Hamba Kahle Clement Benny: brilliant drummer, neglected by the archive

Clement Benny at a workshop in Goteborg, Sweden. Pic: Frankvision

I’d planned to write an extra blog this week, to congratulate the Mzantsi Jazz Awards winners (see the winners here: https://www.musicinafrica.net/magazine/mzantsi-jazz-awards-2023-all-winners#:~:text=Moreira%20Chongui%C3%A7a%20and%20Sandile%20Masilela,the%20Best%20Male%20Jazz%20Artist. ) This one, however, is a blog I never dreamed of writing, and one that – particularly so close after the passing of Sylvia Mdunyelwa – makes me very sad. On 27 August, jazz drummer and music educator Clement Gerard “Professor” Benny died.

I’ve written before about the false belief that these days there’s no need for music journalism because Google has everything. That belief is leaving a wasteland for future researchers into South African jazz and popular music, and attempting to research Benny’s life exemplifies that.

Benny was a great drummer who had played with all the South African greats, including Miriam Makeba and Abdullah Ibrahim when he was still remarkably young. But for a tall, talented, potentially imposing human being, he was also remarkably self-effacing. He never wasted time building his “brand” as performers are exhorted to in this commodified age. He just got on, quietly and craftsmanlike, with his passions: playing and educating.

And for that reason, no, Google doesn’t have everything.

The East London-born drummer earned his M.Mus from UCT in 2008. Before that, his playing had already scored multiple awards, including several from the Old Mutual Jazz Encounters and a Harvard-SA Fellowship Award. While in the USA, he studied on various rhythm and musicology programmes, not only at Harvard but also at Tufts and the New England Conservatoire.

Back home, he taught at Kingsmead College and Wits in Johannesburg, and after he moved back to the Cape, at Reddam and Alexander Sinton High, where he was Head of Music.

Throughout all that, he sustained dedication to his own community sports and music youth project: the S7VENONN9NE Music Institute.

He recorded with the proverbial Who’s Who: on Makeba’s 2006 Forever, with Mac Mackenzie’s Goema Captains, on Bheki Khoza’s Getting to Heaven Alive, Sydney Mnisi’s 20 Year Celebration, Andile Yenana’s Who’s Got The Map?, Andreas Loven’s District Six and the TRC’s Voices of Our Vision – and more.

Benny’s playing thus ran the gamut, from rhythms rooted in community history to both straight-ahead and experimental contemporary jazz. He explored innovative kit set-ups such as a rig with three snares, took pride in his work and was forthright when he felt fellow musicians were not being treated as they deserved.

On stage, he was a cool presence, riding the kit with elegant ease, not tempted to waste energy on extravagant signals of personality. The fire roared out through the sticks: in intricacy, kaliedoscopic dynamic shading, precision and passion.

And that, since I never interviewed him, is all I know. His loss so relatively young, is a tragedy; the lack of a more extensive archival record, almost equally so. Hamba Kahle to a respected, skilled and committed musician.

PLAYLIST

at VidaE caffe with Marcus Wyatt in 2009

With Carlo Mombelli at Wits in2011

At a Music Connection jam in 2011

With Mandla Mlangeni’s TRC in 2021

Tune Recreation Committee

Hamba Kahle Ncediwe Sylvia “Mama Kaap” Mdunyelwa 1948-2023

If we can hail Miriam Makeba as the vocalist of her generation who brilliantly embraced (and actually shaped) global music sounds, and Sathima Bea Benjamin as the experimenter who entranced the modern jazz scene, then Ncediwe Sylvia Mdunyelwa, who died on August 25, joins that pantheon of late, great South African singers as the consummate vocal classicist.

At the core of her music was a fierce insistence on respect for the tradition – of the international greats such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and of isiXhosa music – and for the song.

Langa-born Mdunyelwa grew up in those traditions. Her uncle, Aspro Sipoyo, led close-harmony vocal group The Semitones, her sister was a jazz singer, and her home became a meeting-place for musicians including bassist Victor Ntoni; family gatherings sounded loud with religious songs, and Ella, Sarah and Carmen Macrae were all regulars on the record-player. Singing along, the young Nce, became a singer even before she had articulated the ambition to be one.

Her first employment was at Cape Town’s Space Theatre as a receptionist, but there she both grew her experience as a vocalist, and developed a formidable acting career. Sunday afternoon jazz sessions at the theatre brought her into contact with pianist Merton Barrow (credited by many Cape Town jazz players as unstinting with advice and guidance) and drummer Maurice Gawronsky, and by her early 20s she was the regular vocalist with the regular band there, the Victor Ntoni Sextet, as well as guesting with other Cape Town jazz stars including the Ngcukana Brothers, Mankunku Ngozi and many more. But she was also drawn into some of the independent theatre productions that found a stage at the Space. This experience led to her talent being noticed and to later appearances in feature films including Born to Win and Freedom Road.

Her passion to pass on all this skill and knowledge to younger generations led her into community arts education – and that, in turn, led to a 1990 Canada trip at the head of a youth group, and eventually to a bursary for study at UCLA. After that, tours, including to the Berlin Jazz Festival and to Colombia in Latin America (where she was awarded for her community work in Cape Town), followed. 

Mdunyelwa released two albums, the 1998 Africa Diva, recorded live at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda (then Grahamstown), and the 2000 studio recording Ingoma, on the international Blue Note jazz label. African Diva is still available on Spotify, but, as she told jazz writer Warren Ludski a couple of years back, “I was asked if I got royalties from Spotify. I got nothing from Spotify.   I didn’t even know about Spotify.” (https://warrenludskimusicscene.com/interviews-3/who-is-the-local-diva-whos-done-it-all-sylvia-mdunyelwa-of-course/ ). Ingoma doesn’t seem to be available anywhere. A reissue is long overdue – ideally through a label that will make sure Mdunyelwa’s estate and legacy Trust actually do see some benefit.

The singer continued to perform in and around Cape Town, worked as a jazz broadaster at P4 and served on the board of Fine Music Radio. But increasingly her passion was for community education and activism: she served on her local street committee in Langa, and composed the impassioned anthem Where are the Children Now? to draw attention to the situation of Cape Town’s young people, caught in the crossfire of poverty, family insecurity and crime.

Check out the playlist below and you’ll hear what a powerful singer Mdunyelwa was. As I wrote at the start: she was a classicist of South African jazz song. Melody came first; lyrics were delivered with crystal clarity and emotional force; swing centered her versions of American classics (listen to Easy Street), but there was always a compelling subtext of respect for the Xhosa language and that community’s musicality. It all comes together beautifully on her rendition of Lakutshon’iLanga, which, for many people, remains the best ever.

Mdunyelwa was grittily realistic about the kind of support musicians could expect in South Africa. She told Ludski “Forget about government. They will promise you something and you’ll be dead before you get anything. When you die as a legend or diva or icon, they will come and talk at your graveside. I don’t want that.”

Nevertheless, I hope she receives multiple official tributes, accompanied by concrete support to ensure her legacy as a guardian of and activist-educator about the South African jazz tradition, however belated it all may now be. Lala Ngoxolo.

A SYLVIA MDUNYELWA PLAYLIST

1993, Germany: Easy Street

1998: Mbube from African Diva

2007 with George Werner and Duke Ngcukana: an isiXhosa Stormy Weather

2012: Lakutshon’ilanga

2017 at the Errol Dyers Memorial

Talking about her cultural development work on HeartFM:

https://www.facebook.com/dreamfuelmedia/videos/ma-sylvia-mdunyelwa-and-the-langa-arts-association-on-heart-1049fm-talking-art-a/1285431171515707/?locale=ms_MY

2022 with McCoy Mrubata: Thula

2023 at Guga S’Thebe: Where Are the Children Now?

The reissue of Joy lets us hear Ernest Mothle in his youthful prime

We’re starting, slowly, to fill in the blanks in the recorded history of South African jazz: the names not sufficiently remembered at home, and the texture of lives in exile, as well as the sounds of the music. One signal of this intensifying musical as well as musicological interest is Mayibuye iAfrika, the Sept 9 show guitarist Billy Monama is presenting at the Market Theatre as a retrospective of some of that exile music. Another is the hotly anticipated tribute to bassist Johnny Dyani planned by Herbie Tsoaeli for this year’s Joy of Jazz festival.

One more exiled bassist whose work remains less appreciated than it deserves to be is the late Ernest Mogotsi Mothle, also called Shololo. Now a reissue from London’s Cadillac Records, Joy, https://cadillac77.bandcamp.com/album/joy is set to add a vital missing piece of the jigsaw.

Mothle was born in Lady Selborn in 1941 and attended St Peter’s College in Rosettenville as a boarder, eventually playing bass in the Huddleston Jazz Band and founded the Dominoes vocal group. By the early ’60s, he was working with the cream of the jazz scene: in Alf Herbert’s touring show African Jazz and Varieties; with Mankunku, the Gordon Mfandu Trio and Early Mabuza’s Big Five: and – perhaps his biggest recording success before he left for exile – with the Heshoo Beshoo band on Armitage Road.

As for many other restless creative spirits in music, apartheid pressed down too hard anmd in 1972 Mothle left for exile in London. “I was just sick and tired,” he told me in a 2000 interview. “We were harassed by the pass laws…couldn’t work properly…always looking over your shoulder [for the police]…and of course I also wanted to expand my knowledge music-wise. I wasn’t interested in campaigning for becoming a star; I wanted to learn.”

Joy was recorded in 1976 with musical friends Mothle quickly made in London. “After playing with some guys [who just seemed to have got my number from somewhere], I met [trumpeter] Jim Dvorak, [alto saxophonist] Chris Francis, this drummer, Keith Bailey, and [pianist] Frank Roberts. We had… I don’t know…it was just an experience to play with those guys.” That’s the personnel of Joy.

The 1976 cover

Roberts was a particularly close and collaborator and friend: “…working with Frank Roberts and them falls under contemporary. I learned a lot. I think that style was started by people like Miles Davis: playing modal instead of bebop. [And Mongezi Feza] – things groups like Weather Report were doing after, we used to do with Mongs: he was an amazing person… Myself, him and Frank Roberts, we’d starve for a couple of days and then get a gig. And then after the gig we’d go to an Indian restaurant and really eat for all the days you didn’t eat before!.”

Mothle hated labels and the stereotypes they attracted, and that’s equally true of his (and everybody else’s) playing on Joy. It’s certainly jazz-rock from the days before that genre dissolved into anodyne “fusion”. It’s full of concentrated groove; some reviews have noted that it’s the rhythm section of Mothle, Bailey and Roberts that really make the album.

But it’s also a declaration of the multicultural nature of the ’70s London music scene (Dvorak was a draft resister from the US; Roberts was of Caribbean heritage) and, in particular, of the influence of South Africans on that scene.

Some arrangements – and some sounds – irresistibly evoke the South Africans with whom these musicians socialised and played. As well as the insistent intricacy of Mothle’s bass work throughout (listen to the two takes of Do You Know The Way), there are some remarkably Chris McGregor-ish arrangements – particularly the horn chorusing on Tribute, which also contains a really Dudu-like solo from Francis. It wasn’t copying; it was the sonic language this generation was developing together. And Roberts is certainly no McGregor copyist; his keyboard voice is highly individual, melding edgy, staccato modernism, classic swing and sweet lyricism – listen to the track PM.  

This 2023 re-release of Joy was remastered last year with the informed input of surviving band members, particularly Bailey. It presents two tracks heavily edited on the original LP in full for the first time, one previously unreleased track, You, and alternate takes of three others: in total, an hour and 20 minutes of music.

Ernest Mogotsi Mothle

Mothle worked part-time as a taxi-driver to stave off the starvation days, and played in every musical context he could access, from dance to film and TV and the political punk-pop of Scritti Politti, always with the aim to learn more and, as he said “eventually bring it back home.” Once back home, he was often the bassist of choice for visiting jazz stars such as Jackie Maclean, taught at the Mmabana Cultural Centre (though he felt “it’s a rural place and the people were not always ready for that kind of [music]”) and gigged until the complications of his diabetes confined him to home. Mothle died in 2011.

On Joy, you can hear him in his youthful prime: elegant, assured, complex and exploratory all at once, in a band whose freedom from genre cliches makes the music sound fresh and engaging even half a century later. The album belongs in any South African jazz fan’s collection. And if you want more of Mothle, here’s some:

1) with Trevor Watts Moire Music Drum Orchestra

2) on Country Cooking with Chris McGregor

3) in the background of a Dr Who BBC-TV episode with Courtney Pine

4)working with South African company, Dance for Life, in 1991

5) with Chris McGregor and the SA Exiles

6) with Scritti Politti on Rock-a-Boy Blue

7) in Acoustic Africa with Greg Georgiadis and Madala Kunene

8)with Heshoo Beshoo on Emakhaya

9) with Dudu Pukwana, Julian Bahula, Roberts and more

Herri9: a long-overdue tribute to Lefifi Tladi

We’re back with the printed – or at least on-screen – word this week, for the appearance of the ninth iteration of online music and arts (and much more) magazine, Herri. www.herri.org.za/9  . A creation of the Africa Open Institute, supported from the Social Impact Initiative (both at Stellenbosch University) and helmed by film-maker/writer/artist Aryan Kaganof, Herri commandeers the full potential of digital publishing (sound linked to and layered with image, words and movement across geographies and eras) to, as one of its own statements puts it, “answer the question: what does decolonisation sound like in the age of techno-hybridity?”

All the issues of Herri have been worth reading, so if you didn’t already know the publication, now should be your cue to jump in and explore.

Herri9 brings the customary constellation of editorials, reviews and other contributions orbiting more or less closely around a central theme. That theme, however, is particularly interesting to this blog because it’s what amounts to a festschrift – a tribute – to the art, music, poetry, intellect and lived politics of Ntate Lefifi Tladi, who turned 74 this year.

It’s pointless to provide a lengthy, pedestrian list and evaluation of every single item of contents here – all you need to do is click the link above to access that (under the red dot).

What’s more interesting to consider is what the techno-hybridity of the form brings to the party, and what discourse emerges from immersion in this wide-ranging and carefully curated collection of content to, for, about and around Tladi and his milieu.

We often focus on the bad news about digital platforms, and particularly the way the global platform monopolies scrape and cobble content and gouge profits from performing artists’ original work. That remains true – but Herri isn’t run by a global monopoly and its curation is definitely not governed by the commoditising echo-chamber of “here’s some more stuff that’s just like the stuff you already bought.”

Lefifi Tladi: the artist at work

So the reprint of a polemic by the late baritone saxophonist Fred Ho, “Why music must be revolutionary”, (not in the Tladi section, but electric with resonances of the Mamelodi musical revolution) doesn’t just provide the obvious links to sounds from Ho himself . You’ll find Louis Armstrong in there, Miles Davis, Asher Gamedze and Tumi Mogorosi. It’s time-travel along the connecting high-wire of what has and hasn’t changed about the sonics of resistance. Ho worked, and is seen playing, with Salim Washington, who has his own contribution later in the book: an isiZulu/English reflection on the politics of community enacted in the ceremonies and sociality of a KZN funeral. Washington worked with Lesego Rampolokeng, who reloads Tladi’s gospel into the literary canon via a tribute to Mafika Gwala (again, not in the Tladi section, but…): “‘unpoetic to write that’ said the civil academic/…language is a race hiding place”

Throughout Herri9 such human, sonic and thematic links strand a dazzling dreamcatcher of ideas and possibilities: how the potentialities of digital publishing should and could be used if torn from the hands of its current greedy global barons. But Herri publishes only because of donor support; and (despite its best intentions) remains an elite initiative while more than 40% of South Africans still struggle on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Language is indeed a “race hiding place”, and multilingualism has been asserted in previous editions of Herri as it is here. It’s important for the conversations around Tladi’s work and around the choice of the Black Consciousness poets of his era to work in English as defiance of apartheid’s divide-and-rule ideology of retribalisation.

Retribalisation isn’t discussed enough in current discourses or histories anywhere. It was a vital plank of, and survival from, apartheid. It still demands more extensive treatment: old identity serpents continue to rear their heads. In in this collection, though, both the questions around using English and the contradictions inherent in the idealisation of African femininity receive measured consideration.

Bringing such a polyphonic collection together situates Tladi effectively in his various communities – at home and in exile – rather than offering the “lone, heroic artist” lens too often invoked by outsider writings on South African revolutionary culture. And the story of his early artistic community at home, in Mamelodi also strengthens another vital piece of framing. This was a community sharply aware of, identifying with – and part of – international and Pan-African anticolonial discourses from the start. Never alone, never bounded by the local, those voices made their contributions to a movement happening in the world. That was certainly apparent to the forces of reaction, as we see in the increasingly well-documented history of CIA interference in South Africa’s cultural struggles. The global contributions to Herri9 from Fred Ho on, underline still-pertinent solidarities.

One important current aspect is the resistance to digital colonialism – currently dominating a dystopian platform landscape with decreasing space for progressive, innovative online initiatives. That begins to get its nod in a review by Patrick Lee-Thorp of Veit Erlmann’s South African copyright study, Lion’s Share. However, the power imbalances and contradictions on the copyright landscape have intensified since Erlmann did his study; the progressive fightback against digital music monopolies would merit more space in future Herris.

Enter the Herri mix wherever you like; skip from author to article to image to track to poem. You’ll find your own connections between them and to both the world we live in and the work of a remarkable polymath. To end, here’s something from the man himself:

https://panafricanspacestation.org.za/its-a-shame-theyll-never-change-lefifi-tladi-sibusile-xaba-tumi-mogorosi/

Women’s Month: long-term, smash the patriarchy; short-term, fair contracts and safety

August is Women’s Month, and Wednesday is Women’s Day. The tokenism and corporate pink-washing that always taint the day may be worse this year, because capitalism has Barbie’s movie petticoats to ride on.

1956. Twenty thousand women proudly doing politics

But Women’s Day in this country has far more vibrant issues at its core: issues given a historic profile when, on 9 August 1956, more than 20 000 women carrying more than 100 000 signatures, marched to the Union buildings to protest against gendered legislation – the Population Registration Act – designed to reinforce apartheid’s patriarchal control over the movement of Black women. Read about some of them here: https://mg.co.za/article/2016-08-25-60-iconic-women-the-people-behind-the-1956-womens-march-to-pretoria/

Women’s Day celebrates the power of collective organisation and women’s right to act together politically for change. The charlatans currently holding many political offices (in all parties) may have since given the word ‘politics’ a bad smell – but it’s long overdue we reclaim it for the people.

To mark the month, SAMRO, ConcertsSA and IKS Cultural Consulting (declaration of interest: I’m part of the IKS research team and chaired the panel) held a discussion on Women in Music at Constitution Hill on August 4. We looked at three dimensions, representation (far more than simple visibility), equity and safety. Here’s the recording https://m.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=sharing&v=788974462970796&paipv=0&eav=AfYQ5mYwH8hxKxnUM3un310zkftUUhnpD7D0cEG9xwO0k5DUbKL7Vj-Lq36jXA4rd0I&wtsid=rdr_0gAEDZXt6oJo1hklW&_rdr

and this short column can’t possibly do justice to the richness of that initial conversation – only a start, because the event also kicked off phase two of SAMRO’s research into what will help women in the industry thrive.

Our context matters. We live in a society that is sexist, violent and highly unequal, and we can’t simply win against those ills inside the walls of our own industry, or if we stay silent about them in the music work we do. But the employment conditions in our industry – highly individualised and precarious – add another layer of opportunities for exploitation. Those working conditions impact men as well as women, so they also offer the potential of a platform for allyship: music workers need to organise together.

We need to campaign at the policy level – but we also need to sweat the small stuff, because a few tiny words in a contract can make all the difference between income and destitution.

One specific issue many audience members identified was being asked to “add something to my beats” by a producer. Let’s be clear: if the “something” a musician (on voice or instrument) adds is wholly created by her, then it’s her composition and her intellectual property. She should have ownership via a contract and be able to earn from it. IP is one of SAMRO’s core concerns, and this is an area where information and support from them and other rights organisations will be key.

But if a musician demands ownership, or speaks out about abuse, or even simply suggests the need for safe transport home after a late rehearsal, she risks being labelled “difficult” in ways that can affect future employment. The insidious silencing of women’s voices anywhere except behind a microphone was mentioned often. Even when a woman musician has the role of music director – a space that, increasingly, offers opportunities for original women’s work – its creative significance is minimised. “Oh,” some may say, “she’s just putting a few tunes together…”

Bassist, composer and music director Aus Tebza Sedumedi

Today as I write, one of Friday’s panellists, bassist Aus Tebza Sedumedi, is music director for a Women’s Month event at Nirox: The Art of Superwoman. How did The Citizen headline it? “Former HHP’s bassist Aus Tebza…” (https://www.citizen.co.za/entertainment/austebza-hhp-bassist-austebza-art-of-superwoman-interview/ ) The story’s first five paragraphs are about the late motswako rapper. They pull in Cassper Nyovest too. I’m sure Aus Tebza didn’t mind; she’s always credited the late HHP – unique and deserving of praise for the support and opportunities he very intentionally gave to women instrumentalists – for his solidarity at the start of her career. But wouldn’t it have been nice if the headline on a news story about a powerful female instrumentalist and composer, music-directing a big event, had not started with a man’s name?

As we noted on Friday, the media have a lot to answer for too, in the way they continue to sideline and stereotype female musicians.

When Aus Tebza gives us a powerful, rock-solid mbaqanga bass – only one of her many musical faces – she’s continuing a tradition whose founder left us this week. The late Joseph Makwela of Makgona Tsohle band invented those now-classic basslines, whose sustained notes, and groove- rather than swing-based patterns, are as central to the mbaqanga sound as the guitar sebene is to Congolese rhumba. You can read tributes here https://www.iol.co.za/sunday-tribune/entertainment/jazz-maestro-joseph-makwela-dies-at-83-4168ab3d-65d0-4454-b97d-e731368e3972 and here https://www.citizen.co.za/news/rip-joseph-makwela-mbaqanga-pioneer/. May his uniquely creative musical spirit rest in peace: hamba kahle.

A Women’s Day playlist: our music fits no single stereotype – listen!