Bassist Benjamin Jephta: challenging stereotypes of ‘coloured’ and ‘free’

Giving an album an intriguing title can cut both ways. People might listen out of curiosity to find out what it means. Or they might decide they already know what it means and make a dumb arbitrary decision based on that.

Fortunately, bassist/composer/producer Benjamin Jephta’s release Born Coloured, not Born Free (https://benjaminjephta.bandcamp.com/album/born-coloured-not-born-free), released on June 2 on Akoustik/Elektrik leaves us in no doubt what his title means. There’s a beautifully-filmed EPK collaging ideas about those identity labels

Added to that, Jephta’s 2019 graduation presentation at Berklee, where he gained his Masters from the Global Jazz Institute, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGCAKj_KUas digs deeper into how he shaped the music to carry the thematic ideas.

Mitchell’s Plain-born UCT graduate Jephta released his debut, Homecoming, in 2015 https://benjaminjephta.bandcamp.com/album/homecoming-2 , and was Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz in 2017. After graduating from Berklee, he gigged around New York with the likes of Danilo Perez, Diane Reeves and more, before basing himself back in Johannesburg. He’s featured on multiple other albums, and scored the Cape Town nightclub-set TV series Skemerdans https://music.apple.com/za/album/skemerdans-season-1-music-from-the-showmax-original-series/1570005621.

The title and music of this new album address the tension between being born into a post-apartheid South Africa ostensibly freed from oppressive racial divisions, yet where community stereotypes still too often imprison people’s perceptions of others – and of themselves.

BCNBF is a half-hour long, six-track EP, featuring the bassist alongside US co-players saxophonists Nery Zidon and Stephen Byth, trumpeter Alonzo Demetrius, pianist Noe Zargoun, percussionist Tareq Rantisi and drummer Tyson Jackson.  

It opens with what the composer describes as the “harmonically ambiguous” An Incomplete Transition, swirling electric bass musical uncertainty around scholar Leonard Martin’s discussion of the “disease” of racial inequality. It’s piano and drums that underline the ambiguity, and Jackson manages beautifully the difficult task of establishing patterns that are simultaneously strong and profoundly uneasy.

The album ends with BCNBF Metamorphosis and Resurgence, in Jephta’s words “re-imagining a non-stereotypical identity. On Metamorphosis, Jephta’s acoustic bass stretches out with sweet lyrical intensity. On Resurgence, the opening, piano-led theme inescapably recalls the soundscape of Abdullah Ibrahim, Basil Manenberg Coetzee and all the other Cape Town artists who created music proudly and unmistakably of the Cape and the suburbs apartheid called ‘coloured’ – but so universal that the nation embraced it as an anthem of liberation. The melody has ‘future standard” written all over it, in equal parts memorable and deeply moving.

In between, we hear Ben-Dhlamini Stomp: the stomping rhythms recalling the Gauteng protest shutdown, and the title the nickname Jephta’s Black fellow-players gifted him. That naming reminds me of an anecdote from Pops Mohamed, a child of Johannesburg’s “mixed” Kalamazoo settlement. Playing with the late Sipho Gumede in the 1970s, Mohamed recalls the Zulu-heritage bassist jokingly asking him “Does my bass sound coloured enough?” Jazz musicians have long shared wry jests about the divisions imposed on them. As Jephta says on the video: “We’re all Black, man!”

The remaining tracks, a two-part tribute to Jephta’s grandmother Gadija, open with a gentle invocation of the Southeast Asian musical modes and rhythms that generation kept alive as part of a precious heritage. Yearning reeds segue in the second part into a complex shout of indomitable defiance. You leave the tune with a strong sense of a remarkable human being.

At the end, I found myself wishing for more music. In his Berklee lecture Jephta introduces a real rocker called Kwaito Klopse that isn’t on the EP – and maybe wouldn’t have fitted with the recording’s clearly intended thoughtful mood. But playing clever with diverse rhythm patterns is something good bass players excel at, and the short clip in his lecture whetted my appetite for Jephta’s extended take on that combination.

Maybe it’ll crop up on the next album. Until then, you can also hear a couple of rather different visions of some of this material as part of Jephta’s drumless trio set from his 2021 at House on the Hill, adding the texture of the guitar and the imagination of Keenan Ahrends, alongside knockout young saxophonist Simon Manana.

DSAC R16M Grammy banquet sounds the wrong note

Trombonist/vocalist/composer Siya Makuzeni: an NYJF graduate

Last week, I pointed out that one of the most developmental music events the country currently stages – the National Youth Jazz Festival – is currently without any local funding. As that blog was landing, so was another news story: that in late April the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture had spent R16 million on a “gala celebration” for 360 people to honour this year’s South African Grammy winners, Wouter Kellerman, Noncebo Zikode and Zakes Bantwini https://sundayworld.co.za/news/arts-culture-spent-r16m-on-grammy-celebration-gig/, as well as those who preceded them (a dazzling roster including Ladysmith Black Mambazo, DJ Black Coffee, and many more).

When questioned in parliament, arts minister Zizi Kodwa responded in a written reply that “more than two-thirds of the money”, was not in fact spent on the celebration itself, but “towards incentives and funding for the Grammy winners to develop cultural workers in their respective fields.”

Okay, let’s say it was a five million-rand banquet. So, only around fourteen thousand rand per diner: likely a mere trifle for dinner bills in the circles in which ministers and their coteries move. Even so, the food probably still included some larney version of rubber chicken, which seems to be a menu fixture at such events.

The contract for the banquet, according to the Parliamentary reply, went to an entity called Abstract Group Media and Marketing Events. Those of us who looked that company up discovered it had been very aptly named. It has no online existence so it’s impossible to check its credentials in terms of government tendering processes. No matter – that’s an issue for other forms of inquiry.

Drummer, bandleader and composer Ayanda Sikade: an NYJF graduate

In principle it’s heart-warming that DSAC, given its record under the previous incumbent, even noticed that many South African artists over the years have been bringing the honours home. A reasonably-budgeted celebration would be wholly appropriate and the Democratic Alliance – which raised the question in Parliament, but gave no mention at all to the arts in its February 2019 manifesto – might be accused of sounding petty and mean-spirited. Kellerman, Bantwini and Zikode are good people who worked hard for their win and work hard every day to sustain their music, and the decisions made by DSAC should never be pinned on them.  

So far, under the new man, DSAC has performed less objectionably than under his predecessor. There’s been no passive-aggressive blaming of artists for their own economic predicament, no blustering charges of “ingratitude”; no absurd, grandiose new flagpole projects. While staying fairly low under the radar, the new minister has turned up at the right events and said relatively unobjectionable things.

But there comes a point where “not as bad as Mthethwa” stops being enough.

First, there’s something fundamentally wrong with a departmental approach that seems to notice only creative achievements on a wholly commoditised global stage. A wealth of critical analysis has pointed out how the Grammies have, over the years, become increasingly irrelevant and only rarely find space for genuine innovation. Their exclusionary, Western-centric structure has frequently reduced global music wins to sidebars – even when those winners, as very often, are the most musically interesting.  

South Africa has many performers and cultural mentors keeping tradition alive, creating astoundingly good original music, and building young artists in the most impoverished of settings, who’ve never even qualified for a free bucket of Kentucky from DSAC. A department that was really doing its job would have ears to the ground, and notice what is happening here and now, without waiting for some American committee to tell them.

Second, the skills that can win a Grammy are not necessarily the same as the skills, experience and contacts that can successfully undertake cultural education and development. We’ve got vastly experienced unsung heroes who already do that  – for example Bra Monk Molelekwa in Tembisa, the Daveyton jazz academy, multiple community music and arts initiatives in Mamelodi, in Gugulethu, in Mdantsane…Why not, without waiting for three undoubtedly talented individuals to be recognised at the Grammies, plan to spend money (and from the minister’s “two thirds” comment, we’re talking ten million rand or so here) on those? And if you really feel you need some Grammy gloss, encourage synergistic relationships with the good and talented people who win international awards as part of that process.

Pianist and composer Bokani Dyer: an NYJF graduate

Third, there’s a serious process problem in that Parliamentary reply. The money, we were told, came out of the 2023/4 arts budget. Under what budget head? With what performance indicators and monitoring processes in place? The Mzansi Golden Economy Guidelines: Criteria, Eligibility, Processes & Systems set a R1 million threshold for funding individuals and R2 million for events and tours. How does the amount granted to the Grammy winners fit into those approval requirements? It would be nice for us to know; it’s essential for Parliament to know.

For three years from 2019, DSAC awarded multiple Grammy-winners Ladysmith Black Mambazo R12M a year to develop isicathimiya music (https://northernnatalnews.co.za/211995/funding-ladysmith-black-mambazo-used-spread-word-isicathamiya/). Their Mobile Music Academy has, according to a report of an interview with Sibongiseni Shabalala: “In Msinga and Pietermaritzburg…workshopped musicians and even found talented singers they have promoted with the help of the funding. In the Eastern Cape, at the University of Fort Hare, the students recorded a song with them.” Some of the funding also supported the inaugural 2019 event of the Cothoza Music Awards. Was that example of a grant to an undeniably community-rooted Grammy-winner (which has long paid its dues and has long experience in mentoring) able to support the academy’s transition from fixed grant support to sustaining its own activities? What’s it doing now? What did DSAC learn from that similar, earlier initiative and how is it feeding those learnings into this proposed funding for Kellerman, Zikode and Bantwini?

And so back to the un-funded National Youth Jazz Festival, which has official reports galore, and living examples on stages everywhere to support its record of cultural development. Somebody who knows what these kinds of activities cost, gave me a rough estimate: to do an NYJF properly, around R2M a pop.

So we could have that banquet, and those (as yet pretty nebulous) plans for cultural development for R16 million. Or maybe we could have had eight guaranteed years of NYJF. You choose.

Rhythm leads the way for Makhanda Jazz 2023

I’m not sure how they did it, but without that historic Standard Bank branding and support for anything except Young Artist for Jazz, saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane, the National Arts Festival main team and Alan Webster’s jazz team have succeeded in creating a diverse and intriguing NAF Jazz programme for 2023 ( https://nationalartsfestival.co.za/category/naf2023/jazz-festival/ ). Two weeks to go…

Kesivan Naidoo leads a big-band

The most irrational of the Standard Bank funding withdrawal decisions was to cut support for the National Youth Jazz Festival. You might argue that the adult, performance-based festival, could more easily find alternative branding – though in this post-Covid, eroded-disposable-income world, that wouldn’t be true either. But the Youth Festival is developmental, and bringing students (many without high family incomes to back them) for a week-long winter jazz school from all over the country just isn’t possible without ample support. Logistics had to change. What the long-term impact might be needs a study over a few years of any shifts in the demographics of participants and the two ensembles – youth and schools – selected specially for the event…  

Nevertheless, there is still a Youth Jazz Festival, with National Youth Jazz Band led by Bokani Dyer and a Schools Jazz Band led by Marc de Kock both performing. In addition, youth bands from eight high schools and other youth music projects, and university jazz ensembles from Stellenbosch, UKZN, UCT and UP also take the stage, as does a big vocal ensemble of youth participants. Without doubt, this is the most important work that jazz at Makhanda does. It has no exact equivalent anywhere else, and corporates ought to be clamouring to help pick up the tab for future years.

Paul Hanmer…70 minutes of solo magic

Aapart from Sikhakhane – who gets two concerts to expand on his compositional vision – and trumpeter Darren English with a quartet, the emphasis this year falls heavily on the vision of those who play strings and skins. Drummer Kesivan Naidoo leads a big-band as well as participating– as do most others named here – in several other ensembles.

Bassists Carlo Mombelli (with his Chamber ensemble including Sisoke Xonti and Kyle Shepherd), Shane Cooper (in the Magic Number trio with Marc Stucki and Andreas Tschopp), and Banz Oester (with the Rainmakers, including Afrika Mkhize and Ayanda Sikade) all get their own shows, as do guitarists Reza Khota (in a trio including German saxophonist Tara Sarter ) and Mageshen Naidoo (in the KEMistry quartet including Swiss-based bassist Eva Kress).

Wonderfully, there’s also an hour of solo piano from Dr Paul Hanmer: a long-overdue acknowledgment of how much he now has to say, after composing and playing in every possible context you can imagine, from jazz small-group to chamber groups, orchestra and oratorio choirs since Trains to Taung.

For the voices, Natalie Rungan and Babalwa Meintjies have their own shows and (although she’s on the main rather than the jazz programme) Msaki is this year’s SBYA for Music, appearing on several of the Festival’s programmes, including a Cathedral performance of her choral Bawo Khusela project.

Tara Sarter…playing with Reza Khota

Makhanda has created a jazz programme that all of us who follow the genre will acknowledge is representative of South African jazz today. It showcases our new and highly individual voices, for whom the ’80s generation (Hanmer, Mombelli) are now the veterans and pioneers, drawing musicians together in intriguing combinations across jazz generations and across nations. It’s always been the most interesting of our festivals in that respect, and despite resource constraints, it still hasn’t lost the magic.

But, seriously, funders, why should something this good have to struggle for cash, when commercial pop-fests and scams that don’t even materialise as actual events seem to find it so much easier to get support?

Robin Fassie’s Intwasa: still becoming

Robin Fassie. Photo: Earl Abrahams

Some of the most beautiful melodies in South African jazz have been written as tributes. Think of Feya Faku’s tribute to his jazz predecessors, Song for my Fathers, or Sydney Mnisi’s tribute to his mother, Ida (a song so moving and memorable it should be part of our standards canon and be heard far more often). Now there’s another: trumpeter Robin Fassie’s AP’s Lament for the late pianist Andre Petersen, which appears on his 2018-recorded, March-released debut EP, Intwasa(The Becoming) https://music.apple.com/za/album/intwasa-the-becoming/1650198409

AP’s Lament, though, wasn’t written after the pianists death two years ago. It was written by Fassie with mentor Petersen’s encouragement way back, as part of the application process for a scholarship. (Hear that tale and several others as part of Nothemba Madumo’s informative UJX interview at https://omny.fm/shows/urban-jazz-experience/ujx-robin-fassie )

That doesn’t diminish the emotion with which the ensemble lands on Intwasa, played by Fassie’s Norwegian college and Scandinavian touring mates, pianist KjetillMulelid, guitarist Roar Bernsten, bassist Asmund Eikill – sounding particularly gorgeous here – and drummer Sondre Veland.

Invoking Faku’s name is no accident. Fassie acknowledges the veteran trumpeter as a hero, and his compositional style will certainly speak to Faku fans. There’s a lot of the same impassioned romanticism, carried by melodies that unfold gently rather than slapping you round the ears with urgent blaring and technical triple-tongued wizardry.

Not that Fassie doesn’t have the chops. What listeners sometimes ignore is that any instrument demanding precise breath control, like the trumpet, can sometimes be more difficult to play soft and slow than loud and fast. (Miles’ velvet entry into a song took practice and hard study to perfect). If you want to hear Fassie do the latter, listen to his jagged, furious impro on Final Conclusion (or to some of his more recent collaborations with, for example, Asher Gamedze).

But for most of this outing, it’s the contemplative, melodic side of his artistry Fassie foregrounds. He confessed to Madumo that he’s “an Rn’B artist at heart” – he loves a good romantic ballad and there are plenty of them here. That’s appropriate for the thematic story told, which, as the album title says, is about how he became the man and musician he is now, from early youth playing in carnival marching bands (Klopse Jol), through church ( The Altar Call) to his passage into manhood ( the more intricate harmonic structure of Intlungu Netlupheko ).

Even the opener, Klopse Jol, isn’t as much of a jol as you might expect from its name. It has a wonderfully memorable melodic opening hook which, I’d guess, might make it a radio favourite. And it’s about childhood memories, so there’s gentle nostalgia before guitarist Bernsten moves the pace up a notch to where klopse rhythms definitely get played with for a while under Fassie’s energetic solo. On Klopse Jol , there’s no mistaking Fassie’s sound: a bright, brassy and definitively Cape trumpet.

It’s not always easy for musicians from the global North to get our sounds – particularly something like the klopse rhythm – but Fassie’s collaborators do so brilliantly. They understand and allude accurately to what the trumpeter’s composition evokes, but they’ve no problem moving out into freer patterns and progressions, and back again. Those fluid transitions speak clearly of empathetic collaboration and strong friendships.

Nearly five years have passed since Fassie recorded Intwasa, but it’s no less worth hearing for that. It’s an impressive debut, but we know from his performances since that Fassie, like any good instrumentalist, is still, and always will be, becoming. The next album will show us where and how he’s travelled since. Looking forward….