The things that really mattered in 2023 happened outside music. The ongoing commission of war crimes by every state that can get away with it (ie most of them), the shift to the xenophobic right in politics, the war against women being waged on social media and in homes and workplaces, the farce of a COP hosted and leveraged by Big Energy while the world literally burns – all of these matter far more than whether X has a new album out. The year is ending as Western politicians praise (and their media whitewash) the asymmetrical war of extermination being waged by Israel against the people of Gaza.
Except for dedications to the freedom fighters on all the above fronts, there are really very few cues for singing these days.
Much of it represents what we used to call the last kicks of a dying horse, as the old empires of the West dissolve into decadence and barbarism and new contenders use equally barbaric tactics to rise. That situation touches music too.
Even so, South Africa in 2023 saw much impressive and beautiful new music being released. Some of it certainly did engage with the world: iPhupho L’ka Biko’s Azania, Bokani Dyer’s Radio Sechaba, Mandla Mlangeni’s Oratorio for a Forgotten Youth, Vuma Levin’s The Past is Unpredictable…, Benjamin Jephta’s Born Coloured… and Asher Gamedze’s Turbulence and Pulse all demonstrated that, as well as taking on the politics of the present powerfully through outspoken lyrics, there’s a whole continuum of ways to express similar engagement, including through intensely moving metaphors of sound and collective process.
We lost too many great jazz and improvised music figures this year: Madosini, Sammy Hartman, photographic documenter of the music Ian Bruce Huntley, Gloria Bosman, Sylvia Mdunyelwa, Clement Benny, Julian Bahula and Spencer Mbadu among them. Read their lives, and you’ll see how much less timid some members of earlier generations were in the face of atrocities and oppression than many artists are today.
One source of inspiration, though, was how our knowledge of those generations is being constantly enriched by reissues: at home, from the As-Shams archive, and overseas from a host of smaller, mainly UK, labels. From those we can hear what a significant contribution exiled South African overseas made to the jazz of their era; something that has never been adequately documented here for students of our music. The album Joy would not have been so musically joyous without Ernest Motlhe; Mike Osborne could not have lit his incandescent 1970 Starting Fires without Harry Miller and Louis Moholo-Moholo – and there is probably much more to look forward to from those archives next year.
The really big changes in music though, are located in the seats of global power, not here. In my 2022 review, I noted the bloating of digital platform power, and the ways it works to monopolise and police bottlenecks between music listeners and music makers and use them as engines of exploitation. That trend has intensified in 2023. To it, we can now add the rise of the digital cobbling apps. Artificial “Intelligence”(AI) remains the wrong description for something that just sticks words, notes or images together in combinations it has encountered previously, preserving and embedding in those combinations all the prevalent cliches and biases.
How oppressive that’s all getting was underlined last month when Spotify’s fuhrer, Daniel Ek, announced the platform would no longer pay the creators of two-thirds of the music that has made it such a comprehensive and widely-used repository. Artists receiving fewer than 1000 plays a year will see the fraction of a cent those plays earn re-allocated to the commercial music behemoths at the top. Meanwhile, every platform is using versions of those apps to develop its own, house-generated artificial music to clone what you bought before. Why South African artists even sign up to this originality-destroying shitstem, I’ll never understand.
Music scenes certainly re-opened wider in 2023, post the devastation of Covid. But it was a meagre, impoverishing new normal that musicians found. Some research I’ve been associated with demonstrates vividly how costs have risen, while fees stay static or shrink, and you’ll hear more about that when the research is released for publication.
Oh, and we got a new Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture in March. The nameplate on the office door was replaced, there were fewer public speeches attacking artists as “ungrateful”, but nothing much else changed. Don’t worry, they’re sure to remember that musicians exist when they need free music for their 2024 election rallies…
This is the last blog for 2023. May the break re-energise everybody to continue the battles in 2024. We’ll pick up the conversation again on 7 January 2024.
sisgwenjazz 