2021: A jazz year of loss and creativity

Thank you, South African musicians!

It was only when I began tallying up the albums released this year that I realised quite how creative a year 2021 had been. Given how grim the year has been in some other respects, that’s a fairly substantial flame of hope. It’s entirely down to the perseverance of musicians and those who work directly to support them, because the big political message to creative workers this year was: you’re on your own.

The parched desert of cultural politics

Let’s get the nasty political landscape out of the way first. Slow, inappropriately structured and sometimes downright dodgy mechanisms of support for lost musical livelihoods characterised 2021 as they had 2020. This year, they were augmented by aggressive victim-blaming on the part of the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, culminating in the disgraceful spectacle of a protesting opera-singer dragged away by police so roughly that her upper garments were torn off. Official attempts to renege on contracted cultural grants were ruled illegal by the courts. Not once in any of this did DSAC say sorry, or even express regret for lost creative initiatives. It became clear that this is not (at least not all) the result of ignorance or ineptitude. Indeed, when high-profile events such as international sport, or something linked to the Mandela name https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2021-12-24-stop-the-auction-of-mandelas-robben-island-cell-key-mthethwa-demands/ are threatened, fast, decisive and very public action is taken. Such calculating, uncaring opportunism from the ruling party is echoed by most of the other parties; only one manifesto during the local government elections so much as mentioned the arts. We are, indeed, on our own.

The South African musicians we lost 

Lawrence Matshiza

Inevitably, this list of jazz musicians and others we have lost is going to be incomplete, especially now that neither national media nor DSAC seem to care about marking our community’s losses consistently. The generation of giants is ageing, and Covid has snatched younger players too. To my shame, I failed to learn of or write about the Gqeberha passing of guitarist Lawrence Matshiza in July at the time; his strings and often his arrangements shaped the sound of some of the most seminal bands of his era https://www.heraldlive.co.za/news/2021-07-21-gqeberha-guitar-legend-lawrence-matshiza-dies-at-60/ Please send a message to Comments if I’ve missed any musician you would like remembered; I’ll gladly add to this brief memorial list:

Trombonist and composer Jonas Gwangwa

Music organiser Mme Violet Gwangwa

Singer and teacher Sibongile Khumalo

Diplomat, poet and cultural organiser Lindiwe Mabuza

Guitarist Lawrence Matshiza

Music organiser Nompumelelo Moholo

Bassist Patrick Mokoka

Pianist, composer and teacher Andre Petersen

Scholar of South African culture Bheki Peterson

Saxophonist and composer Barney Rachabane

Multi-percussionist Mabi Thobejane

Singer Tshepo Tshola

Tsamaya sentle, lala ngoxolo, hamba kahle, rest in peace to all. The soundscape has lost too much by your passing.

Shoots of creativity and change

The second part of 2021, when disease and lockdown eased a little, showed green shoots of new growth. As well as all the new music emerging (see below), we’ve seen new venues, new support mechanisms (eg https://johannesburg.prohelvetia.org/en/jazzfund/ and https://www.concertssa.co.za/our-activities/mobility-fund/ ), new campaigning groups, new labels and new formats – such as the drive-in Joy of Jazz – as those who really care about the music work to bring it back. Streaming online continues to bring in only limited revenue (according to WIPO, that’s the nature of the beast https://www.unionofmusicians.org/un-report ) but it has provoked much thinking, debate and innovation – including across national borders – around forms of collectivity and collaboration (see for example https://www.facebook.com/pg/kinsmen.sa/posts/ ). It has interrogated concepts such as “leadership” in an ensemble in practice as well as theory, and has started laying down an important archive of current music (see, for example, the archive of concerts and conversations building at https://m.facebook.com/House-on-the-Hill-111763854068103/ ).

New (mainly jazz) releases of 2021; thank you for the music

Sorry, this is probably another incomplete list. I depend on you to tell me what’s coming, particularly now so much great music is being laid down outside Joburg where I’m based. It’s alphabetical by artist, and includes some overseas releases and a handful where we can agree to disagree on genre boundaries (but they’re all interesting music). Nevertheless, listen to even a few samples from it and you’ll hear how hard and creatively our South African music community has been working this year. It’s impossible not to be moved by the beauty that has emerged from the dark Covid times we’ve been passing through.

The Beaters Harari (reissue)

BlkJks Abantu/Before Humans

Shane Cooper Happenstance

Ernest Dawkins We Want Our Land Back

Madisi Dyantyis Cwaka

Steve Dyer Revision

Feya Faku Live at the Birds Eye

Feya Faku Impilo

Neil Gonsalves Blessings and Blues

Harari Rufaro/Happiness (reissue)

Abdullah Ibrahim Solotude

Malcolm Jiyane Tree-O Umdali

Dick Khoza Chapita (reissue)

Bakithi Kumalo What You Hear is What You See

Khaya Mahlangu and the Liberation Orchestra Visions

Nduduzo Makhathini The Blues of a Zulu Spirit

Sibu Mashiloane Ihubo Labomdabu

Kippie Moeketsi/Hal Singer Blues Stomping (reissue)

Jesse Mogale Heritage from an African Continent

Gabisile Motuba The Sabbath

McCoy Mrubata Quiet Please

Msaki Platinumb Heart

Bheki Mseleku Beyond the Stars

Kgethi Nkotsi Maswitsi

Gideon Nxumalo Gideon Plays (reissue)

Andre Petersen Quartet Downtown Jazz

Andile Qongco Afro Qeys

Dave Reynolds/Pops Mohamed San Dance (soundtrack)

The Roots Roots (reissue)

Hilton Schilder Hottie Kulture

Kyle Shepherd After the Night the Day Will Surely Come

Ayanda Sikade Umakhulu

Spirits Rejoice African Spaces (reissue)

Cara Stacey The Texture of Silence: As in the Sun So in the Rain

Philip Tabane The Indigenous Afro-Jazz Sounds of…(reissue)

The Brother Moves On Tolika Mtoliki

Herbie Tsoaeli At This Point in Time

Various Artists One Night at the Pelican (Matsuli Music reissue compilation)

Various Artists New Horizons Volume II (compilation)

Various Artists On Our Own Time (compilation)

Various Artists Indaba Is (compilation)

Salim Washington with Alchemy Sound Afrika Love

Andile Yenana and Azania Dreaming One Night at the Market

What’s next?

Billy Monama: the guitar history book’s on its way

I haven’t yet reviewed even all the music above – apologies to all those artists and labels who sent me news late in the year – and new sounds are on the horizon. Already scheduled are a sixth volume from pianist Sibu Mashiloane, a new one from TBMO, a second album from trombonist Malcolm Jiyane and – not a recording but – the avidly-awaited SA guitar history volume from Billy Monama. That’s just a taste of what to expect. This blog will now be taking a break until Jan 9. Thanks to all my readers worldwide for sticking with my musings, ramblings and rants, and wishing you all a much better 2022! If you haven’t yet, please get vaxxed to help make it so.

Hilton Schilder’s Hottie Kulture: new flowers; deep roots

The Hilton Schilder Goema Club was an institution before it was an album: a  recurring, hotly followed, series of live Cape Town gigs where the eponymous pianist and composer and an 8-piece with singer showcased and refined some very interesting arrangements. You can catch the flavour in this sampler from photojournalist Ian Landsberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rYFPlI4N88 .

Up here in Joburg, where no venue that survived Covid had the cash to host a biggish group from out of town, it was just a rumour: “Heard that band Hilton’s working with these days? Very nice!”

Now the album has landed https://music.apple.com/za/artist/the-hilton-schilder-goema-club/1595862955  – and you know what? It really is.

With its wicked double-punning title, playing on both a stereotype and the science of nurturing growth, Hottie Kulture situates itself firmly in identity territory. Schilder has always been a formidable composer, and what this album presents is no less than a jazz suite asserting, exploring – and expanding – the music of Cape Town’s communities of colour.

The territory is mapped in the opening number, Coming Home: a nine-minute tour of sonic styles and symbols. Opening with the solo sound of the Khoisan bow, the track segues into a hymn, which in turn is overtaken by the accelerating rhythms and staccato whistles of the klopse and embroidered with the melodic beauty of Malay choral song, particularly from Muneeb Hermans’ horn. Subsequent numbers return to those elements, as well as visiting the romantic territory of lush night-club songs (Have I ever Let You Down Before?), dances for jazzing feet (the edgy Tangle Foot Tango) and, this being inarguably a jazz album, plenty more damn good tunes that open space for inspired improvising.

Hilton Schilder

One of Schilder’s tricks is to interrupt conventional idioms with elements that are slightly unsettling – an unexpected minor key; a rhythm that breaks with a beat or two of silence; jagged free blowing in the middle of a straight, sweet melody – to keep the listener alert to what the music’s saying, rather than being lulled by a familiar idiom.

There’s also a poignant reminder of who the fathers of this subversive approach to Cape musical conventions were, in a reprise of Schilder’s composition for Robbie Jansen, Grassy Park Requiem  (from Nomad Jez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVoQ8H1Gx70 ). That’s taken straight, with the reeds sensibly not even trying to go where Jansen went (and a moving bone solo from Edwards); nobody could travel those stratospheres, but fresh approaches are just the kind of legacy he’d have wanted.

And that brings us on to thinking about the rest of Schilder’s collective, because this clever juxtaposition of new visions and time-honoured styles couldn’t rest on the shoulders of a composer/pianist alone.

Candice Thornton

Reeds are Mark Fransman, Byron Abrahams and Duncan Johnson; brass, Hermans on trumpet and Brett Edwards on trombone; with Sean Sanby and guest Clayton Pretorius on bass and Carlo Fabe on drums. Vocalist Candice Thornton displays a mature mastery of phrasing and diction. The song lyrics are far more thoughtful than the average soppy ditty and need to be heard clearly, something she achieves without sacrificing warmth or sweetness.

Mostly, these players are the craftsmen of the Cape jazz scene: totally professional, impeccably reliable, competent in any genre, respected teachers, but not (apart perhaps from Fransman) touring much in their own right, and thus not widely known outside the Mother City. This album gives them space to announce and celebrate who they are to a much wider audience.

Carlo Fabe

All of the solos made me want to hear more of their authors. For me, the revelation was veteran Fabe, who, when playing “support” (which is how I’ve mostly heard him before), takes that role seriously and doesn’t intrude bombastic beats. In the less constrained arena of Hottie Kulture he’s just magic. If anybody thought the goema beat was limited or limiting, listen to his dazzling, fast embroidery with the sticks on Tarata, or his intricately textured solo on Fire.

As for Schilder himself, he gives the band ample space. I’d perhaps have liked a few more piano solos from him, but this album is about the community of musicians, not a “leader”. We need to wait until the scenic, contemplative Duiwepiek 1 to hear his keys come to the front for any length of time, alongside an equally lyrical Sanby, whose bass intro sets the tune’s mood.

“Cape Jazz” is too often a reductive marketing label. Hottie Kulture gives a cheerful middle finger to external assumptions about what the style is and what it isn’t. The album never denies the energies of those stylistic roots, from klopse march to club-dancefloor love song, but constantly and powerfully transforms them.

Red-hot and rhythmic: Ayanda Sikade’s Umakhulu

When you usually sit at the back of the stage beating skins, an album may be your only chance to demonstrate all the other things you can do. 

So when drummer Ayanda Sikade’s debut, Movements, appeared in 2018, it surprised everybody with not only superb stick-craft – that was no surprise – but also a striking and unexpected flair for composition. The tunes were just gorgeous: memorable, emotionally rich, and invoking an encyclopedic jazz lexicon in their references.

Now, three years later, Sikade’s second release as leader, Umakhulu https://afrosynth.bandcamp.com/album/umakhulu consolidates that composer’s mantle. But make no mistake, these are also, emphatically, a drummer’s tunes.

Mdantsane-born Sikade’s professional story is well known: jamming with the Vuka Jazz band at only eight; National Jazz Festival band alumnus; UND jazz programme graduate; Samro Overseas Scholarship winner; and rhythm man of choice for, among many others, the late Zim Ngqawana.

Sikade has long maintained one of his dynamic partnerships from those days, with pianist Nduduzo Makhathini, still present in the Umakhulu quartet, and creating some powerful conversations with the drummer, notably on the number Enkumbeni.  The quartet is completed by bassist Nhlanhla Radebe and reedman Simon Manana. 

The nine tracks are bookended and split by tradition: the opener, Mdantsane, is an affectionate tribute to the structures of “African Jazz”: straightforward and instantly recognisable. In the middle, the title track expresses praises for Sikade’s grandmother, alluding to highly salted isiXhosa rhythm and vocal traditions with their complex beatwork around a thread of groove. The closer, Gaba, is a lush, Ellingtonian ballroom ballad, with Makhathini doing (and, of course, subverting) the sweet Strayhorn thing.

In between, there’s more risk-taking. The head melodies stay captivating and catchy, but the space for exploration expands. And while sax and piano are front-of-ear, what they do wouldn’t make half so much sense without the way the drums underpin, fill in or make space.

Sikade isn’t a flashy drummer given to crescendi and ten-minute ooh-ya solos. He’s a quiet, precise musician with a light touch on the sticks and an even lighter one with the brushes. He rides his kit easy, not hard. When you hear a cymbal or drum-roll, it’s deliberate punctuation, not listen-to-me volume.

But the filigree fretwork of his strokes is intricate and compelling. Ignore the melodic line of the ballad Izzah (which is pretty hard, but more about Manana later) and you’re dazzled by what’s going on underneath – and even more so on Space Ship, the number that follows.

Umakhulu, then, is far more than a follow-up to Movements. It extends what we know about Sikade’s powerful vision, range and skill and has to be a contender for just about any award going this year.

Simon Manana

The album holds another surprise too: the contribution of 23-year-old reedman Simon Manana (see https://www.jazzitout.com/2020/10/09/simon-manana-has-huge-ambitions/ ). Despite his youth, Tembisa-born Manana is no stranger to stages, having been spotted by the late Johnny Mekoa as well as featuring, among others, in the big bands of Khaya Mahlangu, his mentor. Those roles, though, are rather different from carrying the entire reed role in a quartet. Manana plays with power, invention and maturity. He parallels his much older leader in an ability to call on the jazz legacy in his references. Hear him on Mdantsane without knowing the lineup, and you might think you’re listening to Mankunku. On Gaba, maybe Johnny Hodges – Manana’s tone has a lot of the same warmth as Jeep’s. On Space Ship, the inspiration might be Ngqawana – but the song that emerges is definitively Manana’s own.

A red-hot, tasty jazz album and an introduction to a really interesting new reed voice. What more – sorry Mariah Carey – could anybody want for Xmas?

****

The late Lindiwe Mabuza

Finally, three sad deaths in the past week, two international, and all important for music here as well as there. First, feminist diplomat, poet, scholar, journalist and organiser Lindiwe Mabuza. There have already been extensive obituaries (see, for example, https://www.citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/2937397/poet-and-freedom-fighter-lindiwe-mabuza-passes-away/ ) but it’s worth noting in particular her role on the ANC Cultural Committee in exile in the late 1970s. Among other work, she was instrumental in supporting the first European tour of the Amandla Cultural Ensemble. As Chief Representative in Scandinavia and later the US, she is remembered by many South African musicians for her shrewd advice and warm practical support while they were in exile. She recalled, with characteristic hearty laughter, how the official apartheid SA book stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair hurriedly packed up its stock as Amandla, still in its infancy, marched in, headed for the ANC stand where the book of militant women’s poetry she had edited was being launched. This, she recalled, is what they were singing:

Robbie Shakespeare back in the day

Second, Jamaican bassist supreme, Robbie Shakespeare, the other half of the Sly n’Robbie rhythm duo who taught the world what riddim really meant. Interviewed in 2017 when Rolling Stone elected him one of the world’s best bassists, Shakespeare told the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper: https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/entertainment/20211208/robbie-shakespeare-sly-and-robbie-fame-has-died “We never ever feel like anything we get in life, we must get it. There have been a lot of sleepless nights and ‘eatless’ nights, too. ‘Nuff time we go to bed hungry, so we remember these things and take stock.” Shakespeare played reggae and so much more: disco grooves for Grace Jones, experimental world mash-ups for Bill Laswell, and jazz for Monty Alexander. But to remember him, a reggae classic: the Mighty Diamonds’ 1981 Pass the Kuchie.

Greg Tate

Finally, cultural commentator and scholar Greg Tate. Tate was hailed by many as the “father of hip-hop”, partly because he gave that genre the grounded, upretentious theorization the music deserved. Writing initially for the Village Voice https://www.villagevoice.com/2021/12/13/flying-high-remembering-greg-tate/ and later for multiple publications worldwide he cast a sharp, sometimes warmly romantic – but never romanticising – eye on Black history and culture, politics and all the music he could devour. His vision was heterogeneous and internationalist; he took a great interest in South Africa https://mg.co.za/article/2016-09-01-00-tate-of-the-nation-dissecting-the-ties-that-bind-black-americans-and-south-africans/  and found common ground with writers here, including Bongani Madondo, for whose first essay collection he contributed the foreword. For a full obituary, see: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/greg-tate-obituary/. Tate made music not only with words but with a guitar too, in the outfit Brown Sugar that he co-founded and whose praxis was based on Butch Morris’s conduction system of collective improvisation. Here they are, from a 2012 Freedom Day concert.

Hamba Kahle to three heroes whose passing leaves the world of music poorer.

Gabi Motuba’s Sabbath foregrounds strings to challenge genre

There are so many albums appearing at the moment that it’s almost impossible to keep track. Despite the devastation that Covid and inept government support wreaked on live music, it’s clear that the locked-down months of 2020/21 were a period when intense creativity overflowed offstage. For the musicians able to make it happen, that creativity is now being consolidated in recordings.

Gabisile Motuba on the cover of The Sabbath

In that context, though, music-buying pockets that may also have been lockdown-struck are getting stretched, and those few South African media that still bother to document our original music can’t possibly cover it all in good time.

So it’s possible that – unless you listened to Kaya-FM last month at about 2pm on a Sunday – you aren’t aware that vocalist and composer Gabi Motuba recently released her second project as leader, The Sabbath https://gabimotuba.bandcamp.com/album/the-sabbath-2 .

The five tracks, totalling around 20 minutes, are a showcase for Motuba’s instrumental composing, rather than either her jazz singing or the urgent spoken-word abstractions of her Fanon-inspired collective trio project The Wretched https://www.facebook.com/Gabi-Motuba-206485503347435/videos/the-wretched-is-a-sonic-conceptualtheoretical-project-which-is-an-interpretation/271254357281343/  – although the opening track, The Scream, shares the mood of righteous horror infusing that latter work. The intellectual themes, however, remain constant: reflections on how past events, personal and political, imprison and overdetermine the present.

The compositions are for string quartet, with voice, as on Motuba’s debut Te Fiti, Goddess of Creation https://music.apple.com/za/album/tefiti-goddess-of-creation/1478224078 , adding words, but equally important for enriching the sonic textures created by violinists Stella Mtshali and Tiisetso Mashishi, viola player Daliwonga Tshangela, and contrebassist (no cello here) Thembinkosi Mavimbela.

The Sabbath reminds us – if any reminder was needed – that attempts to stereotype Black music traditions are doomed before they begin. String music belongs to Black South Africans every bit as much as ukupika guitar technique, split-tone singing or famo accordion-playing.

In 2006, when Thandiswa Mazwai used a string quartet behind her searing indictment of a revolution betrayed, Nizalwa Ngobani https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKO-RS47UOo, some listeners were surprised, some even questioning the presence of these ‘bourgie’ instruments.

A young Michael Masote

But King Tha’s instrumental choice was spot-on, fitting neatly into a long tradition that takes in string players from itinerant street fiddlers through pop heroes such as Noise Khanyile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHS_XWgMxsA  to dedicated classical players and teachers such as Dr Khabi Mngoma and Michael and Sheila Masote https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/opinion/how-one-pioneering-man-armed-only-with-a-violin-challenged-apartheid-9570055.

Yet there still aren’t large numbers of South African composers writing for strings – and until very recently very few of them were women. That’s changing, in the academy and even more in the liminal performance spaces where genre boundaries are dissolving. Singer/songwriter Msaki, working with producer Neo Muyanga, has put string arrangements at the emotional core of her most recent album, Platinumb Heart https://open.spotify.com/album/5I1PuwMzFN5Ooh8R5zUncS, woven into protest ballads and riding alongside house and piano.

It’s in those liminal spaces that The Sabbath also belongs. It effectively employs the composing techniques of contemporary concert music, as, for example, in the sprightly cycles of An Exchange Between Wretched Lovers. But you’ll also find timing, phrasing and a way with a lyric, such as on A Call to Sound, that are unmistakably the work of a jazz singer.

Those genre roots are gloriously irrelevant. What we get instead are complex, intriguing music, shifting textures and compressed patterns, punctuated by moments of stark emotion. Not only is this some of the most interesting music I’ve heard this year, it’s also some of the most strikingly beautiful.