Black Discovery and Pops Mohamed’s Afrofuturism

First, apologies for the long pause — if any of you out there have had the same killer seasonal bug as me, you’ll understand why I haven’t been able to write for a while.

So, right, today is Heritage Day, or as Big Meat in cahoots with Big Liquor and Air Pollution Incorporated have re-christened it, National Braai Day.

Nobody – least of all DSAC – seems to know what “heritage” is. The closest we get is fetishising some arbitrarily-selected and discrete elements of the past, including a fair number that, if we look carefully – read Govan Mbeki! – were cooked up by Nineteenth Century colonialists to entrench the narrow, puritanical, authoritarianism they brought with them from Victorian England.

Heritage isn’t only what we’ve inherited. Even in the dictionary, the concept of inheritance sits alongside “things of value”, “things worth preserving” “things embodying craftsmanship”, and so on. Because heritage is a living thing, it can shed those aspects of the past with no special value that aren’t worth preserving at all.

Homophobia has nothing to do with heritage. Treating our African neighbours as enemies has nothing to do with heritage. Patriarchal violence against women and children has nothing to do with heritage. And – sorry, Big Liquor – getting pig-drunk behind the braai has nothing to do with heritage.

Heritage is something we’re in a constant process of making and remaking, so that our kids can inherit (or reject) it from us. In musical terms, isicathamiya and umngqokolo are part of heritage. South African jazz is too. But so are Brenda Fassie, Durban hip-hop and Amapiano. And so will tomorrow’s genres become, that don’t even have names yet

So it’s a good day to look at a neglected bit of South Africa’s music heritage: our first tentative forays into sonic Afrofuturism.

Pops Mohamed

To do that, this month the As-Shams label has helpfully reissued a compilation, Discovery 1975-1976 https://as-shams.bandcamp.com/album/discovery-1975-1976 foregrounding the work of Pops Mohamed and his faithful Cee-Threepio on his Black Disco space travels: the Yamaha Electone keyboard.

There were three Black Disco albums. The first, in 1975, featured Mohamed, Sipho Gumede, Basil Manenberg Coetzee and the Yamaha effect on drums. The second, the 1976 Night Express, put a real drummer in the chair: Peter Morake. By the time of the third, later in ’76, Sipho Gumede was in such demand for touring he coudn’t make the session: Mohamed and Coetzee teamed up with live drummer Monty Weber and bassist Peter Odendaal.

But Afrofuturism? A bit of a stretch, surely? The eight tracks compiled here from all three of these albums are catchy and groove-driven, and remind us how talented the whole ensemble was and what a truly lovely flute (as well as saxophone) player Coetzee was. It brings us songs currently out of print in any other form, spanning the group’s whole output and including Dark Clouds: Mohamed’s first composition with the Electone. For all those reasons, it’s worth owning. But it doesn’t take any kind of way-out, Sun Ra-like chances with melody, harmony or form.

No, what’s afro-futurist about this is Mohamed’s vision. He’s been hailed as a fine musician, but hasn’t received half enough credit yet for consistently seeing where the music was going: from electronica then to a back-to-the-future kora today.

Using the Yamaha was a conscious reaching out to Timmy Thomas’s pioneering organ minimalism, which was pretty futurist in the US too in the mid-70s, when big, florid, gospelly organ sounds dominated. There’s that word “disco” in the title – think Donna Summer in a Space-Age zipped silver catsuit with pointy shoulders!

Mohamed, though, often spoke of how he hankered for “Black Discovery” as the real title back then too, because of the music’s future orientation “except it sounded kind of revolutionary and we wouldn’t have wanted them to notice that too much – even though we were revolutionary!” It’s only right that this compilation carries that title now – very much like Manu Dibangu with his assertion of an “Electric Africa”, it’s a defiant gesture against the reductive tropes of colonialists and apartheid ideologues alike.

You can read the full story of the making of Black Disco here https://galacticwaves.substack.com/p/discovery-1975-1976. And listen! It remains great music for a party – even the one you might be having around that “National Braai” this afternoon.

Spencer Mbadu 1955-2023: the bass player’s bass player

It’s been a tragic few weeks for the Cape Town music community, and for South African jazz, with the passing of Mam’ Sylvia Mdunyelwa, Clement Benny – and, yesterday, bass player supreme Spencer Mbadu.

Some bass players are equally talented vocalists (think of Victor Ntoni and Herbie Tsoaeli), some occupy the front of the stage, making their bass the most prominent sound; some have built additional careers as producers and composers. Spencer Mbadu wasn’t like that. He was that quiet, solid presence at the back of the stage – often, in his later years, in his trademark back-to-front cap – doing the essential job of holding the music together and making sure everybody on stage sounded good.

When he soloed, those solos were impeccable and perfectly judged: never overlong and bombastic; just exactly what that particular tune needed, and always leaving the audience wanting more. He could have joined those other, higher-profile kinds of bassists, but (like, for example, Milt Hinton in the US) his passion was for the craftsmanship of playing the jazz bassist’s traditional role, and playing it as consummately well as he could.

Mbadu was born in Kensington, but like many Black South Africans under apartheid, was turfed out of that family home aged three when the family was relocated to Nyanga West. It was a musical family. He told one interviewer https://globalrhythms.net/2017/10/25/we-could-get-arrested-just-for-making-people-happy/ “I started kicking when I was in the womb”.

Mbadu was playing flute by the age of four, then a home-made guitar. As with many musicians of his generation, it was the women in his family who were the musicians and music teachers. His mother encouraged him, his grandmother was a church harpist; she introduced him to the piano a few years later “and I never stopped after that.”

In his teens, Mbadu took up bass in a Nyanga rock group, by his 20s he was working part-time as a motor mechanic and playing in the well-regarded Skyf, with penny-whistler Robert Sithole and a rising saxophonist called Winston Mankunku Ngozi. “A beautiful group,” veteran reedman Roger Koza called it in his interview with Lars Rassmussen.

When Mankunku moved on, so did the bassist, continuing to gig with Mankunku but broadening his circle of collaborators to include reedman Kader Khan, multi-instrumentalist Tony Cedras, guitarist Russell Herman and more.

When Sipho Gumede left the experimental modern jazz outfit Spirits Rejoice in 1981, Mbadu took over the bass chair in a powerful rhythm partnership with drummer Gilbert Matthews. He also stood on the back-line for vocal trio Joy, and various outfits featiring reedman Robbie Jansen, most notably Workforce, which lit up the stage at many UDF rallies. Those bands, particularly Workforce, speak of Mbadu’s quiet politics of solidarity with the working people of his community.

Times were hard. Once, Mbadu famously smashed up his instrument in frustration. Workforce has no sonic footprint online; Skyf, a single track – more sounds you’ll never know if you think Google has it all.

Mbadu was an enthusiastic teacher, first at the radical community music education project MAPP (Music Action for People’s Power) and later in other contexts, often featuring his students in the bands he put together for his live gigs.

By the ’90s, the legendarily reliable Mbadu was go-to session bassist for pianist Mike Perry’s Nkomo label, as well as continuing to work with Jansen’s many diverse projects, with old playing partner Mankunku, and the Ngcukana Brothers’ Chorimba concept. Duke Ngcukana credits Mbadu with bringing the creativity of the bass to the fore when they collaborated. Whereas more conventional jazz players still followed the drums”[Now] the creative guy could be the bassist: a guy like Spencer Mbadu. We listen to Spencer (…) He is able to sit for long hours working on things…he still has that energy.”

When Abdullah Ibrahim recorded his homecoming album, Mantra Mode, Mbadu was his chosen bassist.

He was also bassist of choice for many South African and visiting artists at Cape Town International Jazz Festivals, and featured in the international 4664 fundraising recording alongside, among others, Bono. Mbadu continued to gig – albeit intermittently as he grew older and frailer – until as recently as last year.

May his spirit rest in music: hamba kahle

A SPENCER MBADU PLAYLIST

With Skyf: Be There

https://nextstopsoweto.bandcamp.com/track/be-there

With Abdullah Ibrahim: Mantra Mode

With Hotep Idris Galeta: Harold’s Bossa from Heading Home

With Winston Mankunku: Langunya Khayelitsha from Molo Africa

At the launch of the Cape Jazz Band

Three interviews:

Speaking about his life and showcasing three women students at a Crypt gig

Speaking about his bass playing to Daniel Petersen:

Reminiscing with fellow musician and journalist Glenn Robertson