Reject canned playlists! Make revolutionary mixtapes!

Today’s International Jazz Day. The best way to celebrate that is to find a way of helping live jazz survive, whether that’s buying an album – preferably not from an exploitative global platform; rather put cash money back into the artist’s pocket – going to a gig, or simply spreading the word about how damn good our music is.

Tomorrow is Workers’ Day – and the above refers because musicians and all who help to realise their vision are workers too. Usually, I publish a mini-playlist in solidarity. This time, I’m going two dozen tracks better, by showcasing 2023’s mega-workers’ playlist

and talking to its maker, Dj and podcaster/writer/editor Charles Leonard.

Two months ago, when Jacana launched its modern South African edition of The Communist Manifesto (complete with all the relevant forewords, from Leon Trotsky – in Afrikans – through Neville Alexander to Jeremy Cronin) https://jacana.co.za/product/the-communist-manifesto/, they commissioned Leonard to compile an accompanying Manifesto Mixtape. Many hours of listening later, what emerged were 28 tracks travelling back and forth in time and across the world.

After a slyly subversive intro song titled Marxism (owing not a little to the Spice Girls), the compilation really gets going with Liela Groenewald’s Afrikans version of The Internationale. That song, Leonard told me when I interviewed him, was “an obvious choice…but I knew of four –no, five – versions, so which one to choose? 10 years ago, Trotsky’s Afrikans foreword had come as a surprise to me; there’s synergy with that.”

Leonard began with multiple must-have track ideas, including the Chilean Victor Jara, Billy Bragg, StereoLab, radical UK 80s skinheads Redskins, LKJ, Woody Guthrie and more. “Obviously I started with what reflected my taste and background,” he says. “In the ’80s there was this great indie scene that produced a lot of radical bands like The Clash. But I wanted to go wider, in terms of time, geography and genre. And the more I came across, oh my goodness! the more I wanted to include. There’s an amazing range of musicians who believe that a better world can be achieved through socialism.” As a result, Manifesto Mixtape Episode 2 will appear later in May. “That’s me throwing in a bit extra for Jacana – hats off to them, because the first mixtape was their idea.”

He adopted wide definitions of socialism and struggle and, while keeping it “respectful and relevant, I also wanted it to be entertaining rather than too earnest. I wanted to lure in people who wouldn’t necessarily be attracted to a ‘political’ mixtape – maybe even entice them to read the book.”

Charles Leonard

Those who recall Leonard’s series of mixtapes for New Frame will recall how adeptly he juxtaposed interesting music and the ideas and stories underlying it. (Those mixtapes, incidentally have just been taken off the web along with the rest of New Frame 2018-22, breaking management’s final promise: to keep the journalistic archive up.) That continues on the Manifesto compilation, nowhere more poignantly than in his telling of the death of Victor Jara (Canto Libre) at the hands of Pinochet’s military thugs, who crushed his hands first to ensure he’d never play his guitar again.

Among Leonard’s surprise finds were gay country music artists Lavender Country, Italian radicals the Marxist Love Disco Ensemble (“Clearly party people. If I’d met them, they’d have been my mates!”), singing PhD economists Red Shadow, and vocalist Barbara Dane. “And other artists who, back then, I hadn’t listened to the lyrics deeply enough, like They Might be Giants.”

Sometimes the artists’ back-stories amplified their impact, as in the case of veteran IWW folk-singer Faith Petric (“You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red”). Sometimes, it was using sequencing to put a song into a new context, as with Thandiswa’s Nizalwa Ngobani. Nina Simone, of course, starts a new sequence – with Misissippi Goddam.

That work of playlist curation, researching to amass a longlist, then simultaneously juggling thematic content, mood, musical texture, rhythm and more, Leonard reflects, was “sometimes a process of driving myself insane!”  As well as the obvious direct references to communism, Marxism and struggle, “you’re asking yourself: will LKJ work back-to-back with Didier Awadi? Who can I put after Faith Petric? hmmm…but she ends with applause so that will support a segue (…) I could make a cross-generational link between Woody Guthrie and Tom Waits… All the time you’re editing down. In the end, it’s an emotional thing – you know when it’s done. You’re balancing old and new, familiar and weird, songs with explicit messages and songs that are just good music.”

That last is political too. Radical writer Rebecca Solnit is only the most recent to observe that, “When you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.”

As well as his various one-off gigs, Leonard has a regular DJ session in Brixton and now, thanks to the Mail& Guardian and the French Institute, is getting back into the monthly playlist business; catch the latest one here: https://www.mixcloud.com/charlesleonard37/ampersand-mixtape-2-weekend-special/. In all those contexts, he observes, because you can never separate music from its ideas “there are always going to be politics”.

These days, some people get sniffy about mixtapes: an adolescent enterprise, they suggest, descended from an obsolete technology. With all the music in the world online and Spotify doing the hard work for us, who needs that?

The process Leonard describes, which parallels what every other good DJ does too, illuminates the intricate combination of intellectual and aesthetic decision-making and context consideration that make a really satisfying session.

Most importantly, when any of us compiles a playlist – even if not as skilfully as a professional DJ – we’re exploring and discovering, making decisions, creating connections and asking questions that belong to us. When we outsource our playlisting to some grasping online platform, we’re signing up to jail-time in a closed loop of things like the things we already know.   

So, for International Jazz Day and Workers’ Day, listen to the Manifesto Mixtape. Then start some revolutionary digital crate-digging of your own! And enjoy the holiday: joy is defiance. A luta continua!

Mandla Mlangeni’s “Oratorio”: powerful translation to disk

It’s going to be a bumper next few months for new South African releases. Between now and end-August we can look forward to Jonathan Butler’s Ubuntu (April 28), Asher Gamedze’s Turbulence and Pulse (May 5) Bokani Dyer’s Radio Sechaba (May 12), Vuma Levin’s The Past is Unpredictable; Only the Future is Certain (May 19); Nicky Schrire’s Nowhere Girl (June 9) and Sibu Mashiloane’s Izibongo (end-August).  Those are just the plans I already know about, and I’m hoping this shout-out will encourage other artists with recordings in the works to tell me about more.

Before I get stuck in to all that tasty fare, I need to catch up on the un-reviewed recordings from earlier this year. Prime among those is the other, less well publicised, release that accompanied Mandla Mlangeni’s The Future is Now: a CD version of his stage creation based on a concept by TBMO, Oratorio of a Forgotten Youth.

That multimedia performance (poetry from Lesego Rampholokeng, sand art in constant re-creation from Tawanda mu Afrika, jazz solos, big-band choruses, strings and voices) was one of the most powerful experiences of Makhanda 2021. Much of its power lay in the interaction of the different elements. From that perspective, it wasn’t easy to see how well it would translate to a medium for listening only.

It turns out to be a no less powerful, but rather different, experience. The CD (supported by NAC, the NIHSS and Wits) is a drastic cut from the stage show, throwing the spotlight on six tracks only: Rampholokeng’s poetry fronting The Gathering, #Movement/Soldiers Lament  and the searing closer, Darkness, plus Yonela Mnana’s beautiful hymn uBaba, and the trumpeter/leader’s Inkululeko and Woza. History moves much faster: the landscape between lives sacrificed in 1976 and today’s neoliberal sellouts and “monstrosity politics” is outlined much more starkly.

Though the musical ensemble is as big and stellar (Ariel Zamonsky, Sisnke Xonti, Yonela Mnana, Mark Fransman, Muhammad Dawjee, Siya Mthembu, Benedikt Reising and more), the recording has much less space for soloing than the stage did; sonically, these selected numbers, absent the others, shape something bigger and more oratorio-like – in the conventional sense of that genre descriptor. But if you have ears, there’s a great deal of collective improvisation going on: Darkness, for example, concludes with a dissonant, mournful, angry chorus channeling the spirit of earlier South African free improvisers such as Pukwana, Moholo-Moholo and Ngqawana.

An album that’s almost 50% spoken word demands sensitive engineering, and Gavan Eckhart’s mix largely masters the challenge of letting us hear both the cross-currents of instrumental and sung textures and Rampholokeng’s spoken verses. We still have access to all the audacious wordsmithery that can make one of the poet’s lines simultaneously a very rude comic pun and a furious, forensic piece of political analysis.

I missed the constant onstage metamorphoses of mu Afrika’s art, but I guess a DVD wasn’t possible within budget; his cover image gives you a flavour of his work. But – and again it was probably a budget issue – we really do need a book of lyrics. Rampholokeng’s word-play is just so damn clever and compressed that you’ve no sooner caught one piece than he’s already on to the next. He’s in his element weaving poems with really good music. But to truly savour the words – and remember them – you need to see them on a page.

The words do need to be remembered, because the Oratorio is no slice of musical ephemera confected for a festival. It’s a complex, stirring meditation on hope and betrayal, remembering and forgetting, and the place of all those in how – and by whom – our history is currently being constructed. The questions are posed not only through words, but in the beauty, poignancy and anger of the music too, Mlangeni’s choices as leader do a good job of letting both work together to document how “power to the people goes the way of all vinyl records – scratched.”

Free expression in the arts: much more than blue pencils and bureaucracy

This week saw an important contribution to conversations around South African artistic freedom with the launch of a report into The State of Free Expression in the South African Cultural Sector by the independent Campaign for Free Expression (CFE). You can download the full report at https://freeexpression.org.za/cfe-publications/

The topic is an important one, and this report brings into the discourse three new elements. First are the contents of an August 2022 consultative meeting around the topic made possible by CFE with Dr Ismail Mohamed’s Centre for the Creative Arts at UKZN. Second, we get a glimpse into the preliminary findings of the as-yet-unpublished report by the South African Roadies Association (SARA https://www.facebook.com/sarodies/ ) on the National Arts Council PESP fiasco and its deadening impact on creative activity. These are augmented by accounts of and quotations from subsequent inquiries among 15 artists and creators, several of whom opted to remain anonymous.

The report has many useful elements, including a short guide to censorship under apartheid, about which you can discover more here

and here:

https://mixtapes.org.za/category/apartheid-censorship-of-popular-music/

There are valuable snapshot accounts of half a dozen relatively recent free speech-relevant incidents. At only 12, clearly-presented pages ( Lucas Ledwaba’s photographs are striking and evocative), the report is an easy read, and definitely worth your time.

However, it is also realistic about its own status, stating in its prefatory disclaimer: “This research is a preliminary investigation to introduce to the sector and encourage future engagement in further research.”

Taking that as a cue – and with huge respect to those who have started shining the spotlight on such a vital area – let’s look at how such work could be strengthened and moved forward, and at some of the limitations of what we currently have.

The main target: NAC

Censorship – by Leon Zelensky

The report is centred around the National Arts Council (NAC) and similar grant-making bodies. Its sources assert that grant-makers in South Africa are beset by nepotism, cronyism, incompetence, corruption and political appointment practices that together fatally erode the arms-length principle. Artists are as a result denied the resources vital for free expression. Fear of reprisal from grant-makers is cited as why so many respondents opted for anonymity – and, perhaps, for reluctance to participate too – which makes for a very small sample: self-selected and self-reporting. It’s saddening that such self-censorship is hampering not only artistic activity but research too.

There is certainly evidence that decision-makers’ biases formed part of the PESP mess. That has been thoroughly and damningly investigated – perhaps most meticulously by the Theatre and Dance Alliance (TADA), whose 53-page report on the matter (downloadable at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NQNZN552zZB9g66lVd4blMr991nGh5fj/view ) would have made a useful addition to a rather short set of references, heavily reliant on second-hand media reports. The arts sector remains over-siloed in its research reach; TADA’s Mike van Graan was one of the CFE report’s informants, yet TADA’s report, with valuable reinforcing data, goes un-mentioned. (Another important omission from the references is Jane Duncan’s pioneering 2009 research paper on South African censorship: https://www.academia.edu/6332897/The_arts_freedom_of_expression_and_censorship_in_south_africa )

Let’s remember, too, that PESP – although it certainly hampered creative expression – was not about state censorship per se. To make its points, the CFE report blurs conceptual lines between censorship and all the other bureaucratic, socio-economic and power-relationship factors curtailing creative freedom. All matter, all are damaging to free expression, but each needs distinct and detailed treatment and that is perhaps the first way we could build on the foundations laid by the CFE Report.

Blurred Lines

Similar conflation is reflected in the various cases discussed. They are all about attempted or successful gaggings, all relevant to the report’s subject matter – but all very different and raising distinct issues which demand their own unpicking.

One – the ignorant, philistine certification saga around the movie Of Good Report, (and, later, of Inxeba) – certainly was the action of a state censor. Mbongeni Ngema’s track AmaNdiya was banned from airplay by the SABC, but not banned from sale and was indeed played by other radio stations. (By the way, both local content quotas and their absence have the impact of excluding/censoring certain musics.) Ismail Mahomed was gagged from speaking out about corruption around a Board he served on – but bravely found ways to air the issue anyway. Brett Murray’s Spear fell foul of some sectors of public opinion; decisions about it were taken by his gallerist.

Zapiro’s cartooning comes from a different legal framework altogether: that governing media freedom. The reason his political cartoons were, in the end, not sued was because legal precedent exists to protect them as part of the Bogoshi Judgment – and decisions about his religious cartoons were made by his editors. Justin Nurse’s T-shirt spat with SAB relates to another crucial area: the use of lawsuits and threatened suits by commercial powers to hamper free expression. His is the only instance of that cited, but it is at least as prevalent as suppression by the state and perhaps more so: talk to the creative workers in community media. There’s a comprehensive and chilling account of the free expression abuses they suffer from both political actors and advertisers in the SANEF Independent Panel Report on Media Ethics and Credibility (downloadable as a PDF here:  https://sanef.org.za › 2021/04 › Satchwell-Report ),

CFE takes an absolutist position on free speech. It declares that the organisation “does not care what your view is: if it is legal, we will defend your right to have it, express it, argue and fight for it.” There are strong arguments that in the context of the political conjuncture and place in which it appeared, AmaNdiya tested the definition of legality; it veered perilously close to hate speech.

Shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre?

But the cases of Ngema, Murray and Zapiro also raise a question the report does not discuss: what if creative work sits just inside the legality boundary but causes extreme hurt or risks wreaking harm?

Arts journalist Charl Blignaut has powerfully pointed out the triggering impact and potential for harm in some discourses, even in Zapiro’s cheerful use of Springboks raping other animals as a sporting cartoon metaphor (here https://www.news24.com/citypress/voices/our-words-build-south-africas-rape-culture-20190210  and elsewhere). Clumsy state attempts to mess with definitions of hate speech could certainly benefit from more acknowledgment of and debate around the responsibilities and risks of free expression; that’s another way the CFE’s foundation work could be extended and enriched.

Where’s online? Where are the women?

Then there are the restrictions on creative cultural expression CFE cannot, given its limited brief here, explore. There is silence on digital manipulations of creative expression. Yet the power of global online platforms through both payment and playlisting practices in effect de-platforms South African music from some spaces – that looks a lot like censorship to many artists.

Finally, although the report takes seriously its responsibility to gender representivity in sources (and on the panel assembled for Thursday’s report launch) there is no consideration of gendered forms of creative repression – for example, the lava-flow of misogynistic bile directed at women to shut them up, on Twitter and in multiple “free” podcasts; the gendered behaviours and stereotypes that discourage female instrumentalists; and more. SAMRO has made a small start on that work (https://www.samro.org.za/news/articles/womens-rights-and-representation-south-african-music-sector ) but it is surprising not to find a single case cited in the report: all the subjects are men. If Zapiro merits attention for attempts to silence his news commentary, so, surely, do Ferial Haffejee and the late Karima Brown https://mg.co.za/article/2019-03-06-cyberattacks-on-female-journalists-threaten-everyone/ ?

Thanks, CFE, for starting the conversation up again. Let’s keep it going!

Layers and colours from Riley G’s Joseph’s Mind

Riley G (image supplied)

Mainstream platforms still too often cover South African jazz as though it revolved around only two poles: Joburg and Cape Town. Even the international prestige of Nduduzo Makhathini on the Blue Note Africa label, and certainly not staying silent about the KZN roots of his inspiration, hasn’t changed that. But long before Makhathini, Durban had a jazz scene: Photographers Ranjith Kally and Rafs Mayet imaged it; Shunna Pillay novelised it. These days, if you keep your eye on who’s doing what, Durban jazz artists continue to make waves at home as well as abroad.

Latest is Riley Giandhari, whose family history asserts that larger story: his first inspiration, aged 3, was his drummer father, Pravin. Now Giandhari, whose 2020 debut A Groove for the Nation https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=OLAK5uy_lwuRkRefQorbBG-GI7UI2r462t8JyISwk was a Mzansi Music Awards nominee, has released his sophomore outing: The Riley G Collective Joseph’s Mind https://therileygcollective.bandcamp.com/album/josephs-mind .

UKZN M. Mus graduate (and producer and teacher as well as player and composer) Giandhari explains the new album’s title as alluding to his middle name, Joseph, and how his mind engaged during post production to layer and add a “coat of many colours” to each track.

A Groove for the Nation featured an eclectic choice of guests from across popular music and jazz (including rapper Kasinova the Don, pianist Sibu Mashiloane and avant-garde bassist Carlo Mombelli) but was grounded in precisely what its title named: groove. As well as the acoustic sounds, it offered a generous helping of electronic textures: loungey ambient washes and unsettling, edgy beats. You can get a taste here, on the track Purity:

Giandhari’s ‘layering’ approach was starting to be evident on that debut. On Joseph’s Mind, the electronics are used equally generously but more subtly: to detail as well as magnify the sound, without blurring the voices of the instrumentalists. That’s just as well; they’re a sterling team. On tenor is Salim Washington, one of Giandhari’s UKZN teachers. Pianist is Sanele Phakathi, a name that’s new to me but, on this inspired showing, should not be. Occupying the middle generation between veteran Washington and the youngsters is bassist – and distinguished Afro-House producer in his own right – Prince Bulo. Zoe “the Seed” Masuku provides sweet vocalese, and longtime guitar collaborator Ethan Naidoo rounds out the list.

If I haven’t mentioned it already, Giandhari is highly accomplished drummer right across the genre landscape. His style favours intricacy over bombast – in fact, many of the intriguing details come from his drums long before the electronics wash over. What they do is spotlight how the drummer already hears his tunes. That crisp, precise detailing has always characterised his sound: listen to him here doing some much more strict-tempo things in a trio with bassist Dalisu Ndlazi and pianist Zibusiso Makhathini:

What Joseph’s Mind also shows us, however, is much more of Giandhari the composer – and especially a composer of lush, lovely ballads like Beauty in Reverence and Discernment, both of which give the soulful, Dexter Gordon side of Washington’s tenor a chance to sing. (His other, more astringent experimental side gets its airing alongside spiky beats from Giandhari on Mzansi Rising. ) Beauty..., the album opener, also shows us what the strings of Bulo and Naidoo can do; the guitar solo a waterfall of notes that refreshes the melody’s emotion without diminishing it. This outfit really is a collective, where players shape contrasts to complement rather than jar.

The closer, Double-Minded, a Weather Report-ish exploration, carries us towards a conclusion showcasing the classic rhythm double: drum and bass. Soaring solos from Washington, then Naidoo and Phakati open space for an absolute killer from Bulo and then – just like in a live show – what we’ve been waiting all album for: the fireworks of extended solo drums. The solo is restrained, detailed and intricate rather than ooh-yah noisy, but that makes it no less starry: it’s who Giandhari is.

Here’s the title track, to whet your appetite for the whole of Joseph’s Mind

As Shams Archive Vol 1: nothing dusty about this music

It’s more than 50 years since label boss Rashid Vally founded his Soultown imprint out of a cramped corner of his dad’s general store on Johannesburg’s Kort St. Other imprints, most famously As Shams /The Sun, followed, encapsulating the rich jazz history of years – the ’70s to ’80s – that some music historians formerly dismissed as “silent”.

Cover photograph: Ralph Ndawo

“Everybody”, conventional wisdom declared, “had gone into exile.”

That’s only true if you believe that fewer than half a dozen names – most prominently, Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Abdullah Ibrahim – comprise “everybody” on the historic South African jazz scene. They never did, and nor would they ever have claimed to; they respected their jazz parents and peers too much. They achieved prominence because their superb musicianship got space on international stages, not because they were all there was.

Meanwhile, a gloriously diverse pantheon of jazz players battled censorship and suppression to continue making fresh new music back home.

On March 3, As-Shams in partnership with Cape Town-based SharpFlat released its first compilation from the As-Shams archive of tapes and other record-related materials: clippings, photos, artwork and more. SharpFlat’s Calum MacNaughton has been working on the archive for some years, following fragmentary trails to decipher or correct the session and personnel information (sometimes incomplete or even missing) that survived with those old tapes. As Shams Archive Vol 1: South African Jazz Funk and Soul 1975 – 1982 https://as-shams.bandcamp.com/album/as-shams-archive-vol-1-south-african-jazz-funk-soul-1975-1982 does its musicians justice.

Rashid Vally then...

The ten tracks (90+ minutes of music) have been meticulously restored, and serve not only as an introduction to the various full As-Shams reissues also available, but as an impressive and still fresh-sounding collection of SA jazz in its own right.

The curation has dismissed potential archival whiffs of dust and cobwebs by favouring musical flow over chronology and not selecting the “obvious” tracks – even from albums that have now become better known. From the Matshikiza/Moeketsi Tshona we get not the title track, but Umgababa. From Dick Khoza’s Chapita, again, not the title track but Lilongwe, showcasing the gorgeous guitar of Themba Mokoena.

The youngest track, Mike Makhalemele’s 1982 Spring is Here from Blue Mike, features a historic rhythm section: Zulu Bidi on bass and Nelson Magwaza on drums, illustrating the cross-generational continuity of our jazz tradition. There’s also stuff you are less likely have heard before, like pianist Lionel Pillay’s haunting Blues for Yusef from 1980’s Deeper in Black, with Barney Rachabane and Duku Makasi on reeds.

…and in the current era

Because there was a period when he was pretty well As Shams’ house bassist, admirers of bassist Sipho Gumede will find riches here: he’s on four tracks including the Pillay, demonstrating the vision and growth in his musicianship over a five-year span. I suspect (and hope) there may be more Pillay sessions to release in future: his truly was a unique piano voice, tragically silenced by mental illness way too soon.

The album concludes with Sathima Bea Benjamin’s Music from her 1976 African Songbird, recorded in this country on a brief return home for her and Ibrahim that convinced the couple it wouldn’t be desirable to bring up their children under the barbarities of apartheid.

“Music”, Benjamin sings, “is the spirit deep within you…find [it] and let [it] flow free and easy.”

From the sadness soaring into hope of Basil Coetzee’s sax on Movement in the City’s Blue Sunday to the precise beauty of his flute on Music; from the youthful Afrocentric assertiveness of Harari’s Musikana to the community celebration of Tete Mbambisa’s Bride/Umthsakazi, that’s exactly what the players of this era were doing