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.