Asher Gamedze Two Duets: music, work and playing outside

Next Sunday is Workers Day, so this is a good time to talk about the latest release from drummer Asher Gameze: Two Duets: Outside Work (https://gamedze duos.bandcamp.com ). There are layers on layers of metaphor in the titles of album and tracks – Robbing the Clock, with reedman Xristian Espinoza and Wild Cats Strike with the sax and voice of Alan Bishop – all of them deliberate. As free improvisation, the album is all playing “outside”: outside rigid time signatures and formal compositional structures and rules (although it lacks neither rhythms nor form). And as Gamedze’s sleeve notes make explicit, “Time outside of work has, under racial capitalism, been when oppressed and exploited people have produced their own things: culture, food, music, art, fun, joy, etc…Under the tyranny of capital, the fruits of our labour are not enjoyed by ourselves but by those we work for.”

Asher Gamedze

Forty-four minutes of free improvisation can’t be “reviewed” in the way one might note “Track One is a great tune to get down to; Track Two is a lyrical ballad.” Rather, it’s an exercise in communication.It’s one sound (and the human being producing it) talking to another. Sure, you can hear allusions to more literal sounds: fragments of deconstructed dances and marches; echoes of birdsong and human cries and shouts. But this isn’t programme music .

So what are these conversations between musicians saying, to one another, and to us?

Xristian Espinoza 2nd left in Angel bat Dawid’s band

Because the musicians are drawing on the lexicons of sound they’ve assembled through living and playing, they’re telling us who they are, and who we could be if we escaped the shackles of labour and immersed ourselves in the collective, untramelled expression of our experiences and skills. This isn’t a saxophone “leading” or a rhythm player following. There are no ‘feature solos’, although sometimes one player cedes space to let the other’s voice breathe. The praxis of making this music isn’t individualistic: the changes in direction can come from either player, and either player can insert their own commas, full stops and question marks into the discourse. But to do that in the most complementary way requires highly-developed instrumental skill, won through hard, committed practice. In this context, ‘playing’ and ‘working’ are not, as capitalism makes them, opposites, but two equal parts of being human.

The conversations that result are fascinating. You’ll hear humour, passion, anguish, celebration, mourning and calls to arms. But they demand that you, the listener, stop splitting your attention between the multiple distractions capitalism offers and enforces, and really listen. Work at it – it’s work outside work, and its rewards are priceless.

Alan Bishop

And they remind us, as Workers Day approaches, that music is also work – work chosen and done with pride. Musicians are workers. Next time you whine about a ticket price, think of everything musicians have put into that performance – the years before that you can’t see, the thinking, the rehearsal and instrument costs, the families providing nurture and inspiration – and if you can afford it, pay up. At the same time, recognise that ticket prices exclude workers with low or no incomes. That this should be the only way of supporting music work raises huge questions about the social order we still tolerate. Access to creating and appreciating music has been commodified into a thing to buy and sell. That has to change, too.

Here’s more music for the Workers’ Day weekend. Some is old, some new, and from several places in the world. All of it reflects on work, the lives of workers, and the work of struggle that’s needed to release human creativity.

https://www.facebook.com/abahlalibasemjondolo/videos/the-durban-rally-for-unfreedom-day-2021-began-with-the-internationale-led-by-the/2804766276520635/

Jazz Appreciation Month – where are the blue plaques for our jazz heroes?

Afrika Mkhize: new project in Switzerland

April is Jazz Appreciation Month. You’d think that would prompt an avalanche of media coverage here, in one of the few countries in the world outside America where jazz has a history as a genuinely popular, rather than niche, music, and where a distinctive jazz voice has developed and is still growing. You’d think the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture would be at least saying (if not actually doing; we can’t expect miracles) something.

Apparently not.

There are, to be sure, plenty of jazz gigs around the country right now, thanks to the birth of a whole new generation of (in many cases, musician-curated) venues, and support from funds such as the ConcertsSA Mobility Fund. But staging or attending gigs is not the only way to appreciate jazz.

I’ve written too often before about the failure of the mainstream media to acknowledge the genre with anything more than intermittent, news-driven stories when a ‘star’ releases a new album. I won’t bother repeating those comments. Jazz in South Africa is far more than those discrete events. It is part of heritage, a site of struggle and, in its praxis, an embodiment of freedom. And it’s damn good music too.

What’s more, it is still being and doing all those things, because heritage isn’t merely a set of signifiers left by the past that only exist today for consumption via monuments, museums and galleries. Heritage is constantly being made and re-made in communities. The making and re-making of jazz music is, right now, one of the most vibrant sites of that creativity.

But when we do get acknowledgments of the music from political leaders and policy-makers, what do they talk about? Usually, the great names of past eras and, from among those, only the names who made it on international stages. If we’re lucky, the work of Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim will be wheeled out for (rightly-deserved) praise. It’s as though those in power who are supposed to know the arts went to musical sleep some time in the late 1980s and haven’t woken up yet.

(Maybe that’s unfair. They woke up briefly for Jerusalema, remaining oblivious to the years of consistent, innovative jazz creativity that was going on before, during and after that one-hit wonder.)

The musicians who worked tirelessly in their communities – for example, a trumpeter like Kleintjie Rubushe, who taught and influenced the hornmen who later travelled, or a guitarist like Almon Memela who shaped a whole segment of subsequent guitar sounds (and whom I wrote about a couple of weeks back) – never get the props. That list could be much longer: Mackay Davashe, Patrick Pasha, Robbie Jansen…Where were their homes, their birthplaces, their sites of work? Some of them, like guitar titan Themba Mokoena, are still with us. What official acknowledgment does he receive?

So here’s one idea. Jazz Appreciation Month might be a good time to institute a series of blue plaques, so that children in those neighbourhoods – not tourists – can grow pride and learn history from the lives of the heroes who grew up just streets away from their parents and grandparents. We apparently have funds for absurd bronze statues of discredited kleptocrats, but not for modest gestures like this.

Blue Note Africa’s first release

In fact, South African Jazz in Jazz Appreciation Month seems to be getting a great many of its props outside the country of its birth. Before I start writing about April’s recent and forthcoming album releases next week, let’s look at a little of what’s happening elsewhere. Through a partnership with the International Music Group Africa (IMG), Blue Note is leveraging the success of Nduduzo Makathini’s debut for them by launching the Blue Note Africa label. Its debut release will be another from Makathini, The Spirit of Ntu ( htttps://www.discovermusic.com/news/nduduzo-makathini-blue-note-spirit-ntu )

Jazz at the Lincoln Centre is hosting a month-end South African jazz mini-festival at Dizzy’s. Artists slated to appear, on consecutive nights, include McCoy Mrubata, Melanie Scholtz and Nonhlanhla Kheswa in a Makeba tribute evening with pianist Aaron Rimbui, Makhathini and Mzansi Jazz Award winner Thembelihle Dunjwana.

Meanwhile, London’s International Live Music Conference, also at month-end, sees another showcase for South African talent, assembled by commercial Cape Town and Netherlands-based promotions outfit Arte Viva.That roster includes Mandla Mlangeni, Sibu Mashiloane, The One Who Sings (Zolani Mahola’s new solo identity), Hope Masike and more.

The One Who Sings: showcasing in London

South African Jazz in Jazz Appreciation Month gets its showcasing support from donor-supported projects like the Mobility Fund, from commercial promoters, and from overseas venues. From DSAC? Not even a press release.

That makes South African jazz no worse treated than any other currently vibrant but struggling South African arts genre that the Department ignores – but, hey, it’s our month, and it’s what this column covers.

Let’s end on a more hopeful note. If your Sunday mornings have felt bleak without Brenda Sisane – I know mine have – look to local radio. On Sunday mornings between 10 and 1300, Ngwako T. Malakalaka hosts the K Jazz Show on KofifiFM 97.2, with an online live stream. To my shame, I only recently discovered it. This morning, the host is talking about yet another exciting South African project overseas: the SA-Swiss Mkhize/Spiess Project with pianist Afrika Mkhize, reedman Simon Spiess, bassist Rafael Bossard and drummer Ayanda Sikade.

The content of that broadcast demonstrates how South African jazz has never been more alive and innovative. Let’s be thankful for that and for all the organisations, here and outside, who hear and support that world-standard work, and try to forget – at least for this holiday weekend – the bureaucratic philistines in government who don’t. Happy Easter!

Mingus, resistance and war

Charles Mingus Jr.

A hundred years ago this month, on 22 April 1922, Charles Mingus Jr, jazz bass player and one of the greatest American composers in any genre, was born. The event is being marked all around the world, and collectors might like to diarise the release in the week following that date of Mingus’s previously unheard (except by those lucky enough to be there)1972 sessions at London’s Ronnie Scott’s Club from Resonance Records ( https://www.ResonanceRecords.com ). The recording was never released because a year after it was made the Columbia label arbitrarily dropped all but one (Miles Davis) of its jazz artists.

If you want to hear how gorgeous Mingus was sounding in London, listen to this recording made for the soundtrack of the British movie All Night Long with Dave Brubeck: Non-sectarian Blues

That title points towards why it might matter to talk about Mingus right now – not only because of the power and beauty of his music, but also because of the politics of resistance that infused it.

Mingus was born in Nogales, Arizona, but moved to the Los Angeles Black suburb of Watts before his first birthday. He was an African-American of very mixed heritage (his maternal grandfather, for example, had migrated from Hong Kong to Mexico) and so, from a very early age, experienced not only the pervasive racism of American white society, but slights from other communities where his appearance implied he might not fit, as well as violent beatings from his father. His first musical instrument was the trombone, but he switched to – and quickly fell in love with – the cello. At home, his mother insisted he focus only on “serious” and religious music. (She also loved Country & Western because of its churchy themes.) But the scanty grounding provided by school music training and the racial exclusivity of the classical music establishment posed barriers to his becoming an orchestral cellist.

He had been composing since his teens, but the gigs that were open to him were mainly in jazz, and he credited bandleader Buddy Colette with suggesting that the transition from cello to contrebass would be relatively easy and open far more performance doors, starting with Colette’s own band. That was where Mingus the “jazzman” began – but he was never limited by that label.

There are biographies of Mingus everywhere online right now, and describing the scale and scope of his recording and composing career could fill at least half a dozen of these columns and still fail to do him justice, despite the fact that just as he was entering early middle age he was diagnosed with the neurological condition ALS, which quite swiftly confined him to a wheelchair and stopped him playing and writing. He died in 1979, at the tragically early age of 57 and composing until almost the end, singing his ideas into a recorder.

He credited his mother and the church meetings he attended with gifting him both belief in god (“there has to be something better,” he told documentarist Studs Terkel) and a highly developed sense of right and wrong. Mingus’s life is often linked in a very literal way to the autobiography he published, Beneath the Underdog. That book, however, is a mix of real memories, fantasy and satire – today, we might almost reclassify it as “magical realism”. It features three Minguses – three different incarnations of its author – and was originally framed when he wrote it as an account of his exploratory conversations with his psychiatrist after a severe bout of depression. But, he told Terkel “They [the publishers] changed the form to make it simpler.” How far highly marketable racist stereotypes about Black jazzmen at that time impacted on “changing the form”, we’ll never know.

Mingus (r) with Max Roach (centre) and Duke Ellington (left) at the recording of the album Money Jungle

What we do know is how he felt about a society that failed to acknowledge original musicianship (Mingus went for years without royalties for his participation in the album Jazz at Massey Hall) and persecuted Black Americans. On stage, he demanded respect for the music, once telling a noisy club audience “[Classical violinist] Isaac Stern doesn’t have to put up with this shit”. But although he had flirted with drugs when younger, he also became increasingly impatient with the emulation of some of his peers for all the wrong reasons, such as the addictions to which despair had driven them. His track Gunslinging Bird was directed at the copycatting of Charlie Parker’s heroin use and originally titled If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There’d be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.

His music mercilessly satirised racists in power (Remember Rockefeller at Attica; Original Faubus Fables) and yearned for peace and Freedom:

And that’s why it’s worth remembering Mingus right now too. One declining empire, Russia, has responded to the provocations of another (America and its minion NATO) by subjecting the people of the Ukraine to the kinds of merciless atrocities and war crimes it recently helped to unleash in Syria, and which the West and its allies have also committed and abetted, most recently in Palestine, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. Russia is no longer the socialist country many South Africans remember with affection as an ally in the anti-apartheid struggle. Vladimir Putin has quite explicitly rejected all traces of that socialist legacy – including Lenin’s insistence that any member nation of the then-Soviet Union should have the right to secede. He is waging an imperialist war against an expansionist West. The people of Ukraine and the children of ordinary Russians in the army are the victims, and theirs, not either of the other two, is the only side any sane person can take. Even if this is a jazz column, it’d be immoral to stay silent, because silence is condonation.

Using his razor-sharp wit, Mingus lashed out at a previous wave of imperialist warmongering in the 1962 composition Oh Lord, Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me. Let’s remember his legacy with respect, and think about new, creative ways to resist the global capitalist system that grows fat on the horrors of its own wars.

Almon Memela’s Funky Africa: a towering career; a scant historical record

Sometimes you don’t hear a name for ages – and then it crops up all over the place. That was the case with the name of guitarist, composer, talent scout and producer Almon Memela. First, guitarist Billy Monama mentioned it when I was interviewing him about his new book Introduction to South African Guitar Styles vol 1 (https://realafricanpublishers.com ) There are names, Monama told me, that are omnipresent on vintage album credits, but with no complete account of their lives or analysis of their style and contribution. That was one of his motivations for writing the book (see https://www.newframe.com/making-black-intellects-central-to-music-teaching) – and Memela was one of those names.

At about the same time as that interview, Memela’s most famous album, Funky Africa, reappeared in a reissue from wearebusybodies. ( https://www.almon.memela.bandcamp.com/album/funky-africa ). The album is out now in digital format, with vinyl shipping from May 6.

And, yes, Monama is right. There’s no one place where you can find a complete account of his life and work and a full discography. With patience, you can put most of that together from a patchwork of sources: the rigid, apartheid, definitional boxes of the late Yvonne Huskisson’s Bantu Composers book; the ever-reliable Electric Jive online archive; the SAMAP archive at UKZN; the Flatinternational album cover archive and the Discogs website. Even from all those, there are only the beginnings of discussion of his voice as a guitarist.

So what do we know? Almon Sandisa Memela was born in Donnybrook in KZN in 1936. He taught himself to play guitar , first on homemade instruments and with no encouragement from his family. He worked for a while at United Tobacco in Durban before signing up in 1956 to work on the mines around Joburg. Two years later, he signed up for guitar lessons at Dorkay House, but was already accomplished enough for Union Artists to ask him if he’d teach instead. He did session work, much of it undocumented but including accompaniment for Miriam Makeba and the Skylarks during the 1950s and time in the original King Kong pit band, and made his first recording, Naziwe with the Travelling Singers, in 1960.

Memela recorded with various formations, including Almon’s Jazz Kings, Almon’s Jazz 8 (from 1963, and marking his switch to a primarily instrumental orientation), the bump-jive band Abafana baMaswazi and the soul outfit AM’s Stragglers. Increasingly, he composed for other performers too – for example, the minor hit Banoyi for Letta Mbulu in 1967. He collaborated with the Drive/Heshoo Beshoo’s Henry and Stanley Sithole and Bunny Luthuli in the late 1970s, with Lemmy Special Mabaso (Phansi Phezulu in 1976 and Speed Trap in 1977) and with Rex Ntuli. Putting together all the sources above, I’ve managed to find 20 or so documented recordings which he led or co-led, and a fair few more where he’s credited as composer. I didn’t even start counting producer credits. And that, apart from the fact that he gradually rose through the music industry ranks to become a talent scout and producer for WEA records, is about all we know. It’s a huge, undoubtedly influential career, about which we know far too little.

Apart from Memela as producer and main composer, there are no instrumentalist credits on the original Funky Africa LP, and consequently equally few on the Canadian reissue. That’s as frustrating as ever, particularly since it seems possible from the sound that some of the Drive musicians may have been involved. In particular, I wonder if Bheki Mseleku is anywhere on keyboards, as one track, Big Mama, is credited as his composition. Mseleku was still, in industry terms, quite a youngster in those days. I wonder if Memela would have known the pianist’s compositions if he wasn’t, in fact around during the session? Some at least of the keyboard voice is not unlike what Mseleku contributed to the Drive’s Way Back 50s in the same period.

Big Mama is one of three tracks out of Funky Africa‘s ten that Memela did not claim as composer. Of the other two, the title track is a big, Soweto Soul-styled version of Donny Hathaway’s The Ghetto and Telephone a tasty, Ghanaian-composed piece of Afrobeat. However the second track, retitled here as That Sweet Feeling, is also not a Memela original although he claims it: it’s a guitar-led version of Todd Matshikiza’s vocal composition Petal’s Song from King Kong. It’s also a moving demonstration of delicate, lyrical guitar-playing, very different from the soul and roots guitar sounds that underpin the rest of the album.

Missing in action: Broken Shoes

The album is a fabulous showcase both for Memela’s skill as a composer, producer and arranger (the insane 90 seconds of one-note guitar at the start of Big Mama are pure genius) and of his flexibility as a stylist. There are sounds that allude to Transatlantic soul (Funky Africa and Bumpin the Wall ) and its Soweto cousin (The Things We Do In Soweto). There’s classic I:IV:V mbaqanga in Hamba Kahle, and a mood-perfect maskandi-style opening to Ntshonalanga. The album is striking, too, for Memela’s use of the flute to herald the Afro-soul musical future and hark back to the penny-whistle past. It’s yet another reminder that the music of Soweto in the 1970s was never one thing, but reflected a cultural community well aware of what was going on in the music world as well as at home, with a diverse lexicon of sonic references.

There’s another legendary Memela album still out there – though I don’t know anybody who has heard it: his 1976 Broken Shoes. Here’s hoping somebody can find a useable copy, if not the master, and give us access to that too. On the showing of Funky Africa, it could be really something.

UPDATE 06 APRIL. AND IT IS! Here’s a link