big-name commercial events Mabuza cited, but rather the modest little gigs in pubs, cafes and halls that can happen all year-round – must not have withered. Such venues themselves must have survived and be able to afford the kind of air-conditioning that can stop indoor concerts becoming superspreaders.  All of that needs concrete plans from DSAC. Where are they?

Deputy President David Mabuza at the Return to Play event

Taking responsibility for your own health and the health of those around you by getting vaccinated is a non-negotiable, and it is laudable in whatever context ministers, including the DSAC Minister, say so. But although it’s necessary, it’s absolutely not sufficient.

So where’s the understanding that arts, culture and heritage are about supporting a whole ecology and not just events, and that infrastructural running costs and not only projects need support? And where are the tears from policy-makers for what, in the short first two weeks of Heritage Month (never mind the past 18 months) we have already lost?

Musical stories travelling on their own clock

“[In order for the others to genuinely collaborate] it probably has to feel like something’s missing…and we’re not used to that…” (How to Make Art in a Pandemic Part 2)

When musicians create, they express themselves through sound, right? Well, not always. Musical creation entails listening as well as blowing, and silences as well as notes. And while that’s true of all music, and perhaps most marked and important during collective improvisation, it’s something the Covid era of physically distanced music-making has brought to the fore.

That was true of trumpeter Marcus Wyatt’s experimental Alone/Together project a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcqMj63_3ZY , when the trumpeter sent out descriptive sonic briefs to jazz players in South Africa and Europe, and turned the results into compelling short pieces. There, production played a key role in selecting and mixing: nobody playing knew exactly who would end up as part of which piece; they were responding solely to the briefs. Decisions about form and combinations were made at the desk.

It’s true of jazz trio Kinsmen’s Afr(indian) Fiction project https://afrindianfiction.com/  with Zimbabwean multi-instrumentalist Othnell Mangoma, which briefly considered and then abandoned the idea of detailed briefs and followed a call and response model, where one musician at each phase sent out an initial thematic idea and the others responded, transforming the call into music with deliberately shared ownership and no decisions on inclusion or exclusion from any kind of “leader”.

It’s equally true of the latest release from Mushroom Half Hour On Our Own Clock https://mushroomhour.bandcamp.com/album/on-our-own-clock, out September 3.

Again, the starting point was a planned 2020 session – with players from South Africa, Dakar and the UK, in London – that then couldn’t happen physically because of pandemic travel restrictions. So, as label boss Andrew Curnow describes it: “musicians in Dakar, London and Joburg all [went] into studio on one day in July and [recorded] some mostly improvised tracks … then we swopped the recordings with each other… and the musicians from London and Joburg went into studio again in August and did improvised responses to the tracks from the other countries …. In the end, it was a difficult project to pull off! The post-production required a lot of work as the music from each country was so different to the music from the other countries…”

So the model of On Our Own Clock sits somewhere between the centrality of producer and brief adopted by Alone/Together and the unmediated collective creation of Afr(indian) Fiction. Musicians who knew something about one another’s work and style, contributed initial ideas, listened to and processed what their peers elsewhere had suggested, and then returned with a response, with producers smoothing the joins of integrating the sessions.  Alongside the music there’s a short video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fX2Ka4Alc4, and for vinyl purchasers, a fanzine with words that speak to the music.

The 14 musicians offer a tantalising range of possibilities. From London, there’s reedman Alabaster dePlume, Danalogue, Lex Blondin,Sons of Kemet tuba-player Theon Cross and djembe master Yahael Camara Onon; from Senegal, the kora of Tarang Cissoko; and in Joburg drummer Asher Gamedze, Damola Olowade, Grandmaster CAP, Blk Jks’ guitarist Mpumelelo Mcata, vocalist Nosisi Ngakane, singer/trombonist Siya Makuzeni, bassist AusTebza Sedumedi and, on various keys including Wulitzer, Zoe Molelekwa.

Composite of the players (courtesy Mushroom Half Hour)

The 11 tracks include three, How to Make Art in a Pandemic, that run the artists’ spoken reflections on that very topic over textured sonic landscapes; parallelling the contents of the fanzine and underlining the dialectical relationship between staying optimistic and staying creative. That’s also one theme of the emceed tracks, Be The Light and (Tell the Gods) We Still Building, where Olowade’s flow in particular sounds out an arresting, surrealist poeticism: “Representing Moors/with everything to lose/Herbalise, verbalise the Blues/incorrigibly breaking all the house rules.”

Despite the geographical distances, the music feels like home for everybody. In particular, it’s precisely the right space for Makuzeni and Sedumedi.

The former often occupies that exciting borderland between jazz and the avant-garde and in this company there’s no need to pin one or the other – or any – label on her. She’s responsible for composing the track most likely to speak directly to jazz fans, Dune Dance, adding a very tasty ‘bone solo too. But she’s also co-composer and voice on the ethereally graceful Revelation, alongside Cissoko’s kora, as well as painting with effects on Ngakane’s compelling Ngikhethile.

As for the latter, South Africa has consistently underrated the experienced and insightful Sedumedi, maybe because she earns some of her bread in pop bands. At one Joy of Jazz festival, she was disgracefully programmed on the ‘newcomers’ stage. Here, she displays how her warm tone and flawless, imaginative pulse can enhance all genres, from rap to dream-like exploration and back to jazz. The theme she composed, Cuts and Pieces lays down a melancholy, gospel-flavoured canvas for other players to paint on. When that compelling bass, trombone and Cross’s tuba (offering rhythm and melody) are heard together, the bottom lines of the music become gorgeously grainy and growly, adding a sometimes unexpected richness to the sound.

It’s a pity the fanzine is only available for vinyl buyers: it’s illuminating about where creative musical voices find themselves right now, foregrounding the commonalities of no work and no pay everywhere. Tseliso Monaheng (also a key player in photographic and video images) provides an overview of the project as lyrical as any of the raps. And at the end,Tabara Korka Ndiaye’s short essay This is not an Article about Senegalese Jazz, captures the liminality and syncretism that are text for the outing and make it move.

In the end, neither genre nor the miles of separation matter, because the musicians “have the ability to travel… between spaces and time when we tell stories.” (How to Make Art in a Pandemic Part 3).  

Another story, cut short far too soon, is told this week in the release of a 2017 session from the Andre Petersen Quartet, originally recorded for the Downtown Jazz TV series. https://andrepetersen.bandcamp.com/album/andre-petersen-quartet-downtown-jazz-sessions?fbclid=IwAR1IcrgZynSbb5ZuUjbvF1-JA2vjl_QHUQwOnkCdQ2MuJicxSxyrJmVGOW8. Also featuring Romy Brauteseth, Sisonke Xonti and Ayanda Sikade, the music displays in full the intelligence and invention we lost when Petersen died. It’s a worthy memorial, and all proceeds will go to the pianist’s family. Buy it for everybody you can think of – not just because it’s a good cause, but because it’s superb music, representing a spirit that cannot die.