Allen Kwela’s Black Beauty: style, taste and grace

In 1977, music professors from Rutgers College in the US convened a jazz workshop for South African players in Maseru, Lesotho, to develop conversations and co-operation outside the prison apartheid was busy making of South Africa. The South Africans who attended, by all accounts, had a rewarding time. Long-lasting friendships were established. One attendee, though, found the jamming and transnational conviviality far more rewarding than the professorial tuition. “They were teaching,” reflected guitarist Allen Duma Kwela later, “what I already knew.”

In many ways, that response was typical of the man.

Kwela, born in in 1939 in Chesterville in KZN, never suffered fools gladly, had no mock modesty about his own talents, and constantly resisted being confined within a stereotyped box of what outsiders perceived as “local” idioms.

With the re-release mid-last year of his 1976 album Black Beauty (https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/black-beauty – sorry, I missed it at the time) we can hear – if we didn’t already know – how well justified he was on all those counts.

The album is a beautiful production: re-engineered to eliminate any fuzziness of the kind that haunted many recordings of the era, with a perceptive set of liner notes by Kwanele Sosibo, who’s consulted other guitarists including Bheki Khoza and Billy Monama to provide real insight into the guitar sound, and not simply the man’s biography.

Kwela’s early years around Chesterville, uMkhumbane and KwaMashu tell a familiar story. There were musical older brothers; a self-made oilcan guitar; American jazz on the radio (Kwela himself recalled Glenn Miller’s In The Mood); a kindly neighbour offering access to a real instrument when he was in his mid-teens, and then local session work. The KZN scene was rich in indigenous influences but, being a seaport, was also one of the places where American jazz had landed early and hard. Kwela never saw the walls between the two or the stylistic limits of either.

By the late ’50s, Kwela was in Joburg, eagerly absorbing mentorship from the man he called “The Master”, pianist and composer Gideon Nxumalo, as well as hanging out with the Dorkay House jazz crew (which was later one feeder for Lucky Michaels’  Club Pelican jazz crew).

But he was also composing for the man credited as the architect of pennywhistle kwela music, Spokes Mashiane. In terms of repertoire and stylistic character he was as much the genre’s architect as Mashiane was.

Reflecting on that connection for the liner notes of his 1998 release for Sheer Sound, The Broken Strings of Allen Kwela, he said: “I was [Spokes’] main composer, hence being linked with the origin of kwela music. As I am Kwela by birth, it was just sheer coincidence and I happened to be right at the centre of things – and we sold millions of records we were never paid for.”

The Dorkay/Pelican crew were Kwela’s buddies and regular collaborators. With a selection from among them he released his debut, Allen’s Soul Bag, for Teal/Atlantic City in 1972 (https://www.last.fm/music/Allen+Kwela+Octet/Allen%27s+Soul+Bag ); featured with the Cliffs on the 1975 Alex Express with Winston Mankunku (https://as-shams-busy-bodies.bandcamp.com/album/alex-express ) and was, at the same time, laying down tracks for Black Beauty, released the following year.

Intended to cash in on the success of Dollar Brand’s Mannenberg, Sosibo notes that while Black Beauty‘s opening (title)track is somewhat in that mould, Kwela vehemently resisted making a whole album to someone else’s pattern: his producer at the time, Patric van Blerk, reflects ruefully that “radio thought it was too jazzy…”

What goes unmentioned is the politics of Radio (Bantu) at that time. “Too jazzy” actually meant “stubbornly refusing to fit into an apartheid-defined tribal box for Black music.” Sosibo notes the visual clunkiness of the original cover design (classical statuary plus blonde Afro). But how else to evade racist censors who were deeply wary of anything linking the word “Black” to anything positive, original or creative, as Pops’ Mohamed’s Black Disco(very) found out?

Allen Kwela performing at Wits (Basil Breakey; UCT collection)

After the Maseru workshop, Kwela had – but refused – a chance to go to America for the second time. The first had been an invitation from Hugh Masekela some years earlier. Kwela later reflected “Maybe I should have taken that chance…the people who went into exile seem to have done well for themselves…”

Pianist Pat Matshikiza recalled his response to Masekela’s earlier invitation: “Allen Kwela said: ‘I ain’t going because I want to play jazz, not mbaqanga. I know they’re calling us to play mbaqanga. That’s America. Jazz has got its own clubs there. I want to go and play modern jazz; I can’t be playing those other tunes.'” Kwela was proudly South African, but he saw himself as a South African jazz player, on a par with any in the world.

Black Beauty shows us why.

Even on the opener, there are spicy twists of swing in the bump-jive pattern, complemented by a tricky trumpet solo from Dennis Mpale (also prominent on Allen’s Soul Bag). Kwela’s guitar, never one  to do the obvious, screws around with the repetitive riffing characteristic of the style: his lightning-fast fingers (not for nothing was one comparison with Joe Pass) fit an astounding amount of inventive ornament around those repeats.

Then, the studio’s requirement fulfilled, the subsequent three tracks do what Kwela wanted to do. Mild Storm takes us back to the round, full, arrangement style that had characterised Soul Bag. Three saxes – Kippie Moeketsi and Barney Rachabane on altos and Stanley Sithole on tenor – make the most of soulful chorusing, and Kwela stretches out in a distinctly modern soul-jazz exploration. This is music in a similar headspace to what another bunch of KZN innovators, The Drive, were creating. For that reason, although it’s wonderful to discover more from Moeketsi, in reed terms it’s Sithole’s album.

We go up-tempo for the irresistible Qaphela: Kwela’s kind of South African jazz. It’s unmistakeably grounded in those South Coast foundations, but it looks forward to the modern jazz of albums such as Roots, rather than backwards as Brand’s deliberately retro, jangly keyboard had done. Mpale’s solo – he features on Roots too – takes the same direction, as does Moeketsi’s brief, distinctive intervention.

Finally, Willow Vale – minor-key, bluesy and full of heart – demonstrates how well Kwela could write. Neither the arrangement nor his own solo assert guitar here; rather, they showcase the gorgeous melody he’s written. Like pretty well everything else Kwela did in music, there’s style, taste and grace alongside formidable musicianship.  

Kwela died in 2003 at the ridiculously young age of 63. His breath finally failed him, after a few years when he’d managed, stoically and philosophically, with one functioning lung.

He never got the recognition his massive talent merited – outside musicians’ circles, where his skill was respected with something close to awe. Voice covered his composition You Are The Way on their second album; Monama created a powerful tribute performance that ought to be out as an album too. Hear those, and more from the man himself, in the playlist below.