Heritage Day: Cyril, capitalism and copyright

Solomon Linda (l.) and his Original Evening Birds: Heritage Day hero

The late Solomon Linda and the protracted, massive, worldwide theft of his intellectual property – the song Mbube – was the theme for this year’s Presidential Heritage Day address. In that address yesterday, President Cyril Ramaphosa included many points (https://www.thepresidency.gov.za/newsletters/address-president-cyril-ramaphosa-occasion-heritage-day) that no decent, sane person could disagree with. He declared that xenophobia and gender-based violence find no backing in South African cultural or political traditions, and run counter to the spirit of our laws and institutions. And, for artists, he declared: “Artists must therefore be paid their dues. In honour of Solomon Linda and his legacy, let us ensure that our artists do not suffer in their lifetimes and are not condemned to dying in poverty.”

What he said next, however, was slightly more controversial:

“The new Copyright Amendment Bill passed by the National Assembly at the beginning of this Heritage Month will go a long way in protecting our artists and towards addressing their concerns about the collection and distribution of royalties.”

That Bill, teetering on the edge of becoming an Act, was declared unconstitutional by the ConCourt on the eve of Heritage Day for its failure to provide for the rights of disabled people (https://eelawcentre.org.za/south-africa-constitutional-courts-invalidation-of-copyright-law-an-important-step-in-ensuring-the-rights-of-persons-with-print-disabilities-and-visual-impairments/#:~:text=In%20a%20unanimous%20decision%2C%20the,rights%20of%20persons%20with%20disabilities.). Its invalidity was suspended for 23 months to give Parliament time to put things right. In the meantime, the ConCourt “wrote in” the rights of the visually impaired to existing legislation because of the excessive delays their consideration had suffered (http://infojustice.org/archives/44865 )

Sending the Bill back for Parliamentary repair was greeted with both joy and lamentation, so deeply are role-players divided on it. For some, like this copyright consultant writing in GroundUp ( https://www.groundup.org.za/article/new-bill-will-remedy-many-evils-of-current-copyright-regime/ ) the Bill is a liberatory act of modernisation. For others, like legal expert Owen Dean – who was a ‘Friend of the Court in the Concourt case – it’ll take more than mending disability rights to fix the Bill, so poorly drafted is it. (https://www.news24.com/news24/opinions/columnists/guestcolumn/opinion-owen-dean-constitutional-court-judgment-exposes-defects-in-copyright-amendments-bill-20220924 ). That’s close to the view of the Copyright Coalition of South Africa (and SAMRO) legal mind, Chola Makgamathe, who asserts the legislation needs a significant overhaul to provide adequate protections. (https://mg.co.za/opinion/2022-08-26-south-africa-needs-a-comprehensive-multifaceted-strategy-to-curb-the-economic-impact-of-piracy/ )

So what’s all the fuss about?

Copyright protection of intellectual property has been enshrined in law in many places for a very long time. The US passed its first copyright law in 1790; the Berne Convention (the dominant international framework) was signed in 1886. But increasingly, advances in technology relating to the reproduction and dissemination of “works” have left existing frameworks behind. Especially in recent decades because, you know, digital…

For many people, the big sticking points in this Bill (the exception for the visually impaired is so obviously just and long overdue nobody except Parliament had problems with it) relate to the lack of any prior socio-economic impact study, the participation of major global platforms in advising on it, and in the shift from the legacy concept of “fair dealing”, to what has been misrepresented as the US principle of “fair use. (In fact, 27 countries worldwide now partially or totally employ the “fair use” principle.)

“Fair use” significantly expands the circumstances under which previously copyrighted works can be copied, adapted and/or disseminated, including online, without permission, including by the SA government. This particularly threatens the revenue of the publishers and authors of educational materials.  

The Bill also expands liberty around re-using “orphan (unclaimed) works”. Given the unfair and duplicitous treatment of Black musicians such as Linda by the white-run music industry under apartheid , that should be ringing a few alarm bells too.

Despite the big promises, the Bill is also somewhat stuck in the pre-streaming music landscape. A multiplicity of organisational, and three major, reports in the past year (from the UK House of Commons subcommittee, the UK Intellectual Property Office and the UN World Intellectual Property Organisation) have pointed out the pitiful revenues artists earn from streaming, in contrast to the multiple new sources of profit they provide for the platforms. Platforms have essentially outsourced most of the work from which they profit to music creators. Meanwhile, the platforms profit from platform branding, from the sale of user data, from mining that data to clone their ‘own’ music – and from much more.  

The big international reports point out that this is a systemic problem, requiring systemic solutions that address market concentration. They propose new types of digital royalties in addition to conventional rights payments.

Some commentators go further. One is digital liberation campaigner Corey Doctorow. With intellectual property rights scholar Rebecca Gilbin, Doctorow has just published Chokepoint Capitalism… (https://www.amazon.com/Chokepoint-Capitalism-Content-Captured-Creative/dp/0807007064), a book unpicking why creative labour is such an effective exploiter of writers and musicians and such a glorious revenue machine for capitalism.  New types of royalties alone, the book argues, are not sufficient.

“Giant companies corral an audience, locking them in through “digital rights management” (which locks all the media you buy to a platform controlled by the seller), or by subscription fees, or through exclusive deals with venues or radio stations, or by buying out any company that tries to compete with them, or by starving these upstart competitors by selling at a loss whenever a new company starts up, so they can’t gain purchase.

“These companies know that you need access to the audiences they’ve trapped inside their walled gardens, and they treat you accordingly. They subject you to one-sided contracting terms, locking you in to using their suppliers at inflated rates, forcing you to sign over rights that someone else might buy from you (like audiobook or graphic novel or even TV and film rights), requiring that you accede to funny accounting practices that let them rob you blind, and then, to top it all off, they deprive you of the right to sue them by forcing you to sign a binding arbitration waiver.

“As a creative worker, you need to access those locked-in audiences — you need to stream your music on Spotify and/or YouTube; you need to tour in LiveNation venues and sell your tickets through TicketMaster (TicketMaster and LiveNation are both the same company!); you need airplay on IHeartRadio (which used to be ClearChannel), or you need access to the retail channels controlled by three record labels, or the two cinematic exhibitors who are controlled by four studios, or the four publishers, or the sole independent book distributor…. When you’re passing through these chokepoints, it doesn’t matter how expansive your copyright rights are. You need to get through the chokepoint and the company knows it. Saying, “I won’t sell you my copyright unless you offer me a better deal” won’t get you a better deal —it’ll get you no deal.” (extracted from Doctorow’s blog at https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b885c4cb2719)

Copyright does limit freedom of expression. It’s very necessary though, because creators need to eat.

But there’s a paradox here, because what helps creators eat simultaneously serves capitalism. As one scholarly article explains “the problem for contemporary capitalism is finding ways to capture [the shared intellectual and information flows that feed creative work] and transform them into particular commodities. …contemporary capitalism extracts value by stopping cooperation from taking place. This is done by limiting the remixing of ideas, contents, or images, and introducing artificial boundaries in order to create scarcity.” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304189764_Retweet_This_Participation_Collective_Production_and_New_Paradigms_of_Cultural_Production)

And to solve those problems, we need more than a new Bill, or 23 months for the parliament of one country to tinker with it.

We lost two jazz titans over the past fortnight: Ramsey Lewis and Pharoah Sanders. Find obituaries here (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/12/jazz-artist-ramsey-lewis-death ) and here ( https://www.npr.org/2022/09/24/1124925662/pharoah-sanders-dies-at-81-obituary). And while you are pondering the knotty issues above, remember why we love them. May their great spirits rest in peace and music.

The Ballad of Perilous Graves: hearing the magic of New Orleans

Alex Jennings and his book

Authors often discuss the music that accompanied their writing. Less often, a book comes with a playlist that matters for the plot. But that’s precisely what Alex Jennings has provided to accompany his fantasy novel The Ballad of Perilous Graves (https://www.amazon.com/Ballad-Perilous-Graves-Alex-Jennings/dp/0759557209 )

And what a playlist (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5OZzatd0yr579Dgm0zd6ge?si=d9ddf2f462e04df7&nd=1 ) it is!

It has the New Orleans names everybody knows, of course: Professor Longhair; Dr John; Allen Toussaint; Aaron Neville; and a bunch of marching bands. Its sonic timeline stretches from the historic Satchmo, Willie “The Lion’ Smith and bluesman Champion Jack Dupree, through Nina Simone referencing Bessie Smith (Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer), right up to today’s Trombone Shorty, Dixie Cups and Lil’ Wayne.

But it’s more than that undoubtedly jazz-flavoured playlist that leads me to feature a fantasy book on what’s more usually a jazz blog. Because alongside the eponymous young protagonist, Perry Graves, New Orleans’ music (or rather, particular songs) is a character here.

When, a few weeks back, I reviewed James Gordon Williams’ Crossing Bar Lines  https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2022/08/21/crossing-bar-lines-redrawing-the-jazz-map/  I talked about Williams’ use of Black Geographies theory, redrawing ostensibly neutral (and thus effectively naturalised as white) maps to reclaim them for Black history and present/presence. Black-authored speculative work has employed that lens for a while too.

In a number of books – for example, NK Jemisin’s 2020 The City We Became https://www.newframe.com/book-review-the-city-we-became/  – it comes together with a more widely used fantasy trope: the idea of genii loci: the spirits embodying and sometimes haunting or protecting a place. That’s one, but by no means the only element, Jennings brings to his alternate New Orleans, called Nola, where Perry, his family, his preternaturally strong neighbour and crush Peaches Lavelle and the rest of the characters live.

Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong: a child of New Orleans

Jennings has been clear in interviews about the way childhood reading contributes to the tale. Challenged by his father to create “the Blackest fantasy I could concoct”, he subverts and transmutes stories told elsewhere and colonised for hegemonic whiteness. Peaches, a tall, strong, magical young woman, reclaims those powers – her way – from Swedish 1940s character Pippi Longstocking. Not 20 pages in, and then throughout, the text nods to that classic of American fourth-grade reading, The Phantom Tollbooth and its young hero Milo. There’s even a tiny closing wink towards Harry Potter and Hogwarts.

(If you think such reclamations don’t matter, check the racist morons currently insisting that Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid has to be white, and cannot be portrayed by Halle Berry. A mermaid, for heaven’s sake, is a creature of imagination – she can be anything.)

In Nola, almost everybody seems to have magic, much of it carried through the matriarchal line from ancestors who were Wise Women. Some, like Perry, try to deny their gifts. But the magic of Nola itself – beautifully imagined, with sky-cars instead of trams and haints (ghosts of all kinds) and talking nutria crowding the streets and bars – is embodied in songs: seven of them, to be precise. Somebody is kidnapping the songs and leaching power and vibrancy from the city as the ancient enemy, the Storm, masses to attack.

As is the way in such tales, an unlikely band of heroes – including Perry’s kid sister Brendy, his mother, grandmother and extremely elder relative Daddy Deke; Peaches; reluctant cartoonist Casey and his tagger cousin Jaylon; and various other assorted spirits and people – assembles to find the music and restore Nola’s spirit. Objects of power are sought, found and employed; sacrifices, including of lives, are made. Nola survives, but as in all the best fantasies, it’s an ambiguous, not an unalloyed ‘happy’ ending. With a postmodernist kicker, if you want to read the last line that way.

There’s a clear thematic echo of The Phantom Tollbooth. Where Milo found magic in language and words, Perry finds his in the music. Jennings’ writing voice, however, is a million miles from fourth-grade. Dancing from one to another of his multiple protagonists’ viewpoints, and across time and dimensions, he has a neat eye for description and a profound ear for the cadences of New Orleans speech. His prose sings.

He does, though, take a lot of local knowledge for granted. You may need Doctor Google to help you navigate Nola (I did) and you’ll definitely need that playlist. It’s worth it to reach the sublime moment when the Elysian Horn gets played. What that instrument actually is, what song it sings, and whose hands it is in, will surprise jazz lovers not one bit. Read the book. But if you really can’t handle fantasy – and if you can’t, how on earth do you stay sane in the world of 2022? – at least listen to that playlist.

Here are two tracks I would have added:

Ja-Ki-Mo-Fi-Na-Hay  Donald Harrison with Dr John (saxophonist Harrison leads a New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian crew)

New New Orleans (King Adjuah Stomp) Christian Scott Atunde Adjuah  (the trumpeter is Harrison’s nephew)

Abel Selaocoe, Black strings and red-hot sounds

Improvised string music is hot right now. You’ll know that already, of course, if you caught Gabisile Motuba’s composition The Sabbath live at Makhanda, or the streamed version, still available online ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_0Xpq6PBXI&t=25s ). And it’s likely to become a great deal hotter on September 23, when South African cellist Abel Selaocoe’s debut album as leader – he has previously been heard with other ensembles –Where Is Home (Hae ke Kae)?, (https://www.warnerclassics.com/release/whereishome ) launches.

So far, Manchester-based Selaocoe’s music is making more waves overseas than here, but that’s going to change. Flautist Khanyisile Mthethwa’s 2022 SAMA win for African Songbird suggests interest in instrumental music that challenges genre divisions is growing here.

Selaocoe’s album certainly does that.

Born in Sebokeng’s Zone 7, Selaocoe’s first string education came with Michael Masote’s African Cultural Organisation music classes in Soweto, where his older brother was already a bassoon student. As a boarder at St John’s College, the discipline and precision of the Western classical music taught there drew him. He won a scholarship to Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, from which he graduated with an International Artist Diploma in 2018. Along the way, however, work with artists and ensembles ranging from Famoudou Don Moye and Seckou Keita to various BBC Concert Orchestras (with one of which he curated a 2021 Prom concert) and Chesaba, the group he founded in 2016, broadened that focus.

Selaocoe now plays and composes music that draws from home, the wider African content and contemporary chamber music, as well as composers of the baroque and classical. The 16 tracks of Where Is Home? represent all these, in revisionings of historic works as well as his own compositions.  

“The Baroque music I studied as a young musician,” he says, “and my inherited South African musical culture have more in common that you might expect. … Platti is a wonderful composer I thought would work well in this marriage of Baroque and African music ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmqlahaIC9k ). This cello sonata has a freedom to it, an improvisatory quality that suits my way of playing within my native South African music or in rhythmic music in general. I’ve interpolated improvisations between the four movements of this sonata, featuring the theorbo, an improvising instrument in its native Baroque continuo tradition, and the kora, used for improvised music by the bards of the West African oral history tradition. Together we improvise our way through this wonderful sonata, finding common strands between this African music, Baroque music and the practice of improvisation.”

Selaocoe’s musical roots in Masote’s classroom remind us that – despite the astonishment some Western journalists have expressed at where his musical journey ended up – there’s as long a tradition of classical music as of jazz in South African townships. Today, Masote’s son Kutlwano, the late Sibongile Khumalo’s child, Tshepo Mngoma, the Soweto String Quartet and the Resonance String Quartet represent intergenerational networks that inherited, re-made and mastered multiple repertoires: from Mozart to Moerane to hymns to dance tunes.   

Perhaps that history is even longer – remember, the origins of SA jazz were partly in all-night Concert and Dance performances, which included Shakespearean and classical recitals before the chairs were moved back for the jivers (https://www.amazon.com/Marabi-Nights-Society-Apartheid-Africa/dp/1869142373 ).  

The roots of Black string playing are equally deep in African-American history, and still flowering in modern improvised music, jazz, and even hip-hop. Out recently is the second album from We Free Strings, the 2011-founded ensemble led by viola player Melanie Dyer, Love in the Form of Sacred Outrage (https://wefreestringsesp.bandcamp.com/album/love-in-the-form-of-sacred-outrage ): an angry, beautiful, reflective outing. If you were moved by The Sabbath, you’ll likely love this work too.

Landmark African-American string improvisation: a playlist

We have to start with Stuff Smith’s 1967 album Black Violin. Smith was one of the finest swing jazz violinists in the world, and pioneered electric amplification for his instrument.

Smith’s music – and that album title – was one of the inspirations of the classical/hip-hop duo Black Violin. They’ve just released a single with the legendary Blind Boys of Alabama, The Message (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJhfm-V4K7c ), but you really need to see them perform live

Another titan of no-holds-barred string improvisation was composer, teacher and player Leroy Jenkins, who worked with the AACM and Ornette Coleman among many others and led his own Revolutionary Ensemble.

Billy Bang used his string playing and composition to interrogate his time as a US soldier during that country’s imperialist adventure in Vietnam and the demons that experience left him with. A year before his 2010 death he returned to Vietnam, to collaborate with local musicians

Violinist Regina Carter was classically trained, but switched to jazz in the mid 1980s. A teacher, composer and performer, she was part of the all-woman instrumental quintet Straight Ahead. Her first album as leader appeared in 1995, and since then she has released 10 more albums as leader and featured in more than 20 collaborations.

Bringing the story right up to date is Sudan Archives (Brittney Parks), who describes her mission as “to show the Blackness of the violin… I found violinists who looked like me in Africa, playing it so wildly…It’s such a serious instrument in a western concert setting, but in so many other places in the world it brings the party.”

Heritage Month – time to decolonise “crafts”?

Ndebele wall decoration: art or craft?

As Heritage Month dawned midweek, the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture announced that entries were opening for the Sixth National Craft Awards. There’s no argument that those who conceive objects of beauty and then create them deserve recognition. But look more closely at the whole enterprise of “craft”, the discourse around it and the categories of the awards, and we hear once more that profound tone-deafness that DSAC does so well.

The very division between “art” and “craft” is neither neutral nor harmless. It’s a creation of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy.

Capitalist society has historically defined “art” as creation expressing high emotion and vision and judged on its individual aesthetic merit. “Craft”, on the other hand, is defined as producing objects of practical community utility, based entirely on learned skills and technique.

Think about that split for even five minutes and its logical flaws become apparent. For a start, it defines ‘art’ by how ‘artistic’ it is: that’s called a circular argument. It makes art the exclusionary province of whichever ruling elite defines aesthetics and value. Yet “art” as much as “craft” depends on learned skills and technique and happens in communities – today, in the rarified world of the globalised art market. “Craft” as much as “art” speaks of intellectual conception, aesthetics and original vision. Every woman who beads an imibhaco is innovating and applying her own vision of beauty.

William Morris – and his wallpaper

English artist and early socialist William Morris saw some of the problems with the elitist art/craft division way back in the 1880s. His English Arts & Crafts Movement asserted that useful objects could and should also be beautiful and that those who worked with wood or cloth were not lesser artists than those who worked with paint and canvas. Morris scandalised the Academy by applying artistic vision to things as mundane as wallpaper.

But while Morris and his cohort saw the pernicious classism of the art/craft division, from a decolonialising perspective, we can see much more.

In the global South, any art work created by the original inhabitants of an invaded land was dismissed by the colonisers as “craft”. Aesthetics asserting different identities, visions and values simply were not seen. Those art objects were destroyed or stolen with no conscience, for they were merely “craft” or “trinkets” – particularly when, as often, they were the work of women, whom the patriarchy believed incapable of artistic vision..

Today’s dominant ‘creative industries’ ideology intensifies the dismissal of people’s art as “craft”. To quote Fernando Alberto Alvarez-Romano, author of a chapter in the book Craft is Political https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/craft-is-political-9781350122284/ : “Neoliberal capitalism, sheltered under professions such as archaeology, anthropology and design, among others, has imprisoned crafts amidst a frantic sales strategy based on the blurry notion of identity as market exoticism.”

The numbers of “crafters” may grow, particularly when no other sources of income are available in impoverished communities. But what they make is cut away from those communities, whose stories, uses and realities make it live. The products are simply a set of commodities to be traded – often at prices that are little better than colonial theft.

Intellectual property too is stolen: appropriated by global brands for fashion and marketing, then copyrighted to snatch it forever out of community hands.

Art or craft?

But if all that’s true, isn’t it a step forward that DSAC has been acknowledging original crafts and crafters with national awards?

In principle, of course. R50 000 per category prize-winner is a meaningful amount that could help a creator change their life. And when the prizes are awarded, nobody, including me, is going to diss the winners.

It’s the discourse behind the awards that poses problems.

Even the DSAC press release wants to have it both ways on art vs craft, using at one point the term “artistic mastery” – but if it’s “artistic”, why call it “craft”? One category sits uneasily on the fence: “one-of-a-kind pieces” that don’t fit elsewhere, defined as bespoke, or showing innovation, appealing “in terms of aesthetics, quality and marketability”.

The presence of that word “marketability” even in the category that would otherwise clearly be about “art”, (it’ll almost certainly be won by an art-school graduate) however, shows the real problem with the awards: they define craft exclusively as the production of commodities for sale.

One category seeks to reward the creative repurposing of recycled materials: something the art-makers of the people have always done – partly because formal art-making materials are often prohibitively expensive. Here are the other two:

“Corporate gifts are a potentially rich source of revenue for crafters, with business and political leaders seeking high-quality, original handmade products to exchange with each other at events or special occasions. Souvenirs or memorabilia evoking memories of the places visited are popular among tourists, both local and international, and craft designers and producers are encouraged to play in this market space more vigorously.”

Art or craft?

The art-makers of the struggle era, who repurposed discarded items to make beautiful decorations for the spaces they reclaimed as People’s Parks would find no home in these awards. Nor would those today who make lovely, useful objects simply to give, freely, to neighbours and family or to beautify their community  

When the main purpose of community artistic mastery is reduced to praise-singing a politician or an insurance brand, or appealing to the wallet of a jaded tourist, we’ve lost sight of something very important.  

Sure, let’s have craft awards. Let them be awarded by the vote of communities to those in their midst whose artistic hand-work embodies the stories and inheritances of the people they live amongst. Let’s tear down the wall between craft and art!

Happy Heritage Month!