Harold Jefta 1933-2024: the Cape Town Bird has flown

Legendary saxophonist Harold Jefta (Jephtha, when he was born in Cape Town’s District Six, in October 1933) passed away last week.

Jefta’s family was removed to Salt River as District Six was cleared, and there, aged about ten, a knee accident landed him in a treatment home for some years. To fill his time, he picked up a bamboo pipe and began trying to play what he heard on the radio, and what older boys at the home were also trying to play: pop and swing tunes off the radio. He was mentored by an older guitar player there, and later by his cousin, guitarist Kenny Jephtha and altoist Leslie Stigers, leader of the senators of swing. It was Kenny who gave him his first jazz gig but, like most Cape Town musicians of his generation, he also gigged with langaarm dance bands and on any other platform that was available. By the late 1950s, he had his own quartet, with another young man who was to become a legend – in the Jazz Epistles – Johnny Gertze, on bass.

The mature Harold Jefta in front of a portrait of his younger self. (image: Swedish Radio)

For the detail of this early history, I am indebted to Warren Ludski, whose interview series, Music Legends of Cape Town, does irreplaceable work documenting a whole community of musicians whose precious memories might otherwise be lost. Please read the whole interview here: https://warrenludskimusicscene.com/interviews-3/harold-jeftas-music-like-a-rhapsody-in-blue/

It’s from another interview, Lars Rassmussen’s with musician and archivist the late Vincent Kolbe, (pianist in Jefta’s group) Jazz People of Cape Town (https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Jazz_People_of_Cape_Town.html?id=s7g4AQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y) that memories of that early oufit come. Jefta’s quartet had a formidable reputation as serious be-boppers. Kolbe’s bandleader at the time in the Paramount Dixies told him “Oh, you’re interested in that kind of music? You can go…” Recalling his attempts to secure gigs at the Paramount Hotel, Kolbe recounted the manager warning “If you’re going to play that heavy jazz, forget it!”

Kolbe recalls the quartet trying to venture into the UCT (and whites-only) jazz rag, held one year in the non-segregated, Weitzmann Hall in Sea Point. “All the white musicians didn’t want any Black or Coloured musicians to play.” That made Kolbe and the others so furious they approached a Catholic church hall, Holy Cross, to hold their own concerts. Following their initiative, other unsegregated events and venues began starting up.

Bassist Sammy Maritz recalls Jefta’s quartet “making a nice sound…saying beautiful things”. Guitarist Harry Peacock, a shy teenager at the time, was “amazed that I could hear bebop from a local guy like him…and one thing I liked about him was he wasn’t a selfish musician. He said: ‘Hey, you got something guy: you must come around’ (…) he taught me some amazing things…He used to say: ‘No, no, man, you must open your guitar case and play’ (…) I got a lot of confidence from him.”

The Cape Town bebop scene, recalled drummer Gerry Cupido, “died when the Jephtha Brothers left for Europe…”

They left, of course, with the Golden City Dixies and the story of Jefta’s desire to consume all the music education he was barred from by racial segregation, his settling in Sweden, and his rise to fame with the Charlie Parker Memorial Quartet and later the Harold Jefta Unit, are told in Ludski’s interview.

But Jefta loved and missed home. After the end of apartheid, he tried to visit every couple of years, and in 2016 he brought his Unit to perform in his home city. The documentary below, tells that story and demonstrates how, even in his 80s, the power and intelligence of his playing continued to awe audiences.

I heard him on one of those visits. Jefta wasn’t just any old Parker copyist. He was certainly faithful to an older, bebop, jazz tradition that some might consider retro – but that tradition itself encourages invention and his solos were always wholly his own, even on the tunes Parker had made famous (and he wrote his own originals too). His tone was as sweet, rich and complex as a well-aged brandy. In that style, we all knew in that concert hall, we were in the presence of a master.

So it’s odd that so little notice has been taken of his passing outside Cape Town jazz circles. He joins world-famous drummer Gilbert Matthews, international award-winning music (and more) photographer George Hallett, and several of the musicians who’ve left us in recent months in receiving absolutely no tribute from the media, from DSAC or elsewhere where you might think it would be noticed (City of Cape Town, anybody?).

This nation should be ashamed. It’s all very well, paying fealty to global capitalist music standards when a few of our artists breach those ramparts – they’ve fought hard to get there, for sure. It’s all very well, expressing the desire “to dance with Tyla” from the SONA platform. But how about a bit of respect for the sons and daughters of the soil who did not win Grammies (and may not even have cared about doing so) but who mentored, worked hard at their craft, brought joy to South African audiences and still carried the message of South African talent all over the world, sometimes under the toughest of conditions?

Rus in vrede, Harold Jephtha: child of District Six and master of the bebop sax.