Amaeshi Ikechi’s Travail: a studio album so warm it feels live

It’s too easy not to notice the really good bass players. When they’re bassist of choice in somebody else’s band – as Amaeshi Ikechi is, pretty well every week – and they’re doing their job properly – as he always does – what you mostly notice how beautifully the music coheres around a strong, flexible, harmonic spine. You’d notice him more if he wasn’t there: “When the bass stops,” said the late Charlie Haden, “the bottom kind of drops out of everything.”

But that’s not all bass players do. They may also sing, compose, produce, or arrange, all of it rooted in that smart understanding of the qualities that hold music together. And when they step forward to lead, as Ikechi has done with this month’s release of his debut as leader, Travail (https://amaeshiikechi.bandcamp.com/album/travail), the results can be impressive.

Lagos-born Ikechi got his early musical grounding in family and church back home; he’s described a process of finding his identity and confidence only when he found his instrumental path. It took him a decade longer to find jazz: first, via the old jam sessions at 44 Stanley; later, through mentorship from the likes of Jimmy Mngwandi and Herbie Tsoaeli and formal study at TUT. He’s been a fairly regular bassist for Marcus Wyatt and Steve Dyer, and run the gamut of genres and styles with the proverbial Who’s Who of other artists.

Travail features ten tracks, the majority composed during Ikechi’s TUT years, with a band that looks a lot like some of the most interesting Joburg jam sessions of the 2020s: Wyatt on horn, Abraham Mennen and Sisonke Xonti on reeds, David Cousins on piano and Peter Auret on drums.

Although it’s a studio album, Travail retains much of the feel of a live set, with warm, easy-feeling musical dialogues. Maybe that’s because some of these players have worked together in jam sessions so often — we underestimate the importance of regular jams in building empathy and shared musical languages.

Rather than a collection of radio-friendly, strictly five-minute tracks, each of these numbers takes as much time as it needs; the gently swinging Gbo Ohun close to a dozen minutes.

Travail‘s programming offers the kind of sonic variety you’d get from an intelligently-constructed live set too. The album opens with the energising, unmistakably South African feel of Uche’s Bounce (written for the bassist’s son), and ends with more energy in the dancing King’s Heart. In between, there’s brisk hard bop (Blue for Papa), soulful hymns (Jesus Paid It All and Prayer) and more. The title track is well-chosen, it’s a simple theme that’s impossible to forget and yet, despite its straightforwardness, provides a launching pad for inventive improvisation.

Amaeshi Ikechi

Ikechi writes memorable tunes. That’s something you won’t learn from his supportive work at the back of other stages, and if these compositions date mainly from the period of his studies, there must be at least another album-worth already stacking up in his practice space.

But, let’s not forget, he’s also a really good bass player. He doesn’t dominate here, but when he does step forward – kick-starting the engine on Blues for Papa, for example, or doing subtle but defining work on the title track – the thing you notice most is the warmth, depth and richness of his tone; his clever musical ideas swim in honey.

Around that, everybody else sounds good too: Wyatt plays as prettily here as I’ve ever heard him; everybody else also grasps the ample spaces for exploration these compositions offer, including vocalist Constance Mokoena, whose sweet voice flies imaginatively outwards like a bird towards the close of Sibonga Wena.

Travail has been long in the cooking, but the dish is worth the wait. If you’re looking for the kind of emotional uplift provided by a night out at a great live jazz club (1990s Bassline, say, or 20-teens Orbit), I can’t, just at this minute, think of any album better.

Thandeka Dladla: a debut that leaves all doors open

Thandeka Dladla

South Africa has been oversupplied with good jazz records this year. (“Records”, of course, in the digital as well as analogue sense.) The mainstream recording industry model has been historically bad at handling anything outside mass commercial products, and that remains true; the cosy buying and selling bottleneck that labels have created with behemoth platforms like Spotify hasn’t helped. So new artists and niched artists often self-produce, often regionally, often as EPs, which are a somewhat limited showcase format. It’s becoming very hard to keep up. And if that’s true for music journalists like me, how much more true for the buying (and ticket-booking) public?

Which matters a great deal, because performing live, not selling discs, is where the real earning potential for building a music career lies.   

Take two cases in point. A couple of weeks back, vocalist Thandeka Dladla released her debut 5-track EP, Umnikelo (https://music.apple.com/us/album/umnikelo-ep/1706346519)

Initially classically-trained, Dladla is a UCT graduate who has already been working steadily with other artists in the Mother City, including the longer-established Unity Band,. Which led me to seek out the work Dladla had done with them. Lo and behold! Their latest album, Breaking Bread, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26WMldlODis ; buy at https://www.prostudiomasters.com/album/page/167930 ) has been out since late March. It’s their follow-up to the impressive 2019 Fabric (https://theunitybandza.bandcamp.com/album/fabric ), which, despite high praise and a knockout set at Makhanda, got rather buried by a smallnyana pandemic we were all struggling with back then.

The Unity Band. (pic: Daniel Manners)

Dladla first. As you’d expect from her training, she has a fine voice and finely-judged vocal control.  Unlike some classically trained singers, she has no difficulty or reluctance transitioning between the sweet, pure upper registers of melodic lines and the more assertive, grainy, lower tones that are often idiomatic in contemporary pop and jazz. The compositions have range: diverse, but all unfailingly catchy.

On this showing, Dladla could go anywhere. She could draw on her classical training to focus a career on melodic material with broad appeal. She could settle into the already heavily overpopulated “Afro-soul” landscape, where she’s probably a technically superior vocalist to several, but where standing out from a large crowd might be hard. She could position herself as an Afro-Jazz vocalist leading an impressive improvising trio drawn from the Unity Band  (Lonwabo Mafani on keys, Stephen de Sousa on bass and Kurt Bouwers on drums, joined for this session by guests reedman Sisonke Xonti and trumpeter Marco Maritz). Or she could follow the Thandi Ntuli model, and never (at least so far) make the same kind of album twice.

Umnikelo is an accomplished debut, so all those doors remain open.

But where are the really spine-tingling bits on this EP? As a composition, Inkhathazo: a classic piece of Cape jazz song. In the singing, it’s in the quieter places, where she’s in conversation with a single other musician: another voice; a keyboard, reed or horn. It’s almost disappointing when her duet with de Sousa’s bass on Rise Up turns into another ensemble piece – there’s something in that intimate sonic texture that’s quite magical. The choices are wholly Dladla’s and whichever she makes will likely yield worthwhile future music.

Breaking Bread, I feel guilty about. It merited far fuller coverage, far earlier in the year. It opens with Dladla’s voice and Mafani’s piano again – and because this is a full-length album, they have the time to stretch out. You can hear that stretching beautifully displayed on the band’s official video for the tricky Afrobeat number Chukudu, with Dylan Fine’s guitar, Dladla showing a different side of her voice, and powerful call and response between singers.

But because it’s a full album with a programmatic feel, I need to do more listening. I wish I’d known about it in March, but I’ll find  another way to write more before the year is out. We’re all running just to keep up with all the music that’s flowering – and that flowering can’t continue indefinitely without more stages (and income streams for musicians that are better than the pathetic returns of streaming) than we currently have.

Finally, don’t miss this beautifully informative Afropop Worldwide conversation with Nduduzo Makhathini, just posted.

https://afropop.org/articles/nduduzo-makhathini-in-conversation-with-the-ancestors

Ari Sitas’s Music Notebook: collective cultural work across oceans

“It’s only a small book,” says the worker at the bn’b where economist and musician Sumangala Damodaran has left it for me. “But books are valuable and I want to make sure it stays safe. Can you please come and collect it quickly?”

It is, indeed, a small and at first sight unprepossessing volume: 100 pages, soft-cover, tape-bound. But Ari Sitas’s Music Notebook, published by Chimurenga in August (https://chimurengachronic.co.za/book_series/chimurenganyana-music-notebook-by-ari-sitas-aug-2023/ ), may be one of the most valuable bits of music archive to appear from South Africa this year.

The book self-describes as “at once a scrapbook, a bildungsroman, a playlist and a diary of Ari Sitas’ decade-long collaboration with the Insurrections Ensemble.”

For those of you who don’t know, Durban-based Sitas is a poet and a sociology professor — so we’ll forgive him ‘bildungsroman'(a narrative of personal growth, along the lines of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels), even if it isn’t the catchiest of cover-blurb words. He was a founder-member of the Junction Theatre Group, an activist in both labour and cultural arenas through the 1980s and 1990s, and one of those who fought to achieve a radical cultural transition when apartheid ended. That fight is not yet won: as Sitas reflected a few years back, in the first democratic government, “Culture was handed to Inkatha and creativity to the market.”

Ari Sitas

That didn’t stop Sitas, though, and the Insurrections Ensemble is one of his battle-lines. Animated by the question “Can you create music that finds a home on both sides of the Indian Ocean, beyond the cliche of ‘fusion’?”, the ensemble brings together a host of regular and guest creators including UKZN musician and musicologist Sazi Dlamini, Damodaran, string player Bryden Bolton, poets Sitas and Karen Press and too many more to list; from SA, India, the rest of the African continent and (on their previous production, Giraffe Humming, see: https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2022/10/17/ari-sitass-giraffes-hum-a-powerful-decolonial-statement/),Singapore and China. Their productions unite words, music and staging to challenge the legacy of colonialism and divide-and-rule (there was a memorable riff on Shakespeare’s Tempest), the ways colonialism has wrecked the globe, the human flows and commonalities of workers’ struggles around the world, and more.

The challenges they assert are not just about content, but form too: commercial genre boxes get a particularly hard time.

The Insurrections Collective in praxis

The Music Notebook is all the things it says it is, and equally more.

Although it’s a modest production, designer Graeme Arendse has been creative with the “scrapbook” aspect, so that monochrome printing on differently coloured paper takes on a visual rhythm all its own – don’t neglect those thumbnail album-cover discographies at the bottoms of some pages: they showed me albums I didn’t previously know.

The diary lets us hear Sitas’s own voice: sometimes the magisterial critic; sometimes the idiosyncratic human being with very definite tastes, not all of which you may agree with. No matter – it’s his book.

But it’s where diary and bildungsroman overlap that things get really interesting.

What already makes the book precious South African music archive even on a first reading is that nobody documents creative projects like this any more. Music journalists tend to be briefed for the “personality interview”, which may contain a few, routine “What was it like working with..?” questions. But you know that they’re asked and answered in expectation of nothing deeper than “Oh, they’re amazing!”

Here we have personalities, sometimes scratchy at the edges, and often using that scratchiness to strike creative sparks. We learn how a particular vocal line was devised, and how a particular voice was matched to it; how the sonorities of a specific instrument had the right voice to express a particular message. That’s enough, alone, to make it invaluable . (I can see the PhDs budding already.) Because culture is something people make, not something they buy, and this book asserts that not via slogans but through its detailed accounts of praxis.

Now add to that the ‘journey of personal growth’: the bildungsroman bit. Sitas is a grown-ass man – surely a Young Werther isn’t needed here? No, that’s not it at all. The growth is in the ways the Insurrections project nuanced and deepened Sitas’s (and everybody else’s) grasp of and sensitivity to collective cultural work, as it is conducted (sometimes at a distance) across continents and across generations, and dovetailing into the current era of revolution.

As Sitas points out, for example: “Storming was the most demanding of our projects, not only… [because of its scale] … but also because it was a response to the murmurings all around us  of our increasingly mutinous students (…) about to explode into an insurgency.” South Africa has rich and deep traditions of collective cultural work, which were made by workers in trade union cultural collectives, and by township artists and poets in underground theatre and music formations like Mamelodi’s Dashiki and many more. People sometimes forget that legacy as though it had never been.

The Music Notebook offers evidence of the robust resilience of those traditions, and their flexibility in new contexts and struggles across the globe.

And on top of that, it’s fun to read. Sitas is always a sharp wordsmith, even when playing the grumpy old man. He seems to have read far more than should be humanly possible and draws audacious connections – Madame Mao to Ibsen, anybody? In doing that, he stimulates the reader to seek them too. This isn’t a book for an end-to-end-read, unless you’re one of those PhDs. It’s a book to dip into, for an episode or an anecdote – and then to go away to read that other book again, or listen to that record with fresh questions. And since this is ostensibly a music blog, here are a few of those latter:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=yecMlkNFdSM&list=OLAK5uy_m4j3YmwbPOK7_1GJ1L5WUOhFwUBiQQ0Po

Hamba Kahle Julian Sebothane Bahula 1938-2023

You must by now have heard of the death of Eesterus-born Malombo drum pioneer  Julian Sebothane Bahula yesterday. You can read an obituary based on the official family statement here https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2023-10-01-political-activist-and-musician-julian-sebothane-bahula-has-died/

Below is a short playlist to remind us of his skill and the range of his work and collaborations

In 1967 with the original Malombo Jazz Makers: Phillip Tabane on guitar having just been replaced by Madumetja Ranku, plus Abbey Cindi on flute and Julian Bahula on drums

In 1975 Jabula with Mike Oldfield as part of Ommadawn

In 1976 with his own band Jabula on Thunder Into Our Hearts (Mongezi Feza Tribute)

In 1978 with Jabula on Afrika Awake

With UK saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith on the 1991  Woza Nasu

In 1994 from his album with Chico Freeman, Winds of Change

With The Malombo Jazz Makers on Down Lucky’s way (only released this year