The Second Wave of closedowns: live jazz fighting for survival

Last week’s column on the end of the Leano sessions didn’t get much online response – but it did attract a substantial number of personal responses to me, by email and in conversation. Just as the canary detects noxious gas in a coal-mine early because its tiny lungs are so vulnerable, so Leano – a tough space to keep going at the best of times – has served as a warning that the post-Covid recovery is far more fragile and risky than we’d like.

Somebody who manages another well-run weekly Joburg session told me: “Artists aren’t eating again. People who moved from other cities because there seemed to be more gigs in Joburg are arriving just as those gigs also close down. People will go overseas if they can – or drop out of music.”

So it’s worth looking in more detail at why live finds it hard to survive.

We talked about loadshedding last week. The best way to follow that up is with hard research on impact and mitigation strategies for live music, not more speculation.

Everywhere, spending on live music and other aspects of recreation and entertainment comes out of disposable income – the money people have left when the bills have been paid. In South Africa, many people now don’t have any income at all – or anything left after paying the bills.

Unemployment currently stands at 27%-plus, and that figure includes some who used to have jobs and could (even if only occasionally) afford to attend live music events. Average consumer inflation is currently calculated at nearly 7%, so paying the bills costs more. The increase experienced by many households may be higher, depending on their commitments. And there’s no sign that employment is likely to go significantly up, or the inflation rate significantly down, at any time in the near future.

Those bigger bills don’t just affect potential audience members, but venue owners and artists as well. So the often-heard “Cut admission prices!” or “Artists are greedy for fees!” simply don’t make sense. The venue still has to cover its overheads, including – we hope! – paying service staff decently. Artists have to eat and pay bills like the rest of us, and also have to buy and maintain instruments and cover time spent composing and arranging, as well as rehearsal costs. Those last are expenses we often don’t consider but form a vital part of what makes quality performances possible.

Some venues may also need to upgrade their premises in new conditions, whether by installing an alternative power supply, or enhanced air-conditioning to make them Covid-safer. (Yes, it’s still with us; yes, many people – correctly – remain concerned about those risks.)

So, everybody has less money and higher expenses. There is more good jazz around than ever before, and an impressive wave of up and coming young artists: so many that it’s hard to keep up with them all in Joburg and Pretoria, let alone in Durban, Cape Town and other cities too…But the stages that give them exposure and help them eat are vanishing. What can we do?

If government sincerely viewed music as an area of economic activity (as opposed to simply throwing the term ‘cultural industries’ around in manifestos) all this would signal the urgent need for a rescue plan tailored to industry needs (as well as the bigger societal changes we can all name).

On the supply side, reforming curriculum and the rules about who can teach in various kinds of educational institutions would offer more musicians more alternative sources of income. A Basic Income Grant could cushion intermittent, unpredictable and variably-paid work. (It works; see the OECD’s Just Give the Money to the Poor). Local authority grants to venues that upgrade should be a no-brainer: they improve the city, not just one space. Corporates could make available more commissions and grants for creative work. Oh, and cut the taxes on music equipment. On the demand side, improved arts education, better media coverage of the arts (not tunnel-vision on ‘showbiz’ and ‘lifestyle’) and various kinds of access subsidies – plus accessible public transport and other improvements to the night city – could help to get audiences back.

Of course none of this comes free. But it’s investment, not handouts.

We know why we need to rescue, say, the manufacturing sector. The music sector is smaller but no different. In exactly the same way as any other, a vibrant live music sector creates work, makes the role-players at every level more able to pay their taxes. It has a multiplier effect in terms of what that sector spends on the goods and services of other sectors, and how it can stimulate them – for example, by providing more marketing angles for tourism. That’s even before you start to consider the intangible social and psychological benefits – which manufacturing widgets may not offer to quite the same extent.

Back to album reviews next week – but this second wave of our live music crisis isn’t going anywhere unless we name it, own it, and take action. It’s urgent.

On Leano and load-shedding

Midweek came the sad news that Leano in Braamfontein – in the former Orbit space, but now a restaurant hosting one of the post-Covid comeback’s most successful artist-led regular jazz gigs – was not going to be able to reopen in 2023. We’ve lost jobs and space for cultural development. Both of those matter for the nation, not just for one club in Joburg.

Multiple factors contributed to the closure. The venue was well-run and well-supported, but anybody who’s known the space in any of its previous incarnations (including the Narina Trogon Restaurant, way back) knows it’s a very large area, entailing high overheads, and thus needing a full house pretty well every night of the week. In media interviews https://sundayworld.co.za/celebrity-news/entertainment/power-cuts-cited-as-one-of-reasons-for-closure-of-leano-restaurant/ , Leano management made explicit the extra burden that the country’s energy situation has imposed on live music venues: load-shedding.

Better times at Leano

We haven’t talked much about how loadshedding affects the music industry – justifiably, we’ve focused more on what happens in hospitals when the lights go out. But without power, many restaurants can’t cook or sell meals; there may be health risks and costly wastage if refrigeration fails too often. Drinks can’t be kept cool. Aircon doesn’t work: important in the still-not-post-Covid era. Music can’t be amplified, electronic instruments used or stages lit. (And lighting, in a venue accommodating a crowd, is a safety as well as a simple visibility issue.) Using a generator, noise can intrude on all but the biggest band sounds – and the constantly-rising cost of diesel is yet another overhead cost contributing to budget woes.

The scale of power required to keep a gig going, plus refrigeration and cooking, is far larger than any inverter/solar system affordable by a struggling venue could carry.

Yes, acoustic gigs are possible. They suit some formats of music far better than others. I remember one particularly magical Voice gig at the old Bassline in 2008 – the first year the lights started going out regularly – when the band kept going for candle-lit tables pretty well all night. But only in venues so tiny that scale in itself threatens business viability, is that kind of magic a universal, long-term solution.

It’s a miracle that some music venues survived and new ones have emerged since the killing depredations of Covid and lockdown on individuals, events and places. We need more hard data, but it’s clear that loadshedding is also now draining what’s already a very precarious existence.

What might the answers be?

First, let’s not fool ourselves that any panaceas exist that can – as some are demanding or promising – “stop” loadshedding tomorrow or next month. Wrecked and pillaged infrastructure, corruptly-constructed defective newbuild power stations and a grid that may not even be adequate to carry new power from where it is generated to where it is needed, will all take time to fix, and quite a lot of time even to mitigate. Anybody who demands or promises different is either a fool or a liar.

It’s wholly legitimate, however, to demand transparent , realistic plans, regular updates, and that the burdens are shared more equally.

Some areas (such as the enclaves where MPs live) are shielded from the cuts; many township areas suffer hours if not days of euphemistically-titled “load reduction” – even at times when the rest of us falsely believe there is “no” load-shedding.

Domestic electricity usage is only around a fifth of all the power the country eats up; nearly two-thirds is industrial. So rather than just nagging ordinary people about turning their geysers off (you should anyway, but…) policy-makers might also look at whether big industry is innovating fast enough to adopt energy-saving technologies and drop wasteful practices like lighting-up their premises overnight like Christmas trees, or powering fountains and sprinklers on their lavish corporate grounds. All that may need legislated incentives – or sanctions.

We all have to recognise that power, like water, is a finite, precious resource, not to be squandered. For the sake of the planet, we should all be looking at ways of using far less than we’re accustomed to – those days are over, worldwide – but most people here live below the bare minimum anyway, and only policy and practice changes at government and organisational levels can make a substantial impact.

And for the music industry? Given how small and economically precarious most venues already are, reducing the scale and scope of their activities or investing in big, shiny new energy solutions simply aren’t options. A 2013 Concerts SA report, Song Lines, (downloadable from http://www.samrofoundation.org.za), which did an initial mapping of the South African live music sector ,found most venues at that time could accommodate only between 200-500 patrons, and relied on bar or restaurant income alongside any earnings from music. Mostly, the door-take or some proportion of it went to the performers. Only a third, even at that time, could offer artists backline equipment on site. Many of the smallest of those venues (assuming they’d survived that long) would have been the first and worst-hit by Covid and lockdown. Those that came through are already struggling to do more with less. If they can’t afford back-line they certainly can’t afford the kind of generator, gas and/or renewable options they need.

It’ll take a lot of candles…

A couple of days back https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/657387/businesses-in-south-africa-to-get-load-shedding-relief/ Minister of Small Business Development Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams announced work on a package of loadshedding relief for small businesses. (As usual, “announcing work on” isn’t the same as delivering, but it’s a start.)

However, the perpetual Catch-22 for music is that the small-scale and often informal organisational forms prevailing in our industry will make it very hard for many music enterprises to meet tight, bureaucratic, documentation-hungry qualification requirements. We hit that snag before, with Covid relief.

We need solutions tailored to our industry. We need tech people studying and sharing with industry players what cleaner and more renewable energy technologies could do to keep, say, a 300-seat stage and bar going. We need local authorities looking at how the overheads on small venues that they impose (rates, utility costs etc) could be offset if those venues took themselves – cleanly and greenly, partly or wholly – off-grid. Above all, we need the government department responsible for the music industry (I believe it’s currently called the Department of Obituaries) working with its peer Departments of Small Business, Economic Development and Energy to develop un-siloed, accessible, integrated support. How many more Leanos will it take before that happens?

Madosini 1943-2022: mother, composer, innovator

While this column was on break, South Africa lost one of the great custodians of its traditions, with the death on December 23, two days short of her 80th birthday, of Dr Latozi ‘Madosini’ Mpahleni, master of the uhadi and umrhube bows and the isitolotolo jaws’ harp; teacher, instrument-maker, storyteller, singer and composer.

Madosini’s Special Official Provincial Funeral was a week ago, so now is perhaps an apt time to reflect not only on Dr Mpahleni’s passing, but on how the tragic loss was treated by the South African media, and what that tells us about perceptions of traditional music today. You can watch the entire funeral here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvpiEyAEyvI  – both the heartfelt responses and tributes in the tent, and the embarrassing failure of the province to ensure functioning coffin-lowering equipment at the eMkhanthato graveside, which gave those who knew and respected her a chance to roll up their sleeves and do things the old way.

There’s an appreciation of Madosini’s contribution to music and musicology here https://theconversation.com/madosini-a-south-african-national-treasure-whose-music-kept-a-rich-history-alive-197736 explaining why her work was so valued and honoured.

But even that tribute – not to mention her Wikipedia entry, and media stories not just this year but over her whole career – contains only limited biographical information. Most news stories focus on the other players with whom she collaborated. The official DSAC condolence, for example, https://www.dsac.gov.za/Dr-Latozi-Madosini-Mpahleni is predominantly an account of DSAC’s own work. We still know far too little about her life. And now that library has burned.

What we do know is this. She was born in kwaDlomo Village, Likode in Pondoland in the Eastern Cape, on or around 25 December 1943 (although she admitted to some uncertainty about that; her impoverished family hadn’t kept documents). Her mother was also a skilled musician and storyteller and passed those skills on to her daughter. That was just as well: her family circumstances hadn’t given her the opportunity to attend school and she had not learned to read or write. But her musicianship allowed her to earn something; creating music for family and community events and rites of passage.

Her local reputation blossomed, and by the 1970s she had moved to Langa in Cape Town and made some recordings. I can find only the barest references to these, but – as with so many performers exploited by the apartheid recording industry – they clearly did not bring her prosperity. She returned to the then-Transkei, barely scraping a living but continuing to create music and keep her cultural inheritance alive.

In the mid-1990s, she was visited by Amampondo co-founders Dizu Plaatjies and Mzwandile Qotoyi, who were overjoyed to find a performer who was by then a legend of Pondo music alive and still working. With the support of MELT2000 label boss Robert Trunz , she came into the studio in 1996. The sessions, with an eclectic band of MELT’s musicians, local and international and including singers from Cuba and the Amapondo Choir, resulted in the highly-praised 1997 album DZM Madosini – Power To the Women https://open.spotify.com/album/2HfVRz2BZbPWMLCsBEJ6OL.You can find material from those sessions here:

And here:

At some time during this period (I can’t find a date) she moved back to Langa, settling with her family in a small, overcrowded flat. But international recognition began to grow. In the early 2000s, she toured with UK rock musician Patrick Duff. In 2003, she hosted musician Thandiswa Mazwai for three weeks back in her home village, as Mazwai explored Xhosa vocal techniques prior to her 2003 album, Zabalaza. Here’s footage of Madosini at that very same homestead:

By the mid-2000s she was a regular performer at the international WOMAD festivals, and was the first artist to be selected and recorded for the WOMAD Musical Elders archive. In 2010, she recorded a solo album, Eparadesi Nkosi Uzube Nam, produced by Derek Gripper. You can see the two of them onstage at Cape Town’s Forge here:

Madosini performed in subsequent iterations of the New Music South Africa Bow Project after the health of its original inspirer, Nofinishi Dywili, deteriorated.

All this work resulted in her receiving an Arts & Culture Trust Lifetime Achievers Award in 2013. By 2016, she was working with Hilton Schilder, Jonny Blundell, Pedro Espi-Sanchez and Lulu Plaatjies in Amathongo, a group that made explicit the lineage between traditional music and modern improvised forms like jazz. Their 2016 album Modokali is here https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kE–97N1hVa380Ht5KtK7KcI-qj8tZwe4 and you can watch Amathongo live here:

and here:

In 2017, she provided the main score for the UK National Theatre production of Les Blancs. Touring, was becoming stressful for an artist whose health had never been strong. She suffered from asthma and in 2019 she experienced her first heart attack and was stranded in France for 15 days until her insurer agreed to repatriate her.

She was awarded honorary doctorates from Rhodes university and UCT; because of lockdown restrictions she received the first of those formal tributes only later, in the open air at eMkhanthato village. She was also named a “Living Legend” by DSAC.

But Madosini was never the museum piece that accolade implies. As a composer – an aspect of her work that none of the published tributes have dwelt on – her lyrics were always commentary on the contemporary society she was living in: its joys and its sorrows. Although the scales she employed – Lydian and Mixolydian – may be the first fixed scales known to humanity, her music was about today. It was not only King Tha she mentored. She constantly sought to keep isiXhosa music fresh by working with young musicians around her. Here she is with a young group, Found at Sea, in Stellenbosch in 2018:

Meanwhile, musician Msaki and Rootspring Records embarked on a project to provide her with a better home, one more in keeping with her stature and her health needs. They reissued Power to the Women as part of that fundraising initiative. Here Msaki and Madosini perform together.

Madosini fought back from Covid twice, and her heart condition, though manageable, continued to trouble her, worsening in the days immediately before her death.

So here are some of the things from her life I wish the media had noticed. First, the important role of women as guardians of South Africa’s music heritage. Madosini’s music came down from her mother, and she shared it onwards, to the Amampondo generation and younger jazz artists. Second, traditional artists (and especially women) should be acknowledged as composers far more prominently and often. All the talk of “tradition” and “legends”, while valid, can tend to mask that Madosini, like all artists working in legacy genres, strove constantly to create new songs. Thus, third, she was an important innovator: there was always freshness in her performances too, in the liveliness and relish with which she interpreted the songs. Espi-Sanchez, in his funeral tribute, pointed out that even for others who knew the instruments she played, “It is hard to imagine them singing the way she made them sing.” As an example, the performance below, filmed only three months before her passing. Lala Ngoxolo to a great mother not only of Xhosa, but of all South African music.

Better arts policies: will an extra D-G be enough?

Welcome to 2023! In epidemiological terms it’s threatening to become the year of the Kraken; for Eskom (and only if we’re lucky), the Year of Stages 3 & 4. In China it’s about to be the Year of the Rabbit, and in Vietnam, the Year of the Cat. For jazz fans, that last fits best.

22 Jan 2023: Vietnamese Year of the (jazz) Cat

But whatever you call it, I hope all my readers and their crews had a blissfully restful year-end, listened to plenty of good music, and are feeling refreshed for the battles ahead.

You may have missed what might (maybe…possibly…) be some good news from part 2 of the ANC conference. Interviewed by IOL’s Siyabonga Sithole, ANC veteran Obed Bapela, declared an intention to “prioritise South Africa’s creative economy”. As part of that, the working party Bapela represented wants the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture to have two rather than only one Director-General, so that dealing with sport doesn’t permanently overshadow dealing with arts and culture. Bapela also said “We need a law that makes determination for artists to earn a decent living from their works.” You can read the full interview here: https://www.iol.co.za/the-star/news/anc-wants-to-prioritise-the-countrys-creative-economy-c7bea26b-5a4c-40dd-b193-37ef893c7759

As far as it goes, that’s positive news. It signals that at least some in the ruling party have noticed the tsunami of neglect and impoverishment that a toxic combination of Covid and DSAC wilful ignorance unleashed on our creative community. The conference commission concerned deserves our warm thanks for that.

But before we start celebrating too loudly, let’s look at little more closely at the context in which the statement was made, and at whether an add-on D-G is an adequate fix.

In the wake of the racist attack on young Black swimmers at Maselspoort Resort, the focus on the creative economy is once more framed in purely instrumental terms: a tool to fix the country’s lack of social cohesion. White thugs trying to murder young Black men? Quick – find some artists to make it all better!

First, in terms of specific incidents such as Maselspoort, we don’t need artists. We need effective law enforcement and judicial systems that ensure the thugs swiftly find themselves in orange jumpsuits. But those incidents are merely the cancerous outgrowths from a deeply divided society, in which white privilege, male privilege and the privilege of wealth are entrenched and protected. Invoking “cohesion” while those chasms gape is just ephemeral sticking plaster. Artists don’t have the power to alter a structurally divided society while policy-makers continue to pursue capitalist growth whatever the cost.

Obed Bapela, Deputy COGTA Minister: “Artists should be able to earn a living”

Second, the arts shouldn’t be prioritised only when a political party needs to achieve policy aims. A glorious sunset is not “for” making us consider the fragile beauty of the living environment or the wonders of a deity’s works, but it can direct our thinking towards those things. In exactly the same way, art and culture are not “for” building social cohesion, but they can help us think about how our lives and world need to change, and how we can make that happen. That doesn’t mean preaching cohesion, and can mean inciting revolution.

Third, what about that extra D-G? Directors-General in the South African public service have, in theory, both administrative and policy roles, and there has never been any formal demarcation between the two spheres in our public service. Administratively, D-Gs are responsible for the human and financial resources of their departments. In terms of their policy role, however, considerable research is now suggesting their ability to shape policy is diminishing. Party leadership reinforced by Presidential appointments that have politicised perceptions of the role have meant D-Gs have, over time, been increasingly confined within their administrative function.

An extra D-G could thus be a useful way of ensuring that resources are not tipped too overwhelmingly in favour of sport. But that person is unlikely to be able to improve policy unless the political head – the Minister – wills it. Bapela is Deputy Cogta Minister, not Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture. That, despite all the goodwill in the world from his commission, is the dinosaur-sized elephant in the conference hall that nobody mentioned…