SAMAs and Mzantsis: today’s awards; tomorrow’s heritage

Mandisi Dyantyis

What an award-filled weekend it’s been! The first thing to say is congratulations to all the weekend’s jazz and jazz-adjacent winners!! Musicians know, better than we do, that external rankings and “winners” have very little to do with real (collective, not individualistic) creative music-making. Difference in relation to judges’ tastes, not “better” or “worse”, governs who finally scores the lump of Perspex. In terms of creativity and beautiful music, everybody on those lists is a winner – and so are many who weren’t. Still, that kind of recognition is useful for promotion and marketing.

However, what the awards did demonstrate, yet again, is the absurdity of their genre categories.

Msaki

Neither Msaki nor her music (SAMA Best Female Artist/ Best Adult Contemporary) are any less “African” than Mandisi Dyantyis and his music (SAMA Best African Adult Contemporary). It’s great there were two awards, because it meant both could win, but, really…WTF? Likewise, how on earth was the line drawn at the Mzantsi Jazz Awards between Sibusiso Mash Mashiloane (Best Contemporary Jazz Album) and Malcolm Jiyane (Best Traditional Jazz Album)? Again, both are worthy winners, but you could make equally strong arguments for swapping their titles around, and fearless avant-gardist Jiyane’s perplexity at getting a “traditional” award was palpable during his acceptance speech.

And that, as Heritage Month begins, opens another very interesting debate. What exactly do we mean by words like “tradition” and “heritage”?

The ANC’s 2022 pre-conference discussion document on arts, culture and heritage (https://www.politicsweb.co.za/documents/anc-npc-discussion-document-on-arts-culture-and-he) is a good place to start. It’s an interesting document in that, for the first time, it admits to major errors in the ruling party’s (and hence the government’s) approach: arts were so unimportant they were horse-traded during the transition and remain undervalued and underfunded; the cultural contribution of non-ANC liberation movements is ignored; and – since the ministry merger – sport gets all the props.

That’s the document’s progressive side. Less so is its continued hardline instrumentalism (the value of the arts lies only in what they can be used for, including shoring up “the credibility of the ANC as a leader of society”) and its focus on physical objects and sites rather than on the processes of making and participating in the arts.

That last is where these ideas intersect with our questions about tradition and heritage, because they build directly on the longtime official definition of heritage as “valued property such as historic buildings, artwork, books and manuscripts and other artefacts that have been passed down from previous generations.”

But heritage is not just about the past. It’s not fixed and unchanging. It’s not just a commodity to be viewed in museums or turned into replicas for tourists to buy. It doesn’t just happen in and around specialist cultural production and preservation sites. And it’s certainly not something that only exists when it’s officially labelled (with its representatives officially chosen) or – worse – officially generated.

Meadowlands: new removals; new meanings

Heritage is the product of ongoing human processes that did not stop yesterday but are still happening today, all around us. It is communities, not government ministries, that determine what is cherished, preserved – and changed. In a continuous dialogue between the past and the present, heritage is constantly made and re-made. Changing communities, changing practices and attitudes, changing place and technology all go into the discourse.  

Jazz is a perfect example.

South Africa’s jazz heritage has deep historic roots, in the Southern African community musics that were made in pre-jazz eras, and in the mixing and mingling of all the mine camps and hostels and “native” yards, where the country’s first modern musical fusions were born. It was a music of resistance because it was a music of mixing and mingling, Pan-African and assertively innovative against apartheid’s rigid definitional boxes, constantly changing – resistance was in its nature, not just (sometimes) its lyrics.  

That heritage has survived because communities took it to their hearts; danced and sang to it and sat around tables plotting to it. But when, in the 1950s, people sang “Meadowlands…Ons dak nie; ons phola hier” they were singing about those removals, with the idiomatic musical inflections of that era.

Today, singers still sing Meadowlands. Their musical interpretations take on board and transform all the musics heard and made between then and now. And the evictions they invoke? Well… take your pick: the informal settlements around the Marikana mine? The eKhenana community and farm of Abahlali base Mjondolo? The inner-city Joburg buildings cleared to make way for Maboneng?

It’s still heritage, but it’s saying new things for new times too. If you stop that happening by defining its nature, name and function rigidly from the top, you stifle it. Butterflies are most beautiful flying free, not chloroformed and pinned to cardboard with an official label beneath.

Malcolm Jiyane

That’s why it doesn’t really matter whether the jazz of Sibu Mashiloane is “contemporary” or that of Malcolm Jiyane “traditional.” Both are simultaneously both. They make heritage for tomorrow by the conversations with yesterday their new music creates today.

If you want to think more about these issues, log in on Friday morning September 2 at 11am to http://www.facebook.com/UJArtsCulture or http://www.facebook.com/centreforcreativearts where I’ll be part of a multigenerational conversation about “Jazz as Heritage” followed by a streamed concert from Abbey Cindi and his United States of Africa – a veteran musician who’s as cutting-edge as they come.

Crossing Bar Lines : redrawing the jazz map

There’s much solid writing about jazz but still not enough that’s brilliant.

Nobody can argue we don’t need accurate biography and history– especially in South Africa, where apartheid tried (but failed) to scrub out Black cultural and intellectual history with hard bristles and Jik. But where’s the work that challenges us to re-hear certain music in a new way?

For oldsters like me, the books that first did that were Amiri Baraka’s Blues People ( https://www.amazon.com/Blues-People-Negro-Music-America/dp/068818474X ) and Black Music (https://www.amazon.com/Black-Music-AkashiClassics-Renegade-Reprint/dp/1933354933 ). Both retain their power, as do Angela Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/37351/blues-legacies-and-black-feminism-by-angela-y-davis/ ), George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself ( https://www.amazon.com/Power-Stronger-Than-Itself-Experimental-ebook/dp/B001ULD564) and Robin D G Kelley’s Freedom Dreams (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206173/freedom-dreams-by-robin-dg-kelley/ ).

That’s a horribly incomplete list – but it provides a few markers towards the landscape in which we can situate James Gordon Williams’ Crossing Bar Lines: the politics and practices of Black musical space (https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Bar-Lines-Politics-Practices/dp/1496832108)

Williams, himself a working pianist as well as a scholar, uses the lens of Black Geographies theory (you’ll find a short account here: https://blackfeminisms.com/black-geographies/ ) to help us hear improvisation not just as an exercise of creative imagination – which it certainly is – but also as cartography. Improvisation challenges the boundaries by which not only musical but political, intellectual, race, class and gender spaces have been demarcated by white hegemony, historically and today. It redraws the maps.

If that sounds like fairly high-flown theory, it is. There’s nothing wrong with that. Theory is made to help us see, understand – and change – the world in new ways: “To improvise is to theorize,” says a section heading.

Useful theory is usually grounded somehow in concrete experience and practice. In Williams’ case, it’s the concrete experience and practice of five musicians: trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire; drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill. Because of that grounding and because his writing clears space for the five to assert what they’re about through their own words. sounds and deeds, the book is rather less abstract than, say, a Geoff Dyer imagining what might be going on in the mind of a Charlie Parker.

“The production of space,” Williams shows, “happens on the storied bandstands in jazz clubs across America, as well as festival stages around the world. It also happens in social movements and collectives (…). Black musical space happens in parks , elite performance institutions, community centers and churches.. [and even]….in rare circumstances, in college music programmes…”

Part of what space offers, of course, is air to breathe. In the aftermath of #Ican’tbreathe, that becomes particularly important. It gets its literal exposition in the opening discussion of Blanchard’s searing Breathless: a tight musicological analysis of breathlessness in melody and harmony, plus space where the trumpeter describes why and how he shaped it: “The space comes, ” says Blanchard, “from needing to take a breath.”

James Gordon Williams

We’re far more aware today than we were in the Blues People era of the mechanisms compressing female and gender-nonconforming spaces and sucking the air out of them. Sadly, Baraka’s gender politics – and particularly his homophobia – were doing their own oxygen extraction even as other of his work opened and illuminated glorious musical space. One of the strengths of Williams’ book is acknowledging the intersectional dynamics. His powerful chapter on Carrington makes explicit the unity between her world-view and her sound-world of improvisation without patriarchy: “wakefulness, inclusiveness and noncompliance…Music breaks barriers, strengthens us and heals old wounds. Music is Social Science.”    

It’s surprising that the lens of Black geographies has so far found so little purchase in writing about South African jazz. Apartheid did not merely hide racism behind a liberal mask of ‘transparent’ space. It espoused and proudly declared an explicit discourse of spatial oppression, whose barbed-wire borders and barred gates still bleed through today’s “liberated” map. Think how many jazz songs, from Meadowlands and Armitage Road to Linda Sikhakhane’s very recent uNongoma, allude to place. We hear some of what they say – but what is packed in there that we’re still not hearing? Williams’ approach, combining close score analysis with the makers’ lives and words, could surely open up South African jazz geographies further? (If you’re working in that space, please send a comment!)

Crossing Bar Lines…is too rich in insights, both theoretical and lived, to summarize in a short review. It is a wonderfully hopeful book, not by invoking unproblematic rainbow victories, but by demonstrating how, in a highly problematic, fractured and sometimes pessimistic struggle, music gives us instruments (sorry!) to clear the way forward.

It’s impossible to read the book and not go back to the work it discusses with clean ears, noticing new things. I reviewed Breathless in 2020 https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/from-mali-to-minneapolis-a-jazz-history-of-i-cant-breathe/ but different elements come to the sonic foreground – for example, what Williams calls the “mixed-gender exhalation” in arrangements – when I listen now, after reading. That’s what I mean by brilliant music writing.

A PLAYLIST FOR THE BOOK CHAPTERS

RIP Christian Syren, 1958-2022 – musicians make music; organisers make it happen

Note: Edited 17/08 with fresh information supplied by Steven Gordon – thanks! Although he had been seriously ill for more than a year, it still came as a shock to hear that music organiser supreme, Christian Syren, a director of Making Music Productions, had died on August 8, aged only 64.

Christian Syren 3 June 1958-8 August 2022

We often forget the key role played by music organisers offstage and backstage, but Syren’s life illustrates vividly why they are so important. Like all good managers, he started his career as a player, but in 1986 he opened the Jazz Den club in Cape Town’s Woodstock. In 1987, Steven Gordon opened The Base at 88 Shortmarket Street, and shortly thereafter the Jazz Den relocated to the same address to become The Base&JazzDen. Negotiating the oppressive gathering restrictions of apartheid’s various States of Emergency there was perilous enough, but Syren and Gordon were also responsible for an even tougher task: making sure that music happened at a whole range of struggle rallies. The artists were more than willing, but music at a rally also needs functioning sound gear and some kind of workable stage space. That, time and time again and against all kinds of logistical and state-sponsored roadblocks, was the backstage role that Syren and Gordon fulfilled. Without it, those stirring performances by the likes of Robbie Jansen and Basil Coetzee – still vivid in the memories of those who were there – could not have happened.

The Jazz Den survived until 1990, and around a year later Syren, Gordon and Christopher de Vries established Making Music Productions, motivated in a very similar way by the mission that great music has to be heard, and that demands skilled, hard, but often invisible work in management and production.

Over the years since then, Syren had been involved with the management of a stellar roster of South and pan-African artists: Salif Keita (for more than 20 years), the late Jansen and Winston Mankunku, Thandiswa Mazwai, Jimmy Dludlu and more. He sat on advisory boards, spoke at music forums across the continent and, from 2014, was part of the Afrima Awards judging panel.

As an Afrima judge, 2014

For those of us who write about music, Syren was a reliable, totally professional friend and ally in setting up interviews in conducive settings – and a tough but always polite adversary if he thought the media were pestering or obstructing arrangements for a smooth show. He won respect in both those roles: you knew if Chris said ‘no’, he had good reasons related to putting the musician and their music first. His clever, sardonic wit emerged in off-the record conversations about the various sharks, vampires and wolves who circle music – some of them not a million miles from government. But I never heard him undermine a musician – not even those personalities with a reputation for being ‘difficult’. For him, the beauty and magic they created in performance was worth everything that had to go into making sure it happened.

The loss of Syren and his expertise are a loss for the whole music ecosystem. If you were backstage, you saw what he contributed to a show; if you were in the audience, you’ll simply remember the great experiences that resulted. His passing is an occasion to remember, and give respect to, everybody still working in similar organisational and management roles, including Making Music itself, which stands as a living, proactive testament to what he aimed for.

But most of all, his passing is the loss of a human being who lived a riff on the old Rainbow motto: ‘music for the struggle and the struggle for music’ – not only during the capital ‘S’ Struggle era, but ever since too. Hamba Kahle.

On Kaya-FM on Sunday 14 August at 7pm, Nicky B’s World Show will be in tribute to Christian Syren’s memory and work. Listen if you can.  

Four for the Blue Notes: Ogun reissues you must hear

They started appearing in March, and the last one dropped in late June. But it’s still not too late to celebrate the fresh availability on CD of historic Blue Notes recordings from Ogun Records (https://bluenotessouthafrica.bandcamp.com/album/legacy-live-in-south-afrika-1964) The albums are the Durban-recorded Blue Notes Legacy (1964); the Blue Notes in Concert, recorded live at London’s 100 Club in 1977; Blue Notes for Mongezi, a two-and-a-half-hour wordless mourning jam (1975); and Blue Notes for Johnny (1987).

Material from all these sessions was previously available on LP back in the day, and then as part of a 2008 box-set. The new CD re-issues have, where needed, been remastered to include previously edited material and alternate takes.

They’re a feast for the ears, a precious archive, and a brilliant antidote to the (sometimes vague) nostalgia that remembers time in Europe and those other, big, cosmopolitan McGregor ensembles, but forgets just how rooted in South Africa – and how tough, tight and just heart-stoppingly beautiful – the original Blue Note small group was.

Alluding to the music of Legacy in an account of a 2019 photographic exhibition of Blue Notes images she co-curated, music scholar Lindelwa Dalamba notes the dangerously seductive “process of canonisation that sanitises the complex story of the Blue Notes. After all, exile did not rupture a smooth narrative that, Whiggishly, was tending toward some apotheosis of South African jazz. Its effects were far more drastic”. (https://www.newframe.com/the-lost-photos-of-the-blue-notes/ )

These albums are a sonic testament to drastic rupture. There were six Blue Notes playing on Legacy: pianist Chris McGregor, reedmen Dudu Pukwana and Nikele Moyake, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo. In Concert and Blue Notes for Mongezi  feature four: Moyake and Feza were dead. Blue Notes for Johnny is a trio tribute for the passing of the bassist. Three years later, McGregor and Pukwana would also leave the stage. Only Moholo-Moholo is still with us, and you’d never know just how precious his presence in Cape Town is from the lack of attention he gets in media and the lack of care from official cultural circles. But he describes the rupture best: “Exile is a fucker.”

Because of that exhibition, the music on Legacy has received slightly more coverage here than the other albums. The playlist offers a run-down of the kinds of music the group had been writing and playing before they took off for the Juan-les-Pins festival in France, including American standards like I Cover the Waterfront. Pukwana, not McGregor, is the main composer; you’ll hear his classic ballad B My Dear expressed, even in his mid-20s, with the mature warmth of a much older player. Everybody was so young here: the audacious inventiveness of Feza’s trumpet was coming from a 19-year-old. And this is one of the few recordings where we can hear Moyake stretching out as a jazzman – a poignant reminder of the lyricism that was lost when he died.

Pukwana also composed the big, bluesy jam, Dorkay House (is it the only extant work paying homage to Joburg’s legendary music place?), where Moholo-Moholo comes into his own as the crisp, classic big-band drummer he started out as.

Eleven years on, and Feza has died, untreated for viral pneumonia, in a cold psychiatric hospital ward, in a bitter London midwinter. Blue Notes for Mongezi is his remaining bandmates’ response to that: nearly two-and-a-half hours of tribute to a life and its loss laid down in 1975 in a rehearsal room and never released in full until now.

The liners note that “nothing was said during the session save through the music.” That creates an inaccurate impression, because Dyani and Moholo’s vocal interpellations, particularly in the searing Second Movement, draw words deep from their own hearts and from traditional praises and songs of mourning and passage. They aren’t simply sound, however powerful sound is here. Those verbal allusions matter.

The message of the words underlines the common thread in all four releases, particularly when listened to end-on (which is why this blog didn’t appear yesterday). Yes, these were musicians who went on to thrill the world with their music; who played beside, offered leadership to, and integrated seamlessly into contemporary jazz contexts everywhere. But this was music that came from the people and communities of South Africa, and that identity shouts fiercely and proudly from these recordings.

Maybe not all the Brits who sat in the 100 Club on London’s Oxford Street where the 1977 Blue Notes in Concert was cut, realised quite how deep the roots went. I was one of those, and this album captures perfectly the unpredictable excitement of a Blue Notes gig.

You never knew quite what they’d do next, except that in its sonic context it made perfect, powerful, joyous sense  – but at that time my frame of reference for such risk-taking was as much European free music, and sounds from the likes of Archie Shepp. I know better now. Aspects of those scales, patterns and harmonies had been carried from home, not as some fixed, atavistic, officially-defined “heritage”, but as a richly-coloured book of inspirations. I didn’t know then, for example, that the track lizwi/Msenge Mabelelo and radically re-visioned in Pukwana’s solo was a South African classic, composed by (and here correctly credited to) Tete Mbambisa.

And so to 1987, and Blue Notes for Johnny. This is much more formally a tribute concert than Blue Notes for Mongezi, and a journey through the South African jazz (Ntyilo, Ntyilo; Ithi Gqi; Blues for Nick; Funk dem to Erico) that Dyani had played, composed and championed. But it’s no less heartfelt: on Blues for Nick the jagged fragmentation of Pukwana’s solo lets you hear his tears fall – and Dudu did cry, even onstage, when the music moved him. This reissue includes all three alternate takes of Funk dem to Erico: all different. It reflects the switchback from sombre solemnity to the celebration of a life that memorial events embody. And it not only demonstrates how the music of the Blue Notes came from somewhere, but prefigures where it was headed. There’s a moment about four minutes into Ithi Gqi where Pukwana’s barnstorming, rambunctious playing suddenly sounds like a much younger man – sounds, in fact, like Zim Ngqawana picking up that particular sonic spear a decade later.

There are the albums that are enjoyable, and then there are the albums you must hear. Even given punitive exchange rates, you must hear these.