Joburg Joy of Jazz: brave survivor; conservative vision

Standard Bank Johannesburg Joy of Jazz deserves massive congratulations for surviving for so long, including through Covid, when they developed the genius original concept of a rooftop carpark event. That, truly, was the best way of dealing with social distancing while keeping the music alive devised anywhere in this country.

The 2023 programme has just been announced, with the event set for 29-30 September and tickets starting at R800-odd a day (an ‘early-bird offer’ if you can book before the end of August), before you add in the cost of transport, meal and drinks.

Sandton Convention Centre – the cold heart of alienated consumerism

Joy of Jazz happens in Gauteng’s ugliest and most music-unfriendly venue, the Sandton International Convention Centre, bang in the middle of the city’s most overpriced, alienating and consumption-obsessed area. That’s only one of the distances it has travelled from its intellectual roots in the avant-garde-minded Pretoria jazz appreciation societies, and from the vote of confidence for the inner city it offered when hosted in Newtown.

But to be fair, if the aim was, as declared, to build a “world-class” festival, both Pretoria and Newtown offered limited options for going to scale. There’s a reason the term “world-class” is such a red flag; it almost always translates as “no poor people visible”. You’ll see armies of security guards energetically ensuring that’s true on the pavements of Sandton. Newtown (at the time Joy of Jazz left) was something of a derelict building site. But with the Market Precinct reconstruction and Newtown Junction now complete, it is certainly that no longer. Newtown would again make a very decent jazz festival district, with an acoustically superb set of theatre halls, a mall plaza for open-air sounds, and a range of cafe music spaces including the legendary Niki’s. And the rough, tough, diverse, genuinely stylish embrace of the real city all around.

The 2023 programme reflects the character the event has increasingly taken on since it left the hands of the jazz fundis in Pretoria: it’s the most conservative of our festivals.

Johnny Dyani: remembered by Herbie Tsoaeli

That’s not to say the actual playing will be conservative – it never can be, with such highly talented musicians on stage. Names such as Carlo Mombelli, Zoe Modiga, Billy Monama,. McCoy Mrubata, Titi Luzipo, Herbie Tsoaeli and Nduduzo Makhathini (only some of the 20plus lineup; see: https://www.joyofjazz.co.za/home ) will play their hearts out and display their usual astounding creative imaginations. Whatever you expect, you’ll be surprised and delighted by what you actually hear.

Look, rather, at the concept and curation. Five tributes: Monama to Allen Kwela; Luzipo to Gloria Bosman; Tsoaeli to Johnny Dyani; Max-Hoba to Jabu Khanyile; and a Hugh Masekela Tribute Band. All for great artists who more than deserve the accolades, but meaning that much of the repertoire will very likely be music the audience already knows. For organisers, that’s a shrewd way of ensuring that ticket-buyers don’t fear taking too much of a risk when spending nearly a thousand rand.

Let’s hope the Dyani, Kwela and Bosman shows aren’t as ‘safe’ as that tribute label suggests. Audiences don’t know the music of those artists so well. The bassist’s radical vision was hidden from South African ears by apartheid and censorship; the guitarist’s principled refusals to compromise meant he was often denied industry profile; and the singer’s composing prowess never received as much media spotlight as her stage image. What’s more, Luzipo, Monama and Tsoaeli have all shown themselves capable of innovative re-visioning.

There’s one novel programme element: featured deejaying. That’s a place where women – including the formidable Nothemba Madumo with percussionist Thomas Dyani – will certainly shine.

But the absence of any female instrumentalist leading an act (all the women headliners are vocalists) is starting to be something we should remark. South Africa is blessed with brilliant female singer/composers but that abundance shouldn’t overshadow for festival bookers the growing presence of equally brilliant female instrumentalists, who don’t get half so many big stages.

All the South African artists are known quantities, and something noticeable by its absence from the press release is any role allocated to development bands inside the actual festival space. Community youth and student outfits used to have stages in the corners of each Convention Centre level. They weren’t particularly well showcased, but they were at least there. Ironically, Standard Band continues to back this event but has retracted support for national youth jazz development at Makhanda. You’d think the bank might seek at least a bit of developmental bang for their buck at such a highly commercial event as the Sandton one…

Dutch reedman Alexander Beets

Of the overseas guests, Alexander Beets and his quartet will provide the kind of intelligent jazz interpretations that have long delighted Dutch jazz afficionados, and Andreas Vollenweider will be, well, Andreas Vollenweider: dreamy Swiss New-Age harpist. American Robert Glasper is a fine, thoughtful pianist, composer and producer. Hopefully his absurd, offensive 2017 statement (he explains at: https://www.facebook.com/robertglasper/posts/im-not-much-of-a-writer-i-usually-let-my-music-speak-for-me-its-what-i-do-best-a/10154647660178040/) that “women don’t love a lot of soloing” won’t stop him letting those of us (of all genders) who do, hear some.

If you can afford it, go to Sandton. Artists need your love and you need to hear some of the beautiful, intelligent music they’re making. But big commercial festivals aren’t the places to look for curatorial risk-taking: there’s too much money at stake. Split different ways, that R8-900 day ticket could support more community, specialised and experimental music events – with rather more accessibility too.

The 7th Mzansi Jazz Awards: not about the winners, but the richness of the list

It’s Mzantsi Jazz Awards time again. The growth of this programme from “Has anybody even heard of these?” seven years ago, to today’s prominent and prestigious event, deserves congratulations; that kind of building takes hard work.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m not a fan of awards, because of their implication that music-making is a competitive sport rather than a collective enterprise, and that winners are in some abstract sense “better” – rather than – as is usually the case – simply different and more in accord with the taste of whoever is doing the judging that year. I’m wary of the preconceptions and biases of judging panels. The SAMAs used to give us multiple horrible instances of that, although since they’ve lost interest in jazz and made it some kind of side category, the results have been a great deal more representative of what’s really happening in the music. I’m even more wary of public votes, which, in these digital days, are all too easy for record labels or fan factions to game, however many safeguards the organisers put in place.

But all awards programmes serve two extremely useful purposes, both of which rest not in the winners but in the lists themselves. For artists, they’re a valuable marketing tool: get on that list and you have public profile on a crowded landscape. And for music listeners, they tell us who’s around that we might not yet have encountered. That’s particularly important now so much South African jazz is self-published and doesn’t, otherwise, always achieve national reach.

In that context, the role of regional and community jazz radio can’t be underestimated. The MJAs have a category for jazz broadcasters – this year’s finalists are Kofifi-FM, Alex-FM and Thetha-FM – and that reflects the symbiosis with and importance of knowledgeable jazz broadcasters in understanding what their constituencies are digging and telling the rest of us about it. When global mega-platforms manipulate so much of our music access, the truly locally-rooted jazz broadcaster is an unsung hero. All jazz awards programmes should recognise them.

The work of four artists I’ve reviewed in these columns features in the finalists’ lists: Prince Lengoasa’s Lockdown Chronicles https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2022/07/31/prince-lengoasa-and-lockdown-chronicles-at-last-an-album-as-leader/; Eldred Schilder’s Tenziah https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2023/02/05/eldred-schilder-tenziah-no-more-fretting-at-the-back-of-the-stage/, Mthunzi Mvubu’s 1st Gospel https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2022/12/03/mthunzi-mvubus-1st-gospel-preaches-warmth-and-soaring-emotion/and Robin Fassie’s Intwasa https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2023/06/04/robin-fassies-intwasa-still-becoming/; some in multiple categories. But all the names are a rich reference library for grasping the breadth of the church that South African jazz today comprises.

Deelee Dube: bringing life back to neglected lyrics

“Church” isn’t an inappropriate metaphor: there’s lots that’s gospel flavoured, including Soweto Gospel Choir director Siyanqoba Mthethwa’s album Coming Out, and pianist Mthobisi Mthalane’s performance Live @ Sagiya. There were many releases I hadn’t yet come across, and that list has given me a catch-up listening list that will likely fill my whole month until the awards ceremony on 26 August at the Soweto Theatre. Find the full finalists’ list here: https://twitter.com/ZaJazzAwards/status/1682709145818890241– it’s the kind of list where every one’s a winner.

I’ve only just started that catch-up, but two nominees who have already caught my ears are vocalists Deelee Dube and Bokang Ramatlapeng. The first-named is the only British winner so far of the Sara Vaughan Award. But we can claim her as one of ours, since she’s the daughter of the late pianist-composer Jabu Nkosi and the grand-daughter of legendary bandleader Zacks Nkosi. Her version of Ray Noble’s Cherokee

https://deeleedube.bandcamp.com/track/cherokee-3

resurrects the song’s lyrics, long neglected in favour of competitively breakneck horn solos that never ever quite match Clifford Brown’s original. Dube lets the song breathe, respects the story it tells, and demonstrates classic but still imaginative vocal technique.

Ramatlepeng was this year’s National Youth Jazz Band vocalist at Makhanda. Her Bana ba Nthabiseng

does what all the best South African jazz is doing these days: mining tradition but not afraid to draw from contemporary sonic risk-taking at the same time. Hers is work I’ll be following with great interest in future – and there will be others of whom that’s also true when I hear them.  

Finally, if you’re in Durban this afternoon, the International Film Festival is showing a remastered version of the 1992 South African movie Mapantsula. Apartheid censors made sure that tale of a gangster torn between self-enrichment and solidarity with his community in struggle never had general release in this country. What I’d like to draw attention to, though, is the soundtrack. Now impossible to find, the film’s music was largely shaped by the vision of Nana Coyote and Thapelo Kgomo. Coyote’s voice sounds throughout, with those of Dolly Rathebe – who also displays some magnificent acting chops – Stella Khumalo, Marilyn Nokwe and more, alongside instrumentalists including guitarist Kenny Mathaba and reedman Mandla Masuku. Now the movie is back, can some label please give us access to the soundtrack album again too – it’s the sound of an era? Here’s a taste:

Ian Bruce Huntley: peerless cartographer of South African jazz (1939-2023)

Ian Bruce Huntley died last week, aged 84. You may not know that name, but if you care about the history of South African jazz, you should.

At 21, Durban-born Huntley invested in his first camera and shortly thereafter a reel-to-reel tape recorder. From 1964, for a solid decade  he faithfully documented the jazz music he loved, mainly in Cape Town – which, as apartheid restrictions more swiftly closed down Joburg venues, for a time became the epicentre of South African modern jazz, until apartheid bit there, too. Huntley’s photographic landscape broadened, with later visits to Port Elizabeth, New Brighton, Durban and Johannesburg, but more intermittently, as mental stress made it increasingly harder for him to engage with the outside world.

With the detail-oriented eye of a mapmaker (his day job) Huntley amassed a peerless archive of the sounds and of the people. It’s all there: the proud, defiant stylishness of communities surviving on the razor’s edge of legality; the restless, intelligent innovation of the music itself, and the intimate moments of a shared glance on stage, or a shared moment of transcendence among audience members.

In 2013, jazz researcher Chris Albertyn, photographer Cedric Nunn, and the Electric Jive organisation published a selection of Huntley’s photographs in a book titled Keeping Time. Electric Jive is the custodian of that work, and an open-access collection of around 60 hours of the recordings https://electricjivehuntleyarchive.org/ . The sounds travel through time to us from long-disappeared venues whose names are now legendary: the Room at the Top, Zambezi, the Ambassador and more. Words can’t do justice to the sound archive: visit it, listen and download.

Albertyn’s biographical essay in Keeping Time tells us more. Huntley did not only record the scene around him. He contributed in far more tangible ways, providing a crash pad for black musicians stranded in town after curfew: a hospitable refuge to spin discs and talk music. He bought Winston Mankunku a saxophone; hosted Kippie Moeketsi when he visited from Johannesburg and more.

Even in his later years, he kept in touch with the scene, and with old friends from those days such as saxophonist Ronnie Beer – he was the source for the sad news of Beer’s death in 2018. He rang me up a couple of times over the years, to add a small reminiscence or an extra bit of information to a column I’d published: unfailingly courteous in his very old-school way, but shy to spend much time talking about himself.

Ian Bruce Huntley photographed in 2013 by Cedric Nunn

Huntley’s life and his passing have lessons for us all. Anybody who cares enough can be a historian. He had a camera, a tape recorder and passion, and that was enough to create a priceless archive of the period music historians sometimes dismiss as “silent” because many of the big names who retain profile today had already gone into exile. But listen to the music and look at those ecstatic crowds. The “silence” is instantly crowded and clamorous with audacious notes and elegant, assertive, diverse people.

Huntley continued to contribute, by sharing his archive accessibly through the site and the book. The audio site carries no high fees, no need to be a registered graduate researcher with umpteen letters of recommendation. The people the music was originally made for and their children and grandchildren can continue to hear it. It’s not simply a jazz archive, it is part of the history of South Africa.

And it reminds us of the power of the image as a historical resource in its own right. Each of his pictures, truly, is worth a thousand (or more) words for what it declares and connotes. It was always going to be too soon for Huntley to pass, but the visual and sonic legacy he has left us still resounds with all the life, energy and painstaking dedication he put into it. Hamba Kahle.

Azania: 28 minutes is too little of iPhupho L’Ka Biko

This epidemic of EPs is frustrating. Nobody blames the musicians. The economics of getting an EP out are far more manageable given the current diminished state of our post-Covid music scene. It’s unarguably better in marketing terms to have music out there than to sit on all your tunes until you’ve amassed enough funds for a full album. But when the music’s good – as it has been on every EP I’ve listened to this year – it makes a listener discontented to have to settle for so few tracks.

And so it is, again, with the long-awaited debut EP release from seven-year-old outfit iPhupho L’ka Biko, Azania https://music.apple.com/za/album/azania-ep/1691593585 .

For music-buyers, especially those outside Joburg (or outside South Africa), iPhupho L’ka Biko rose over the horizon with their appearance on the Brownswood compilation Indaba Is

For listeners in eGoli, though, that was simply an “it’s about time” moment. The band has been around, in various combinations (you can see anything between seven and dozen musicians on stage) since 2016, landed with a major splash at the National Arts Festival in 2018, and followed that up with a rousing, joyous performance at Wits that brilliantly captured the ferment, anger and hope of the post-Fees/Rhodes Must Fall decolonising moment. https://www.newframe.com/iphupo-lka-biko-songs-past-present-and-future/

The band’s name was inspired partly by Moses Molelekwa’s tune Biko’s Dream

But much more, the name comes from the politics embodied in those two words: the vision of and aspiration for a different kind of liberated nation, realised in a spiritual and intellectual sense as well as any mere paper one. Calling the EP Azania expresses that line of thinking perfectly.

The five tracks include the band’s long-time favourite, uThixo uKhona, recorded at the Indaba Is session with that personnel and a distinctly Malopoetic feel in the way it melds exploratory jazz improvisation with voices that sing from the heart of the people.  The four others, a mix of leader, bassist, Nhlanhla Ngqaqu’s, old and new compositions and public domain songs drawn from the history of communities in struggle, include another well-established audience favourite, Braam Streets and, in the title track, a rousing militant march. Those feature a personnel better reflecting the group’s 2022/3 incarnation – though it’s an ever-changing family.

This is unmistakeably the sound of a Joburg band: brash, jazzy, imaginative and emotionally intense in equal measures. The dominant role of male vocalists Sibusiso Mkhize and Koketso Poho gives a far stronger gospelly flavour to the music – and, in that context, the female voices do more chorusing than leading. There’s nothing like, for example, the band’s Hymn for Queen Sandra or their subversion of the national anthem, where, live, we’ve heard the women lead with stunning experimental vocalese.

New trombonist Kgethi Nkotsi adds depth and imagination to the brass line – his solo on Azania is firmly in the spirit of the father of liberation trombone, Ntate Jonas Gwangwa. That whole number reads as homage to the kind of sound pioneered by the Amandla Cultural Ensemble, the PAC’s Mafube Arts Commune Band and Swapo’s Ndilimani. But this is a new generation, and this song is an inspiring call to arms for new struggles yet to be won.

Iphupho L’ka Biko: an ever-changing family

As an EP sampler of some of what iPhupho can do, Azania has been very intelligently curated. It has everything fans associate with the ensemble: righteous, inspiring messages, infectious melodies (Ngqaqu is a talented composer in that respect: you can’t forget his tunes) and an interplay of call and response between horns and voices, all tied up in a neat half-hour package. And it’s beautiful to – at last – have this band on record.

But Azania also demonstrates the limitations of the EP format. Shorter numbers dominate. Only on the last two tracks do we hear more of the extended impro and musical risk-taking that’s so compelling live. And, of course, only 28 minutes of music leaves us wanting much, much more.

Ngqaqu told UJX’s Nothemba Madumo  (hear the full interview at her podcast site here: https://www.metrofm.co.za/metrofm/show/urban-jazz-experience/ ) that an album is planned for next year. Till then, we’ll have to stay hungry. Catch the band live on this recent short SABC performance:

Morabo Morojele’s Three Egg Dilemma writes visceral terror – and hope

So, this is one of those weeks when I’m reading, rather than listening. When that happens, I’ve usually got a good excuse: either the book is about music or – as this week – it’s written by a musician.

The musician in this case is drummer (and development scholar and a few things besides) Morabo Morojele. The book is his second novel, The Three Egg Dilemma (https://jacana.co.za/product/three-egg-dilemma/), out in June, a full 17 years after his fiction debut, How We Buried Puso. The wait was too long, but the book is worth it.

Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor has noted the dangers of reductive genre labels, and the way the term magical realism, “gets slapped on to certain non-Western writing (…) just to give it a name” (https://mg.co.za/article/2016-09-16-00-nnedi-okorafor-writing-oneself-into-existence/). Both that label and another, ‘dystopian fiction’, fit somewhere in discussing Morojele’s novel, but neither alone or combined do they do the book any sort of justice.

There’s a ghost that pops in and out of the narrative, haunting one of the narrators, visible and tangible to some of his companions but not to others and serving as a terrifying (albeit frail) horseman of the apocalypse, trailing personal and community misfortune in its wake. And the book is set in a place identifiable as Lesotho, but not exactly the Lesotho of here and now. Some features – depopulated, isolated and impoverished rural areas, corrupt, rogue and simply absent authorities, even Covid – confirm the setting. Others take the consequences of a breakdown of community and the rule of law to a far more universal place that could be Lesotho, or parts of KZN after the June 2021 riots, or Sudan right now, or the fragments of the former Yugoslavia. Dystopia doesn’t only happen in Africa and never did.

The book can’t be reduced to either of those elements. It’s essentially the story of two people and their community negotiating that context. EG was pretentiously named ‘example’ by his father to echo the English translation of his surname and impose an unattainable ideal he can never live up to. EG is a well-educated, semi-retired been-to, living on his family plot. He coulda been a contender, in love and in status, but somehow it never happened. Now he lives on his modest means and, like many old bachelors, intermittently fulminates and obsesses about things around him, when he can be bothered. He can be snobbish and tetchy, but he’s not a bad man, and doesn’t always resist (though he often regrets) his genuine impulses to help others.

Enter Puleng-who-becomes-Pearl, driven from her own village by the same social breakdown. Stranded at the edges of one of the intermittent military rampages against EG’s community, she seeks help and he takes her in.

How We Buried Puso laudably foregrounded the strength of community women even when they were at the margins of the plot. The Three Egg Dilemma (a metaphor for how things might be apportioned out) does something far more subtle and subversive. It lays out all the myriad ways a kindly but all-too-human fellow like EG can stereotype and hurt a younger woman staying in his home (“the woman-child” he calls her): the nighttime fantasies, harassing her close to assault, unquestioningly accepting her household labour, even patronisingly gifting her his mother’s pearls.

Morabo Morojele

And then, close to the book’s conclusion Morojele lets Puleng sing out a powerful voice and agency that slaps back every single one of them. EG assumes she is uneducated but “Of course I have dilemmas,” she asserts. “All his books, he thinks I haven’t been to school.” And more: Puleng, as she describes her choices, completely deconstructs the three-egg dilemma. I don’t think Morojele would have titled the book as such if that gender relationship and that plot hinge weren’t central to the story he’s telling us.

To say more about where it all goes would spoil the read. No way is it an easy read anyway. Despite beautifully put-together words, the story of civil collapse is visceral, bloody, and most frightening for the way the writing conveys how we – all of us, everywhere, who think we’re immune – are just a stone’s throw away from that future. If we aren’t already living it as a present, that is.

EG and Puleng aren’t the only characters. There’s a motley collection of drinking companions, relatives, storekeepers, tenants, pastors and more, each responding in their own way to the convulsions around them. Mkhulu, the elder who keeps EG’s smallholding going, is the most clearly symbolic: his shrewd good sense and fortitude signal from early in the book that people have the capacity to fight through, cope and survive. But all, with all their idiosyncracies, are deftly and observantly realised. Even if they’re only with us for a few pages, we remember them. The subtext is: people matter.

There’s less explicit music in this text than in the first novel, but it’s still the writing of a musician and still carries a soundtrack: the sounds of gunfire; the sounds of rain; the sound of the ghost’s voice; even the many tiny sounds heard in ostensible night-time silence. The writing carries a reader into its soundscape:

“It rained and it rained as if to scour the earth and cleanse it of all its illnesses…inside the house, I could have danced to the rain dripping through the leaks in my roof, plock plock on the carpets and fast ting tings on the enamel vessel I laid about to catch the worst of it.”

Yes, Morojele’s still a drummer.

The Three Egg Dilemma has all the magical realism of its ghost, but the ghost is simultaneously a neat post-modern literary device, constructed “to point at and name things that you do not want to see.” And the narrative certainly paints a dystopia, some of which we already inhabit, the rest of which we all too easily could. But it also has another, wholly non-dystopian message.

Speculative fiction writer Cory Doctorow asked, in Walkaway, whether you’d visit your neighbour in the midst of apocalyptic disaster with a covered dish of food or a gun. The only way to survive , he argued, is to pick the dish of food even if your neighbour might pick the gun. “If she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can both [share a meal].”

Similarly this book – in a completely un-sunshiny way – tells us we’re not inevitably doomed. And in the end it’s the comradeship of your mates – both the solid ones, and the ones who are rat-arsed drunk, mean, miserable misfits – that’ll help to get you through.