Vuma Levin does big-band – but not as you know it

Guitarist/ Composer Vuma Levin’s fifth and latest album release, The Past is Unpredictable, only the Future is Certain https://music.apple.com/za/album/the-past-is-unpredictable-only-the-future-is-certain/1684541854 starts with a title idea that was a wry aphorism in Stalinist Eastern Europe. There, a better future was always certain, but the events and meanings of the past were sometimes literally rewritten to excise inconvenient facts and support that vision. Or, as Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen put it at Alice’s tea-party in 1871: “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today.”

Developing compositions for the album during the Covid years, resourced by his 2021 Standard Bank Young Artist Award, it struck Levin that as part of envisaging an ideal future we still have that tendency to romanticise the past , whether pre-Covid, pre-1994 or pre-apartheid. Yet our images of the past are “being constantly renegotiated” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3RhmKrujvc through the lens of who, what and where we are today. For the guitarist, issues of identity and agency in post-apartheid South Africa have been a recurring personal and thematic concern.

Previous albums have explored that concern through the intimate conversations of a jazz quintet; here, in recording sessions that commuted between Basel, Amsterdam and Joburg, Levin worked with his jazz group, a horn trio, a string quartet and a bunch of guests, including traditional instrumentalists Tlale Makhene and Cara Stacey. It’s a big-band – but definitely not as you know it.

For a start, compositional inspiration came from transcription of historic African music recordings made by Hugh Tracey in the 1950s, now held in the ILAM Library in Makhanda. What Levin was aiming for wasn’t pastiche or collage. Rather the focus was on musical praxis: process, and how musicians interact. Another stimulus was the current debates about how African musics are often treated (marginalised, exoticised, ignored, used for ‘colour’) by classical and Western Art Music establishments. By focusing on process and interactions and creating conversations between musical practices Levin says he was “[foregrounding]  Black African culture as fluid, emergent and …South Africa as a legitimate agent in an increasingly globalised world” (album liners).       

That’s a lot of words, but how does it work as music?

In many ways, the album recalls the concerns and approaches of Levin’s sophomore release Life and Death on the Other Side of the Dream. But although sound clips and intelligent mixing expanded the quintet sound on that 2016 release impressively, it sometimes felt as though there wasn’t really enough sonic space to do more than start conversations. I found myself constantly replaying to untangle fascinating fragments, crammed with enough ideas to become works in their own right.

That won’t happen here. Any replays I press are just to enjoy great tracks again.

There are eight tracks, all Levin’s compositions. One, After Her, we’ve been hearing since the 2017 album Spectacle of An-Other . It reappears differently every time: here, it’s a fragile coda dominated by Marta Arpini’s multi-tracked voice, with both guitar and bass from Levin.

Yaka Yaka and Concertina/iKostini are the ones talking most directly to their origins in the archive. The former is the track most likely to get the radio-play here; it’s relatively short and embodies thoughtful, appealing guitar/ saxophone conversations, but it’s a good introduction to the kinds of juxtaposition and layering that follow.

Concertina, embodies the tensions between ideas of tradition and modernity: the concertina was a ‘modern’ instrument rapidly adopted to play at ‘traditional’ gatherings among Xhosa-speaking peoples; the original recording of young women singing was made by Tracey in 1957:

Levin’s re-visioning retains the lyrics, complex claps and vocal layers, drawing in Makhene’s udu drum. Out of this flowers first a pizzicato string passage, whose plucking introduces the violins to the guitar family, then a bowed passage, then something far spikier laying reed over strings. It’s a lot to pack into two and a half minutes, but the parts dovetail perfectly together and if you listen to it beside the original, a great deal that is beautiful from that is still present in this, just in different kinds of voices.

Gijima features spoken word from Makhene over pizzicato strings: it’s a traditional prophetic voice, but speaking over strings to very contemporary concerns: “To those up there I say: run (…) the country is burning (…) They say they are running away but they are making it worse”. The track sees the melodic and harmonic themes growing from those first patterns, becoming increasingly complex and urgent, until we reach Levin’s guitar solo. A similar progression of sound follows on Wash’uMuti:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=G4UbrO2GNmc

Guitar solos don’t dominate this album; often, the guitar is in the middle of process not standing out in front of it. The Past is Unpredictable is much more about Levin the composer. He always composes, though, with a guitarist’s ear, and in the penultimate Rites gives himself beautiful space to stretch out on a guitar solo that reaches with the certainty of dreams towards beauty.

But it serves little further purpose to provide a catalogue of sonic descriptions for each track. How they unfold, how the parts and voices fit together, the contrasts, precipices, bridges and confluences of the music need to be heard unfolding in performance for a listener to get what the album’s about: travelling (from then to now and place to place) is also part of the vision. Below is the Amsterdam Bimhuis concert from Levin’s current launch tour, which gets to Joburg in July. From it, you will gather that despite the album title, on this suite there is also, very definitely, jam today.

Hamba Kahle Squire: Charl Blignaut’s tribute to Dr Graeme Gilfillan

I really didn’t know enough about music and copyright specialist Dr Graeme Gilfillan to write a full obituary. But there’s no doubt his passing over the weekend represents a huge loss to our knowledge of the field, as well as robbing us of a courageously outspoken human being. So I’m reprinting this tribute, first published by arts journalist and editor Charl Blignaut on his Facebook page. Hamba Kahle to a doughty fighter for rights.

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The news yesterday of the passing of multi-jurisdictional copyright specialist Dr Graeme Gilfillan hung heavily on me when I woke up today. The South African music industry is this morning a far poorer place, especially for those artists fighting against the corrupt mainstream music machine.

Graeme Gilfillan

Born into a Johannesburg legal family, Graeme rejected corporate law and began his own hybrid career around music rights protection, obtaining his academic qualifications in international copyright law. 

Graeme had as many enemies as the people he exposed for stealing artists’ royalties and rights. You will have heard many negative things about his brusque tongue and relentlessly confrontational demands for justice for music creators. But as a friend – and impeccable journalistic source – of almost 30 years, Graeme’s sudden death has left me reeling and bereft. He was a genius forensic investigator and a tireless fighter for social justice.

Graeme was integral to helping usher in a new era of independent local music in the 1990s. Through his company Nisa Global Entertainment he managed the business affairs of many kwaito stars and almost all the major house music deejays and producers, helping them establish their own companies, take control of their rights and publishing, and thrive, spreading their wings globally. He worked relentlessly and at a furious pace for roadies and divas alike. 

Graeme was central to the management of the music rights of a line of great female artists from Miriam Makeba to Brenda Fassie to Lebo Mathosa to Hlengiwe Mhlaba. They all counted him as their friend or ally, especially Mam Miriam, who he toured with and grew close to. He built an astonishing archive of their careers that he allowed me to access for decades in his offices, first at Mega Music in Newtown then at Time Square in Yeoville and finally at Sunnyside Office Park in Parktown. There he would educate visitors and rant for hours, rolling spliff after spliff and sharing what he knew about the industry. Which was a scary amount.

In later years Graeme persistently exposed South Africa’s deeply unscrupulous and mismanaged rights collection societies. He was profoundly involved in restoring and protecting the work of the late great visual artist Dumile Feni. (See some of the fruits of this labour over here: https://www.dumilefeni.co.za/ ) 

His work on what happened to Mhlaba’s plundered rights would lead to him recently obtaining his PhD at mind-boggling speed. He was producing academic paper after academic paper in the past months, exposing systemic rot in rights collection in South Africa and internationally, producing damning audits for big names that included the likes of Duran Duran. (Some of these papers can be accessed here: https://nisaonline.com/documents/)

Graeme was particularly delighted by his new title of Dr Gilfillan, producing a big smile with missing teeth and scruffy hair, which he cared less about. He never liked to put himself in the media unless it was absolutely necessary and he wasn’t willing to do interviews on camera any longer, but in our last meetings in April we conducted several hours of audio interviews which will form part of the next phase of my writing, on Brenda Fassie in particular. 

As anyone who knew Graeme will tell you, when you said hello and asked how he was, he would always answer uniformly and with great vigour: “Pumped up, thundering, mint condition, no issues. And how are you, Squire?” 

It’s unimaginable to think he is gone. Rest in power #GraemeGilfillan. Your work is done and will live on. Corruption will sleep easier tonight.

Bokani Dyer’s Radio Sechaba broadcasts to the nation

”Nation-building”. These days, that term is heard most often either from sweaty politicians claiming their party can achieve it, or from sneering media voices milking privileged audiences for a cheap laugh. Like much of the language that held real meaning for those who struggled against apartheid, it’s been stolen from us, devalued and turned into a weapon to silence us.

So it’s nice to hear it reclaimed sincerely and powerfully again.

Bokani Dyer’s latest album, Radio Sechaba, out from Brownswood on May 12 (https://bokani-dyer.bandcamp.com/album/radio-sechaba ) is about nation-building. Not as some bland, unproblematic, rainbow unicorn – and not as something that raises xenophobic walls either – but as something that can and needs to be achieved together if we’re going to get out of the very real mess the music also acknowledges we’re in right now.

The inspirations for Radio Sechaba, Dyer explains, came from multiple sources, including Nina Simone’s injunction that an artist’s duty is to serve their community, and his own Masters’ researches into whether and how young musicians today are “using their composition to address social issues” (https://blackmajor.co.za/artist/radio-sechaba/)

The album’s 14 tracks, Dyer says, represent “the first album of mine that is really drawing on all my influences and putting them into one thing” (https://twistedsoulmusic.org/2023/05/10/bokani-dyer-set-to-release-new-album-radio-sechaba-this-friday/ ). So we hear the club grooves and chill space of the Soul Housing project era, and a generous helping of the afrobeat (not “Afrobeats”, rather, the old-skool Fela-style stuff) that emerged so strongly on 2018’s Neo-Native. And, every now and again, echoes of music that was around when Dyer was just a Botswana baby, but when dad, saxophonist Steve Dyer, was working in radical, Gaborone-based arts collective Medu (http://researcharchives.wits.ac.za/medu-art-ensemble).

We hear all that from big, pan-African and multilingual cast of musicians that changes from track to track: Linda Sikhakhane, Mthunzi Mvubu and Steve Dyer on reeds, Sithembiso Bhengu and Lwanda Gogwana on horns, Amaeshi Ikechi, Benjamin Jephta and Tendai Shoko on basses, Keenan Ahrends, Reza Khota, Aldert du Toit , Julio Sigauque and Shane Cooper on guitars; Siphelele Mazibuko and Tirotenda Dambareunga on drums; Gontse Makhene and Tlale Makhene on percussions, Keorapetse Kolwane, Damani Nkosi and Yonela Mnana on voices; guest Botswana group Seeretsi and the Natives; and probably more I’ve missed.

Dyer is composer, and features on piano, keys and voice. He does more singing (in English and Setswana) than on any previous album: this one is about conversing with his audience and he needs words to do that. And there’s a lot less out-front piano soloing. His role is often much more akin to Fela’s arranger and keyboard man, Dele Sosimi, juxtaposing and layering those voice and brass choruses and call-and-responses over rhythms that, when you concentrate, are far more intricate than they first sound. The best places to hear Dyer’s piano stretching out are on Ke Nako and a soaring, lyrical celebration of beauty called Picturesque.

The most explicitly political track is Mogaetsho (“Fellow-countryman”), addressing leaders who “seem to love us only when they need us”. Go rileng? (“what went wrong?”) it asks. Using that form of address, Dyer says, “makes the sense of betrayal much stronger” (https://www.newframe.com/political-songs-mogaetsho-bokani-dyer/ ).

But the album’s narrative arc never loses the nuance of complex situations. It’s not enough to express anger, we also have to survive to find the truths in our situations (Be Where You Are), bond together as humans ( State of the Nation ) be strong, breathe, get out of the prisons of the mind, and Move On.

And so the urgent Afrobeats underpinning righteous anger and challenging questions alternate with spaces where we can inhale and think: the sensuality of Picturesque; the invocation of higher powers as Ikechi sings to Spirit People; the soulful reflection of Victims of Circumstance; the calm resolution of You are Home.

There’s irony and hope in Ke Nako. Irony, because that was the slogan that got everybody out to vote in the first democratic election; hope, because the hour, despite the cynics preaching paralysis, has not yet passed. There’s still time to do something. “If we combine our forces in unity, we can build the nation we want to see,” Dyer reflects. After that, the song says, “you will see what we can be.”

And then there are those blasts from the past.

Yonela Mnana’s bluesy, churchy, singing on Ho Tla Loka recalls the yearning gospel that used to belt from cassette-players in Gaborone kombis back in the Medu days: reminiscent of somebody like Johnny Mokhali on Nkwale Morena, but much jazzier. Resonance of Truth has an intro and rhythm patterns that for two-thirds of the number take you right back to Whispers in the Deep days, with Sigauque’s guitar catching the Stimela vibe perfectly (but with the added pili-pili of Fela-style horns). And why not? Whispers was the granddaddy and best of all that era’s rebel pop. It dovetails perfectly with Dyer’s call-out of today’s frantic social media-driven efforts to try “to be everyone’s favourite”.

Amogelang is a gorgeous piece of old-style African Jazz swing: the kind of thing Steve Dyer used to play with Shakawe at the Blue Note, with Ntate Jonas Gwangwa on vocals.

Most poignantly, the album closes with an elegy for Medu,. Not every overseas listener will get the significance of this track. Medu formed one root for precisely the kind of thoughtful creative praxis Dyer’s seeking, crafting an aesthetic where beauty, struggle and change walked hand-in hand. It’s an elegy because the organisation was targeted by the SADF for a vicious 1985 cross-border raid where visual artist Thami Mnyele and 11 others were murdered.

It’s the right place to close an outing that looks back, looks inward, but still has the clear eyes to look hopefully and joyfully forward too. As Medu did.

Mourning and Remembering Musa Manzini

Just a short time before his 52nd birthday, bassist, teacher and composer Musa Manzini died yesterday. For many years, Manzini had courageously lived with brain cancer, never letting it drive him into despair, but rather using his own experiences to bring hope to those living with similar conditions. Manzini was a fine musician, who played across genres with the best of his peers. He taught and throughout his life supported community music initiatives. My solidarity goes out to his family, friends in music, former students and all whose lives were touched by this gentle talent. Hamba Kahle.

Asher Gamedze: bringing the turbulence and pulse of life and music together

It’s interesting what outside commentators sometimes make of our jazz. Take the latest release from activist-drummer Asher Gamedze, Turbulence and Pulse https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/turbulence-and-pulse, out on May 5th from US indie label International Anthem. Two early reviewers, John Morrison on Bandcamp Daily and Jon Turney in London Jazz News, both think the music’s great. But both seem much more ill at ease discussing the album’s politics.

Morrison notes “By now jazz  as a musical metaphor for liberal (sic) ideas about democracy is a well-worn and widespread cliche. Despite this, there is something to be gleaned…” Turney has even more ants in his pants. Noting that the opening and title track serves as a “manifesto…” to “inspire listeners to work together politically to forge their own futures,” he continues: “This would be a fine thing, but even if the results don’t quite pan out like that, it is an inspiring set.”

Other overseas critics didn’t find the politics of Gamedze’s debut, Dialectic Soul, quite so bewildering. Scholar of Black culture Robin D G Kelley, who contributed the liners to that, was so caught up in the album’s discourse he confessed to listening dozens of times. Another distinguished scholar, Fred Moten, provided the characterisation of Gamedze’s drum style that makes the title for this, Gamedze’s third, outing.

But for the two chaps I quote earlier, it feels almost as if they’re embarrassed to talk about the politics stuff. Turney’s harrumphing about how “the results don’t quite pan out like that’ isn’t supported by anything else in his column. Morrison’s terminology evades the difference between collective impro as a “metaphor” and what it actually is – an enactment.

If you treat the politics of Turbulence and Pulse as a discrete element – an aside, a distraction or a “cliche” – you simply aren’t listening to the music Gamedze and his comrades intend. Even a cursory look at Dylan Valley’s accompanying video

would make that clear. The politics are the music, and if it’s good music (which it is. Very.) that’s why!

That’s not an arcane relationship that only some ivory-tower theorist might hear. On the video, veteran activist Marcus Solomon and educator Lee-Ann Naidoo make it clear that anybody woke to the world around them can hear how time, rhythm and social relationships are spun from the same fabric. Time is clipped neatly into parcels by capital, to deprive workers of free time. The rhythms of the natural world and communal sociality, of learning, working and conversing, are broken by exploitation and violence. Music can discuss, disrupt or heal all that as musicians play through time to explore other times.  (The video below shows Gamedze’s Egyptian Another Time ensemble in 2020)

Turbulence and Pulse reunites the Dialectic Soul quartet: Gamedze, hornman Robin Fassie, philosopher of the saxophone Buddy Wells and bassist Thembinkosi Mavimbela. Improvising vocalist Julian Deacon Otis guests. There 11 tracks, and reprises of three of those with a different ensemble (Maurice Louca on synth, Adham Zidan on bass, Alan Bishop on sax and guitarist Cherif el-Masri) recorded live on a Cairo rooftop.

The collective process of music-making on every track reminds us, as the title track says, that “history, the movement of historical time, is produced by people” Themes are stated, passed along, changed, passed back, fragmented and brought together into something new.

Or something old. Many are anchored in the historic sounds of the Cape. There’s a delicious version of Alibama (which the late Hotep Idris Galeta credited as the region’s ur-jazz tune), grounded by the perfect parade-stepping of Mavimbela’s strings; if he didn’t have both hands on the bass, he’d be twirling an umbrella with one of them. There’s Buddy Wells’s searching, yearning solo on If It Rains…completely his own, yet praise-singing every Cape reedman from Nomvete to Ngqawana. There’s a more pointed homage to that latter on Out Stepped Zim , set above those cantering Xhosa rhythms the late saxophonist so often employed. That, surprisingly, sounds even more of a Xhosa blues on the Cairo rooftop, probably because of the presence in the texture of el-Masri’s guitar. The music lets us travel backwards and forwards in time, and across geographies, claiming space for new-made visions of what they were, and what they – and we – could be.

I don’t need to say how good the playing is. We know all these musicians and in this collective they each find the comradeship they need to fly, whether on a melody, in a chorus – or above, around or way outside those reference points. In their company, Gamedze carves beautiful, intricate meshes of drum sounds, pierced with space like a jali screen. What makes Turbulence and Pulse, through-and-through a drummer’s album, however, isn’t the fact that he “leads” it. Simply, it’s about time. And it’s about time people started declaring the politics in that, proudly and upfront.

Ubuntu: lots that’s new from Jonathan Butler

Some albums and gigs go on a fan’s calendar without even bothering to read the previews: no stress, consistently superb playing and never a doubt your money’s well-spent.

Jonathan Butler. Pic: Raj Naik

Guitarist/singer/songwriter Jonathan Butler’s been one of those through almost 30 albums as leader and too many concerts to count since 1975.

But though the quality of Butler’s singing and playing have only got better over time, there have been points in that half-century career when the experience has been – how can I say this politely without half of Cape Town rioting at my gates? – slightly predictable. Butler is canny about what works with his audience; his audience stridently demands all the old favourites they simply must hear again. You couldn’t help wondering what other kinds of material such a massive talent might be creating that he wasn’t playing tonight….

Well, hold on to your hat, because that other stuff is precisely what Ubuntu, released on April 28 by Mack Avenue https://mackavenue.com/products/jonathan-butler-ubuntu, delivers.

Recorded between Cape Town and Johannesburg and with bassist Marcus Miller in the producer’s chair (and, on some tracks, the bass chair too), Ubuntu presents 10 new tracks and a cover. Except jazz producers like Miller and players like Butler don’t do “covers”, so their version of Stevie Wonder’s 1972 Superwoman has a fresh vision, but with a sweet harmonica guest spot for Wonder himself.

There are other stellar guests beside Miller and Wonder: bluesman Keb Mo’, Yellowjackets’ Russell Ferrante, gospel singer Ntokozo Mbambo. My main complaint is that the full roster of predominantly South African artists who helped shape the sound isn’t anywhere in my Bandcamp download. We need to know who they all are, not just the stars!

In a refreshingly frank interview with Afropop music writer Mukwae Wabei Siyolwe, https://afropop.org/articles/the-rebirth-of-jonathan-butler-with-new-album-ubuntu which I recommend you read in full, Butler discusses the inspirations for this new music. Some are relatively recent. As for many artists, the sadness and isolation of the Covid era provoked both introspection and, he reckons, about four albums’ worth of new compositions, including on this release the moving, gospelly blues of When Love Comes In with Keb Mo’and the instrumental with Ferrante, Peace in Shelter, probably my favourite track because of how much of Butler’s playing it lets us hear.

But some inspirations track back further, to Butler’s beginnings as a ’70s teen star, to his spiritual awakening as a born-again Christian, and to his reflections about the smooth jazz envelope in which he was all too often confined. He landed in smooth jazz, he says, “without permission”…”But I didn’t really feel like I had found what I was really set for because I was kind of wrestling with smooth jazz… I was kind of wrestling not wanting to be there, because there was just so much of the same thing. There was so much of the same. Like each day, there’ll be a programmer who will program 93 beats per minute so all songs would be the same tempo. And I couldn’t see myself in the middle of that. I couldn’t see how I fit into that. And then slowly, it was about going through the process of listening to all my stuff that I was writing through lockdown.”

Particularly after learning about his Liberian ancestor, he decided it was time to ditch the musical “compromise thing. I’ve tried [that]… I was doing a song, I wrote a song called “Mandela Bay” on the Madiba album. It was a song for PE, for Port Elizabeth, because that name was going to be changed from PE, to Mandela Bay. And I asked Bra, the late Bra Hugh Masekela, to play on it. But the record company decided they wanted to change the group to fit the smooth jazz market. And that gave me such anger and it put me in a very angry state because you’re going to give this song to some white producer in San Diego to change what the true essence of the song is? So I’ve had to go through all of these processes and, as you can tell, I’m trying to just move away and move into my own journey wherever it’s taking me…”

Faithful Butler fans, however, needn’t fear that Ubuntu is unrecognisable from the performer they love. As much as any other musician, Butler is a product of all his influences: America, Africa, pop and jazz. There are still sweet smoochy ballads and up-tempo numbers for dancing. The love song No Tomorrow, though musically far more sophisticated, recalls irresistibly the kinds of love songs he was singing back in the ’70s. Silver Rain is reggae – but it’s South African reggae and, again, a bit of a blast from the past, with all of his current musical mind applied to it. Coming Home invokes mbaqanga: one of many places on this album where you can hear Joburg at least as much as Cape Town.

Mack Avenue and Miller have also given Butler a wonderfully crisp, crystalline production: at all points, you can really hear his guitar. That’s particularly beautiful on the acoustic closer, Our Voices Matter (inspired by the BLM movement).

The good news is, given that burst of composition Butler describes during Covid, that there’s much more where Ubuntu came from. Including, he says: “There’s one song I wrote for the great Allen Kwela, who I used to love as a father figure when I was a little boy in Joburg in Hillbrow. Allen was always around and Allen was one of the most amazing jazz musicians I ever heard. Nobody there knows Allen, talks about Allen Kwela. But this was where jazz really came from in Johannesburg back in the day.” 

One of the most influential of today’s South African guitarists homaging one of the most influential of the past? For that, I can hardly wait.

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