SAMUS - Volume 32 2012 South African Society for Research in Music

SAMUS

       Volume 32 • 2012
South African Society for Research in Music

EXILES/INXILES: DIFFERING AXES OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ
                 DURING LATE APARTHEID

                                        Salim Washington

      And when a South African player takes a jazz solo on a standard, and mixes in those Xhosa
      chords derived from the overtones of mouth-bow music, or the stuttering syncopations of
      Pedi dance, or the call & response of Zulu song, that’s exactly what he or she is sharing
      with the audience. Robin Kelley in his 1994 book Race Rebels has described politics as being
      partly about “the imaginary world of what is possible”. Recognising those possibilities
      – embodied in, and performed rather than symbolised by, the process of making and
      participating in jazz – (alongside a joyful defiance of unjust authority) was what kept
      South Africans playing and listening to jazz – and using it as far more than a metaphorical
      soundtrack in their writing.

                                                                          — Gwen Ansell (2009)

      They say, “I love Bessie Smith.” And don’t even understand that Bessie Smith is saying,
      “Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass.” Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can
      explain, she’s saying, and very plainly, “kiss my black ass.”…Charlie Parker? Charlie
      Parker. All the hip white boys scream for Bird. And Bird saying, “Up your ass, feeble-
      minded ofay!”...And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker. Bird
      would’ve played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and
      killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note!

                             —Clay, character in LeRoi Jones’ The Dutchman (Baraka 1995, 97)

In this essay I will discuss two axes of South African jazz as revealed in selected commercial
recordings. One axis describes a trajectory over time (from the late apartheid era to the
beginnings of democracy in South Africa) of an evolving aesthetic that moves from protest
to celebration. The second axis delineates differences between the possibilities and the
formations of jazz music made by some South African jazz musicians who left South
Africa during the apartheid era and some of those who remained. The analysis contained
here rests upon critical notices, biographies, and interviews, and especially the commercial
recordings made available to the public. This writer’s observation of the current jazz
scenes in the United States and South Africa, as well as the testimonies of South African
musicians who were active in the 1970s, all attest to the fact that the jazz scene was and
is (always?) much more varied than what is available on commercial records, and thus
these performances can only represent the time period in a limited way. I am also mindful
that, in jazz as much as in any music, there is never a truly official best performance or
perfected achievement, canonisations notwithstanding. On the proverbial ‘good night’ any
performance can be bested. Ultimately, however, hierarchies of musical competence are
mostly irrelevant. A musical moment of spiritual transcendence can make comparisons of
‘good’ and ‘better’ irrelevant. Quite apart from any technical considerations for evaluating
performances, black musical happenings are usually antiphonal ceremonies in which the
dancing, cavorting, and ‘musicking’ (to use Christopher Small’s delightful phrase) of the

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‘audience’ adds dimensions that make every jazz performance unique.1 Nevertheless,
official recordings do give some insight into what musicians were trying to communicate to
what is ostensibly their largest possible audience. They are valuable documents, aesthetic
representations of a particular social reality.
If there are cultural and practical differences between jazz as practiced during and after
the apartheid era, there are also differing trajectories of South African jazz distinguishable
between musicians who emigrated after the Sharpeville Massacre and those who remained.
According to extant recordings, those in exile were more influenced by au courant practices
explored by American and European jazz musicians, and hence more prone to avant-
garde expressions. Thus, for instance, in the late 1960s and 1970s, while inxile Winston
“Mankunku” Ngozi – surely one of the greatest jazz saxophonists anywhere anytime –
was playing music that was heavily indebted to the earlier styles of John Coltrane and
Wayne Shorter circa 1960, musicians in exile such as Chris McGregor and Mongezi Feza
had fully assimilated the ultra-modern music of Albert Ayler (whom Coltrane described as
having started where he left off), Cecil Taylor, and others. Interestingly, as the exiles grew
increasingly avant-garde, they also began to highlight indigenous South African rhythms,
whereas their earlier recordings had relied more closely upon an adaptation of African
American rhythms of the hard bop era. Before looking at the present day jazz scene I want
to first consider the work of these two legendary artists of South African jazz as they can
be seen as emblematic of the inxile/exile concurrence.

                                            McGREGOR
As South African jazz exiles, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela are certainly better
known names in the music world, and Makeba especially was instrumental in bringing
the issue of apartheid to the consciousness of the international community. However,
their musical influence in the West, though jazz-tinged, was really strongest in more
commercial styles of music. By contrast, Chris McGregor and his coterie of musicians,
especially saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, bassist Johnny Dyanni,
and drummer Louis Moholo, are the most influential exile jazz musicians from South
Africa since Abdullah Ibrahim (at the time known as Dollar Brand). It is not too much
of a stretch to say that the music of Chris McGregor contained much of the best of black
musical thought from the jazz perspective.
McGregor, son of a white missionary, was born in the rural region of Umtata in 1937.
There he learned to speak isiXhosa, and his precocious musical talent revelled in traditional
musics as well as Western European art music. By age 14 he had absorbed many lessons
from Duke Ellington, whom Chris acknowledged throughout his life as a primary example
for what he wanted to do. Ellington was a master of combining the colours of instruments
and personalities to make vital music, and McGregor would follow his example. Chris
also saw Ellington as a model for how to adapt a style that could speak to the psychic
and cultural necessities of blacks in a white urban setting. McGregor would play with
the best available musicians, which in his estimation were often blacks. While living in
Umtata he also learned to sing in isiXhosa, and to play the piano works of the European

1
     Small makes an argument that I find persuasive. He contends that music is not a thing but an activity
     and that it is an activity that is realised ultimately through a set of relationships.

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masters. Shortly after the infamous Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, McGregor became a
professional. He assembled and arranged music for the Castle Lager Big Band and the Blue
Notes, and performed with them at the National Jazz Festival that year and dropped out of
the conservatory in Cape Town.
Though he was usually the only white player in the band, the Blue Notes were considered
a mixed race group, and hence illegal. Consequently, they played mostly in the black
townships, as far from the surveillance of the state as possible. This also kept them off the
radio and without critical notice in any of the national or international press. In order to
play the music that they loved, the Blue Notes faced potential arrest, death threats, and the
indignities of preparing skits in which they would pretend that Chris was a baas traveling
with his “boys” in order to avoid police persecution.
Counterbalancing these considerable costs, McGregor gained proficiency in and an
understanding of South African music that few whites had attained. His wife and
biographer, Maxine McGregor, wrote of these township performances: “…the songs were
never played the same way twice—they were always evolving. The intensity of the music
evoked the build-up of excitement during a tribal festival, at times reaching a pitch where
some of the audience were transported into a state of trance or ecstasy. It was of course,
in many ways, an urban substitute for this.” (1995, 55) This African function of music—
spiritual transformation, possession and/or transcendence—is also well documented in
musicking throughout the African Diaspora. In Afro America it is found most famously in
church services, but also present in dance parties, concerts, club dates, and other settings.
Apparently, this is the case in South Africa as well. Music scholar Chris Ballantine called the
Blue Notes’ music a “distinctive blend of post-bebop experimental jazz and marabi-based
South African music.” He went on to place McGregor’s achievement into perspective:
“McGregor is the only white performer who has actually crossed over and become truly
South Africanised. His bands are among the few who have achieved a real fusion of the
multiple musics which represent what South Africa is and might be.” (Ibid., 62)2
This assessment is not hard to believe, for McGregor was a prodigy with considerable
skills in European music and learned South African music from the perspectives of rural
Africans, and also urbanised Africans through his apprenticeship (though as a band leader)
in township jazz. McGregor himself was keenly aware of the import of the conflicting
and complementary music practices that he was absorbing. In a piece commissioned by
McGregor for a 1986 concert in Germany, Ballantine uses the artist’s words to characterise
his development:
      “I was a white kid who had open ears from the start”, he says. These musical experiences
      would have included traditional Xhosa songs of work and ceremony: as a small boy
      he would go and listen, dance, clap and sing. Xhosa women’s responsorial songs with
      overlapping entries, he says, “were certainly my first counterpoint lessons.” There were
      also, he recalls, such experiences as hearing a crowd at a bus station suddenly breaking into
      a song; or the sound of 200 voices in the mission church producing, almost spontaneously,
      their own unconventional harmonisations of hymn tunes. Later, at boarding school, he

2
    Quoted in (McGregor, 62). McGregor’s account is a mixture of her memories of the band’s travels,
    music and history along with extensive quotations from interviews with Chris McGregor and
    journalistic notices. Unfortunately not all of the citations are complete, as is the case with this note
    from Prof. Ballantine.

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      clearly remembers using weekend leave to rush down to the “blacker” end of town in
      order to listen to the music coming out of the black record shops – urban black music
      (mbaqanga), but also Ellington, the Mills Brothers, the Inkspots, the King Cole Trio. On
      free Saturday mornings, he says, “I used also to walk around with my guitar and sit down
      with a black accordion player on the street – playing the street music of the Africans living
      in the towns.” (Ballantine, 1986)

The music that resulted from this process is preserved on their recording, Township Bop,
recorded one year prior to their leaving South Africa in 1965. The name of the group, the
Blue Notes, was ostensibly chosen to hide the racial make up of the band, but it also signals
a musical clue to both the type of music and their primary jazz influence. This music is
very much like African American hard bop, most famously recorded on the independent
label from the United States, Blue Note. The cover gives a visual clue to this affect, with
the top portion of the cover art being the album name with a white background and the
bottom portion a sepia-toned photograph that foregrounds an exuberant dancing couple,
with other dancers and listeners visible. The design of the cover was the signature look
of the Blue Note recordings. And indeed the music delivers what the visual presentation
suggests: original jazz compositions played in the hard bop fashion. They also covered
two Ellington compositions from his collaboration with Coltrane, “Angelica,” and “Take
the Coltrane.”
The opening number, Dudu Pukwana’s “Schoolboy,” relies upon many of the conventions
of hard bop. It is a twelve bar blues, with a minor pentatonic melody that is both plaintive
and snappy. The ensemble boasts very tight arrangements of the rhythm section that
punctuate and comment upon the melody of the front line. The introduction even evokes
the gospel-like progressions that the hard boppers introduced into mainstream jazz in the
late 1950s and 1960s. The piano comes in with bluesy interpolations in answer to the
horns’ call, as often done in the blues tradition. The solos, delivered by Pukwana on alto
sax, Nick Moyake on tenor sax, and McGregor, come over a driving, swinging 4/4 rhythm
with walking bass coupled with time articulated on the drum kits’ cymbals. After the solos,
the shout chorus that precedes the restatement of the melody is a verbatim stating of the
Sonny Rollins blues theme, “Sonny Moon for Two.” And they even land on a flat five, a
convention employed often by the beboppers.
Second to the blues in importance to jazz forms is the ubiquitous “rhythm changes.” In
“Kay,” also by Pukwana, the Blue Notes delivers a Jazz Messengers type rendition that
would surely have made Art Blakey smile. It is at the traditional fast tempo of rhythm
changes tunes, with the Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers gospel style call and response
during the A sections interspersed with brief drum breaks, and the tight rhythmic unisons
over the bridge that the Messengers were known for. The solo by Mongezi Feza (at this time
only a teenager) is particularly noteworthy. While the tight structures and arrangements
lie within the traditional solutions of Afro modernism worked out by the beboppers,
Feza is already straining against the limits of the tempered scale while adhering to the
velocity and melodic shapes that the genre requires. Feza plays with the playfulness and
abandon that jazz virtuosos are expected to deliver, but also manages to include yelps and
emphatic shouts through his horn that pointed towards the future. This music exemplifies
the urbane, sophisticated, and intellectual approach to jazz that led the African American
jazz innovators of the 1940s and 1950s to refer to their music not as bebop (the journalists’

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term) but as “modern music.” Even with the wild and exciting soloing of Feza, the band
never loses its concerns with high modernism right up to the ending of the tune with
its harmonically shifting coda. This music represents a particular strategy for confronting
the hegemony of the Western system—it reveals a mastery of functional harmony at
unprecedented levels of velocity, virtuosity and complexity, even as it utilises it along
with the harmonic matrix of the blues, which itself simultaneously utilises and transcends
Western harmony, often in subaltern contexts and spaces.
McGregor’s “Vortex,” written in homage to one of the band’s favourite performance
venues, reaches towards “modal jazz,” a musical innovation made famous initially by
Miles Davis’s famous hard bop band featuring John Coltrane. After the blues and rhythm
changes, the primary forms in all of the twentieth century jazz genres, the most advanced
hard bop musicians introduced what came to be called modal music in the late 1950s.
While Charles Mingus, and even early big band pioneer Don Redman, had experimented
with modes in jazz much earlier, it became popular after important recordings in 1958 and
1959 by the Miles Davis band. This band featured John Coltrane, who went on to base
his (widely imitated and influential) mature style upon modal music. Not surprisingly this
modal composition by the Blue Notes is closely modelled after the Miles Davis modal
breakthrough composition, “So What.” Like “So What,” “Vortex” is an AABA form
where each 8 bar section is comprised of a single mode. The similarity goes further: as
with the Davis original, the bridge of “Vortex” is the same mode one half-step higher than
the A section with an identical melody played in the new key. Also, the song relies upon a
minimum of melodic materials, and the bass is used melodically as well as harmonically,
again mirroring how Davis employed bassist Paul Chambers when he introduced modal
music to the world through his recordings Milestones and the runaway hit Kind of Blue. And
as if the homage were not specific enough, the background figures played during Moyake’s
solo are the same ones used by the Davis band over “So What.”
The full implications of the incipient revolt against the diatonic system represented by
the possibilities of the modal approach in jazz are not fully realised here, as it was not
necessarily in Davis’ own music of the previous decade. This would come later in the
United States during the early 1960s through the music of John Coltrane especially, and
also in the music of McGregor’s Blue Notes and Brotherhood of Breath once they left
South Africa. There is a time lag between the music of African American jazz musicians
and their counterparts in South Africa as evidenced in these recordings, which was probably
inevitable at that time due to the isolation that apartheid created for South Africa. This time
lag could make it seem that the South African musicians were “behind” in some sense,
but this would be a false conclusion in my opinion. It is clear that the ecstatic function of
music in South African traditional settings is preserved as spiritual content flowing in the
new forms of African American modernism, creating music that is built upon the old time
practices but which contains a new feeling and message. It is equally clear that this Afro
modernism came about similarly in both countries because of the similar needs of their
black proletarian cultures uncomfortably enmeshed in the cultures of (necessarily) racist,
paternalistic settler societies.

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After much sacrifice and hustling the Blue Notes managed to leave South Africa for the
Elysian fields of Europe through an invitation to perform in the Antibes Festival.3 They
found comparative racial freedom abroad, but were initially disappointed by the unexpected
conservative reception with which their music was initially met. It had taken all of their
resources, mother wit, and sheer good luck to make it out of South Africa, and they did
not have the resources to return. They relied upon their tenacity and musicality, and more
than a little help from their compatriot, Abdullah Ibrahim (then Dollar Brand), to survive
in Europe, travelling from Paris to London, and later to Sweden and Copenhagen.
While they stayed in Europe, they initially sought out American musicians. They met,
fraternised with, and collaborated with many distinguished African American musicians,
including such stalwart figures as Shihab Sahib, Idrees Suleiman, Beaver Harris, Archie
Shepp, J.C. Moses, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, and Albert Ayler. These were the most
revolutionary musicians of the late 1960s and 1970s, and McGregor and company’s
interaction with them erased the apparent time lag that had existed while they were in
South Africa. In fact, after settling in England, McGregor and his Brotherhood of Breath,
a big band built around the core of his fellow South Africans, became the leaders of the
progressive music scene. They not only revitalised the jazz culture of the country, but also
revolutionised it. They transformed a rather lacklustre jazz culture into one of international
importance. The South African exiles quickly become regarded as luminary figures, and
several of their English comrades, such as Evan Parker and Dave Holland, went on to be
celebrated as progressive leaders in their own right and continue to enjoy that status until
the present time.
The American jazz avant-garde of the time was tied to the Black Arts Movement, which
was the artistic component of the Black Power movement, including bold new discoveries
and expressions in visual arts, theatre, poetry, and most spectacularly music. The “New
Thing” in jazz was a scene in which the explosion of aesthetic freedom was built upon
what musicologist George Lewis (1996) calls Afrological principles: the conviction that
no longer should European or Euro-American standards be normative for black artists, or
indeed for black people in general. The ultra-hip harmonic mazes of the beboppers and
their artistic children were being replaced by some of the new musicians with soundscapes
whose architecture depended more upon timbral exploration, gestural rhythms, and group
telepathy during collective improvisations. For these musicians the respectability found in
clever resolutions of functional harmonic cycles, tempered, diatonic melodies, and swing
rhythms was less important than the visceral power available through the new techniques
explored by the likes of Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, et al. The music made in London by
Chris McGregor, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani, and Louis Moholo all
fit seamlessly in this new aesthetic. The ways in which their particular branch of the New
Thing developed, however, were anchored by South African jazz rhythms that lent this
sometimes-angry music a more lyrical and joyous content.
McGregor distanced himself from explicit political readings of his music, and did not
align himself with Black Power per se. However, he did insist on his music being about
“freedom.” He also re-evaluated the importance of his heritage while abroad avowing that

3
     For a rather prosaic description of how the Blue Notes toured South Africa gathering funds and
     momentum to emigrate, see McGregor (1995, 49-74).

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“…this conscious kind of South African-ism came in exile.” (McGregor, 104) The “South
Africanism” that obtained in his music was of course predicated upon not just his musical
experiences and techniques, but also his entire socialisation:
      There’s one thing you do realise in exile and that is that you’ve become more and more of
      a homeboy. When you thought you’d cut the ties, you realise you’ve tied them stronger. At
      times I’ve even tried to run away, to play down the South African connection, only to find
      that I’ve suddenly become very African. (Ballantine, 1986)

Importantly, as an African living in Europe, Chris deliberately sought a Pan-African
aesthetic. Perhaps the same historical forces and ironies that would cause the fathers of Pan-
Africanism to be Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey and United States-born W.E.B. DuBois
would allow a white South African who used to wear a kufi to try to pass as coloured to
become a leading musical exponent of the same philosophy. It was not Africans on the
continent who invented pan-Africanism, for the abstraction “African” was not initially a
primary identity for most folk, who rather identified according to their ethnic or language
group. African Americans for the most part cannot identify with a specific African ethnic
group, but rather are an ethnic group comprised of African descendants in their own nation
state, related to “the motherland” as a generalised abstraction. The concept of Africa and
later of Pan Africa logically grew in the environs where people’s identity and treatment
was of a generic, racial nature stemming from African ancestry on the one hand, and a
social, political nature stemming from race-based slavery (again, exclusively understood as
being based upon African ancestry) on the other. The South African musicians of course
did not have to rely upon romantic idealisations of African identity in the same ways
in which African Americans were susceptible, but certainly the ambivalence for a white
South African might have been as pointed as that of any black American struggling with
DuBoisian double consciousness.
Sazi Dlamini rightly draws a parallel between the development of hard bop in the States
as a compromise between the marginalised high modernism of bebop and the vernacular
musics made popular by the black proletariat (such as rhythm and blues and gospel) and
the township jazz of the Blue Notes, which addressed the marginalisation of bebop with
black urban vernacular forms such as mbaqanga. The wide appeal of mbaqanga and its
subsequent over-commercialisation led McGregor to eschew it in favour of bebop while in
South Africa. His experiences in exile, however, allowed him to reconcile these musics and
their ideological valences, “with the Blue Notes musically articulating a triple consciousness
simultaneously with their advancing of the free jazz idiom.” (Dlamini 2009, 21)
Dlamini theorises a triple consciousness to address the inadequacies of the notion of double
consciousness, as neologised by DuBois and further theorised by Gilroy’s black Atlantic,
when applied to the particularities of South African indigenous popular culture (DuBois
1903[1999], Gilroy 1993). Dlamini’s argument is read primarily against Karin Barber’s
dichotomy between elite and vernacular cultures (1987), but also against the fractured
black self assumed and theorised in the cultural theories espoused by DuBois and Gilroy.
Citing South African mass popular culture as practiced by traditional ethnic groups such as
“age-old ceremonies of male youth circumcision among the Xhosa,” and “the reed-dance
and first-fruit ceremonies among the Northern Nguni,” Dlamini’s triply conscious South
Africans, whether at home or abroad, can transcend a seemingly arbitrary divide between
obsolete traditionalists and cosmopolitan-but-deracinated moderns:

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      …while ‘double-consciousness’ and hybridity in the sense of the black Atlantic historically
      stand alienated, and not necessarily by choice, from lived traditions of indigeneity, ‘triple
      consciousness’ stands reconciled to popular practices which affirm a cultural homogeneity
      of its pre-colonial heritage. (Dlamini 2009, 23)

This reconciliation “was achieved and vigorously pursued in exile, with the Blue Notes
musically articulating a triple consciousness simultaneously with their advancing of the
free jazz idiom.” (Ibid., 368) The apex of this music, however, was realised in McGregor’s
big band stationed in London, the Brotherhood of Breath. The progressive styles of the
American Black Arts Movement and the mbaqanga heritage of South Africa were key
ingredients to this new music. Chris was able to reconnect with his heritage on a trip back
to South Africa where he collaborated with his old friends. Particularly memorable were
his performances with Mankunku Ngozi and Duku Makazi. The big band was brought
into existence in not in South Africa, however, but in West Africa, the spiritual and
cultural reference for most of African American culture. Quincy Jones was slated to write
the music for Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest. Chris went to Nigeria to write the
music and collaborated with musicians from Nigeria and from Ghana. Later he would
distance himself from the label ‘free jazz’ and simply claim that it’s that “African thing”.
His understanding of this went beyond his reliance upon polyrhythm. Referencing music
as played in African villages (such as the one in which he grew up), he says: “It’s not a
composition, but it’s in the culture of the people…” (McGregor, 188). This viewpoint is
also evident in his understanding of what jazz is:
      It is difficult for me to say how jazz was introduced into South Africa in as much as I don’t
      really have a definition of jazz as such. One could perhaps say that African music, coming
      into contact with modern technological society, tends to become something which one
      could call ‘jazz music.’ (Ibid., 215)

This may simply be a statement about the poetics of jazz, and in his view stripped of
political import. For this writer, however, this understanding of “jazz” is not only inherently
political, but political precisely along the lines of what was current in the artistic wing of
what Robin Kelley (1996) has termed the great African American proletarian revolution
that was occurring at the time and informing the music that influenced the Brotherhood of
Breath so profoundly.
The mature development of this music can be heard on the 1971 recording Chris McGregor’s
Brotherhood of Breath. “Andromeda,” written for his daughter, begins with a marabi- and
mbaqanga-influenced rhythms and horn arrangement. The song then changes to a jazz
swing rhythm with a stylistically consistent horn arrangement, but with an Ayleresque
saxophone solo by Pukwana. Pukwana’s palette has advanced far beyond the hard bop
phrasings of his earlier years, and now shows an emotional intensity and adventurousness
that was only hinted at in his first recordings. “Davashe’s Dream,” written by South
African composer Mackay Davashe, reveals the many developments of the band. An
achingly beautiful composition, McGregor adds to it a smart arrangement that shows his
love of not only Ellington, but also the big band writing of Charles Mingus and Sun Ra.
Pukwana’s rendering of the melody and solo showcases his understanding of the lead alto
tradition, encompassing everything from Duke Ellington’s Johnny Hodges to Sun Ra’s
Marshall Allen. This remarkable trajectory includes everything from the thick lush tone
and authoritative phrasing that Rabbit brought to the Ellington orchestra to the freakish

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flights of non-tempered shrieks and idiosyncratic fingering technique that Allen invented
with Ra’s Arkestra (though one could say the New Thing’s non-tempered melodies were
prefigured in Hodges’ melismatic approach to tonation, itself a refinement of the non-
tempered blues hollers of earlier generations, and so on.)
“Night Poem,” penned by McGregor, goes even further from any mainstream notion of
the music. Beginning with wooden flutes, bells, and shakers, drums and so forth, there is no
melody or harmony or any kind of repetitive rhythm as such. This extended introduction,
or first movement, recalls the utilisation of “little instruments” by the Art Ensemble of
Chicago, and the strategy of compositional development employed by other groups in
the AACM.4 The song expands organically from this soundscape, appearing more like
the sounds of the forest than the stylings of a big band. Gradually, horns and rhythm
section instruments are added, but there is never any traditional role-playing. The bass
and drums are completely freed from time-keeping duties, and the entire debt to European
harmony and temperament is completely abandoned. After a very long introduction, finally
marimba, bass, and drums play a rhythmic ostinato. Horns come in also, but throughout
there is the tapestry of sounds from percussion, whistles, Indian flutes, and the non-
tempered moans of western instruments. This band, having left the racially-constricted
environs of apartheid, found themselves more centrally involved in the current trends of
jazz. They created powerful, durable music that engaged that tradition and added to it,
forever changing the scope of music in London and beyond. They also found a way to
bring a South African voice and aesthetic to European jazz while fusing these two with the
au courant African American jazz stylings.

                                              NGOZI
A good musician with which to contrast the development of South Africa’s jazz exiles is
Winston Monwabisi “Mankunku” Ngozi, born in 1943 in Retreat, Western Cape.5 Widely
considered one of the most important jazz musicians of his country, Mankunku’s music is
one the great treasures of the world, though as a South African inxile his music is not as
widely known as those of his peers who went into exile.
Mankunku was a very sophisticated improviser. His early preparation for his artistry
included stints on the guitar, piano, and finally trumpet before getting an opportunity to
play an alto saxophone when a band member missed rehearsal. But when I asked him how
he learned to play he began by asserting, “My father was a preacher, and we always had
people in the house singing and I loved it.” This is probably the source of Ngozi’s uncanny
ability to make beautiful melodic statements no matter what the harmonic terrain. Primarily
an “ear player”, Mankunku never sounds pedantic or overreaching, though he addresses
all of the nuances necessary in great jazz performance. His lines always sound natural,
and he cannot be fooled by any of the booby traps with which certain compositions or

4
    The AACM is the acronym for the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. For the
    history of this important institution see George E. Lewis (2008).
5
    Ngozi made his transition while this essay was being written. My understanding of him and his
    music is based upon listening to his recordings, the reminiscences of his musical collaborators, and
    also a series of interviews with him that I conducted in May of 2009 in his hometown of Gugulethu,
    a black township annexed to Cape Town.

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wily accompanists foil lesser lights. I learned of his music while on a research trip to South
Africa as a Fulbright Scholar from the United States. Astonished that a recording artist
of his stature (and one that played the same instrument as myself, no less) could have
escaped my notice, I made arrangements to interview him, and simply to pay homage.
As we were enjoying Mankunku’s hospitality one evening in Gugulethu, Ezra Ngcukana,
a college educated professional, second-generation musician, and historically significant
saxophonist in his own right, insisted that despite all of his considerable training and
theoretical erudition he could not match the spontaneous brilliance Mankunku spun as a
matter of course. Indeed, many South African musicians have their favourite Mankunku
story highlighting his brilliance and special skills.
Ngozi’s improvisations are a veritable repository of the history of the music; he is the
possessor of virtuosic technique, though it is never conspicuous. In fact, his combination
of hipness and relaxed delivery separate him from more earnest would-be greats. His
music implies the complexities of modernity and provides us with tools for negotiating
life as we experience it—with all its confusing contradictions and oppressions, variegated
subjectivities and overlapping histories, opportunity and riches, and terrifying beauty. At the
same time, there was nothing forced or preachy in the way he played. He was truly exciting,
and at the same time, cool. In trickster-like fashion, Mankunku produced transcendent art
that celebrated the best of his culture while simultaneously critiquing its shortcomings and
pointing towards a more ethical society. Explaining how his music registered against the
oppression of the black majority by the Apartheid regime, he said, “Yeah, well, the Bellow
of the Bull, “Yakhal’ Inkomo,” is like about the black people in South Africa We’ve had
enough, so we were complaining, you know. You see us laughing, but inside it’s not okay.”
Mr Ngozi’s first recording, Yakhal’ Inkomo, made in 1968, was an instant classic, a compelling
artistic and political statement, and a jukebox hit. And yet, Mankunku’s notoriety is not
yet commensurate with his greatness. Cognoscenti on both sides of the Atlantic will testify
to apocryphal stories of how some of the greatest jazz artists in history—Duke Ellington,
Chick Corea, Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock—tried to lure him away from his home
country which oppressed and humiliated him. But Ngozi, like Robbie Jansen and other
elite South African musicians who remained in South Africa “during the dark days of
Apartheid”, have not yet garnered the same level of international acclaim as did those
who left— Bheki Mseleku or Abdullah Ibrahim, for example. Indeed, the discrepancy
between the regard in which inxiles and exiles are held seems relevant at many levels in
contemporary South African society, perhaps influencing schisms as far up the ladder as
the defection of COPE from the ANC.6
Mankunku chose to stay and play in his beloved country, oppression notwithstanding.
And while there are artists whose work in exile remained stylistically similar to their
work at home, many jazz exiles left South Africa and increasingly built their music along
increasingly dissonant and avant-garde lines. Mankunku avers that he loves the avant-garde
saxophonists such as Oliver Lake and Albert Ayler, “but I could never work here playing

6
    The defection of COPE seemed to amount to little more than a power play by disgruntled erstwhile
    members of the ANC. It was difficult to ascertain what the policy differences would have been had
    COPE gained some traction, and there was precious little in the way of philosophical or political
    debate. Rather, some alleged that inxile politicos were being left out of the political spoils that the
    ANC political machine doled out to former exiled comrades.

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like that.” When pushed to explain why, he offered that people wanted to take it easy. But
rather than pursue this line of reasoning, he simply dismissed it as something he could not
understand because he was “old.” The testimonies of musicians in South Africa, however,
bear witness to his ability and willingness to play “out” as well as “in”. The need to pursue
careers and dreams of financial solvency with greater emphasis on the practical rather than
strictly aesthetic criteria is perhaps one of the sadder [unintended] consequences of the
newfound freedom for African and Coloured musos. Indeed, some of Mankunku’s later
recordings show evidence of an inhibiting commercialism now favoured by Sheer Sound
and other recording companies.
Like the signifying music in his early recordings, Mr Ngozi is able to say more by implication
than lesser artists can with all of their wares on display. He manages to update and pay
homage to marabi, mbaqanga, maskanda, township jazz, and other home brewed styles
and genres. With what he calls indigeneity, musician/musicologist Sazi Dlamini explains
that South African musicians can make a gesture towards their historical experience and
political orientation through the forms of mbaqanga, much as African American musicians
make similar gestures through their usage of the blues, another three-chord form borrowed
from the West’s tonic, sub dominant, dominant harmonic framework. As in the blues, these
black South African creations subvert the expectations and hegemony of European musical
practice through idiomatic melodic and rhythmic practices. In the case of Afro America,
the subversion of the hierarchical concerns of diatonicism was achieved primarily through
the blues matrix of melodic/harmonic construction. The ‘tonicised’ dominant seventh
chord replaced the major and minor tonalities of the Western canon, and the blues gestures
built upon field hollers and spirituals transcended diatonic melodies. The functionality of
mbaqanga similarly stretched the harmonic function of the tonic, subdominant, dominant
mainstay not by melodic gestures primarily, but rather by creating a rhythmic groove and
cycle that made functional harmony redundant.
A “son of the soil,” Mankunku built his aesthetic conception while searching for freedom
as imagined by the oppressed, not the unfettered license exercised by those who are
comparatively free in a socio-political sense.7 Though McGregor would participate in the
most advanced music movements of his day, under the apartheid system the Blue Notes
played music that utilised Western music materials—functional harmony, tempered scale,
etc.—to fashion a new music capable of expressing the need to exceed these boundaries,
even as they displayed a mastery over those very same forms.
In New York during the 1940s and 50s, modern musicians learned to build an urban music
built upon African American folk music—the classic blues—that increased the complexity
and velocity of European functional harmony. In South Africa black musicians living in
the context of townships, built an urban music built upon traditional musics and functional
harmony—mbaqanga. This cyclical form allowed improvisers to continually signify upon
the expectations set up by the I IV V I harmonic progression that is at the core of Western
tonal music. It is in this tradition that the jazz artistry of Ngozi must be analysed and
evaluated.
His maturity and artistry are in part a product of the shebeen culture of yesteryear in places
like the legendary Sophiatown, where the adult conversation was truly stimulating, and

7
    On the difference between aesthetic freedom and license, see Michael S. Washington (2000).

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wide ranging. The urbane sophistication of jazz was surely at home in a setting where
drinkers routinely discussed history, politics, religion, sex, and all manner of things.
However, neither the politics of respectability nor the mastery of normative social and
artistic values could protect Ngozi from the absurdities of apartheid. If state violence,
economic oppression, and social displacement were not enough, there were the quotidian
frustrations that one had to suffer at the whims of others. One almost funny example:
he once had to play behind a curtain while a white “Winston Mann” pantomimed his
solo. If the indignities that he and his colleagues suffered during the Apartheid era reflect
the absurdities of racialised capitalism, the mismanagement of his legacy and talent in
his later years point uncomfortably towards the pitfalls awaiting a people whose social
structures and whose governors could very well trade in revolutionary zeal for a multi-
racial bourgeois democracy.
Winston Ngozi is often compared to John Coltrane in much the same way that Kippie
Moeketsie is compared to Charles Parker. After Coltrane made his ascension, saxophonists
and other musicians suddenly felt freer to express Trane’s influence in their music. His
“formulas” showed up in countless places, and his hagiography was soon to follow. Ngozi
is among the small number of musicians who were able to display the freedom and the
spirituality that Coltrane and his sound represented rather than simply copying his licks.
While lesser musicians relied upon using specific melodic licks, harmonic formulae and
the like, Mankunku simply understood where Trane was coming from and let that spirit
flow naturally in his own performances. Indeed, Mankunku described to me how as a
teenager he would cry when he heard Coltrane’s music, that he could feel his pain. Also,
that Coltrane would come to him in dreams, and that he was moved primarily by Trane’s
sound. Ngozi also felt a special closeness to Coltrane’s late period because of his penchant
for playing two melodies simultaneously, playing a bit in the high register and then in the
low register, oscillating between the two registers with different melodies. For Ngozi, this
was akin to certain styles of Xhosa singing.
An unhappy but telling connection is that excessive alcohol consumption might be the
aetiology of the premature deaths of both of these giants. It is important to note, however,
that the actual source of the dysfunction in both their lives that resulted in alcoholism and
drug abuse is more than likely social. In a word, it is economic and political oppression.
When one person falls prey to vice perhaps it is a moral lapse, but when a generation does
so, then the cause must be social. This fact can be seen in the widespread drinking and
smoking of Mandrax among African and coloured musicians respectively. Like heroin and
cocaine use among African American jazz musicians of the same generations, these drugs
are an all too regular feature in the landscape of musicians’ lifestyles.
Mankunku’s musical strategy was multi-faceted, but he understood the African American
practices of saxophone playing perhaps better than any non-American. While his melodic
sense is firmly rooted in South African song styles, his improvisational techniques and
saxophone articulations run the gamut of African American jazz strategies. At one
moment he is playing tight harmonies and attending to the details of voice leading that
makes modern jazz such an intellectual endeavour. In the next he is carefully leading the
listener to the limits of this same harmonic system, straining at the boundaries as it were
with the humanising, vocal moans and hollers that owe as much to the “heterogeneous
sound ideal” of so much African music as it does to the dictates of functional music. It

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is the simultaneous navigation of both of these spheres that brings to mind DuBoisian
double consciousness, while Dlamini’s triple consciousness is obviously relevant due to
Ngozi’s immersion in isiXhosa culture. But as a jazz musician, Ngozi’s recorded output
during the apartheid era is decidedly respectable by Western criteria, although the hidden
transcript (to borrow James Scott’s phrase), which included protest against apartheid and a
concomitant straining against the limits of Euro-aesthetics, was audible to black audiences.
The apartheid regime of the United States gave rise to the same strategy until the late
1960s, when significant numbers of blacks no longer believed in the normative values
of bourgeois democracy or in the nation’s willingness to honour its democratic rhetoric.
As the respectable, law-abiding, moralistic Civil Rights Movement gave way to the more
insistent and bombastic Black Power movement and the hundreds of urban insurrections
of the era (especially after Dr King’s assassination), the hyper-diatonic practices of modern
musicians, the beboppers and their stylistic heirs, yielded centre stage to the musical revolts
of the Black Arts Movement. That is, the hidden transcript became public.
Throughout the United States, institutions such as the Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians in Chicago, Black Artist Group in St. Louis, The Union of God’s
Musicians and Artists in Los Angeles, were founded to organise and support the musicians
with new understandings of how to play and present the music. This development happened
after the demise of de jure racial segregation, suggesting that there might be a connection
between the level of freedom that exists in society and the amount of freedom possible for
its artists. On the one hand the post-apartheid artistic imagination of black musicians was
broader in part because the social space and legal boundaries were broader; on the other
hand, Europe was no longer the centre of cultural imagination and its artistic practices no
longer normative. But under the oppression of racist regimes in both the United States and
South Africa, black musicians were far more likely to include respectability as a defense
strategy.8 This was a respectability that included performing the cultural and social norms
of the white Americans and South Africans with superior aplomb and morality. The
decision to eschew Western epistemologies altogether was a luxury that did not attend
fully to the cultural and social needs of jazz musicians under the direct brunt of racial
subjugation, at least according to the recorded evidence.9
And so the urban music created by many jazz musicians in the US and in SA during their
respective apartheid eras was dressed in conventional instrumental virtuosity, harmonic
sophistication, and other signifiers of Western respectability and competence. In the
jazz avant-garde of the 1960s, the dignified revisionism and ‘one-upmanship’ (whether

8
    The “politics of respectability” was theorised in Evelyn Higginbotham (1993).
9
    One leading inxile artist who consciously plied his art as part of the cultural wing of the anti-apartheid
    struggle and continued his revolutionary zeal thereafter was Cape Town’s Robbie Jansen, flautist and
    alto saxophonist extraordinaire. In his 2000 recording with his group the Sons of Table Mountain
    The Cape Doctor, Jansen delivers a jazzy mixture of Cape Malay ghoema, salsa, funk, rock, and bebop.
    Each piece shows a different side of the Cape Jazz sound of which he is a major proponent. At one
    moment in “Zeekloivei” he plays a haunting, non-diatonic melody, evoking an air of mystery, then
    a loving jazz ballad titled for his fellow Capetonian, “Mankunku,” in yet another he pays homage to
    his Khoisan ancestry with “Khoisan Symphony.” An expert composer and arranger, Jansen manages
    to get the Cape lilt into the ballad without losing any of the non-sentimental beauty of the jazz side
    or the infectious buoyancy of the Cape influences.

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it be revealed in greater technical velocity in realm of music, or greater moral authority
within the world of social and political protest) from within the dictates of “the system”
(orderly protest politics, musical adherence to functional harmony) gave way to unabashed
allegiance to black forms (blues, spirituals, mbaqanga, disorderly eruptions of black power,
violence against “white” property, institutions) with lesser resonance within so-called
white society. Simultaneously, there was a stretching of timbral and rhythmic practices that
signified even less allegiance to European aesthetics. These stylings of revolt were present
in incipient form in the early work of Mankunku, but were apparently not as open to full
expression as McGregor’s recordings made in Europe at approximately the same time.
Though it is a protest song, “Yakhal’ Inkomo” is a lyrical composition played over a relaxed
tempo and beat. The protest inherent in the song’s music is subtly revealed in the details,
just as the title would obfuscate its meaning for many white South Africans, most of whom
do not speak any of the African languages now made official in the post-Apartheid era.
The precipice of time negotiated by this band, which includes Lionel Pillay on piano,
Agrippa Magwaza on bass, and Early Mabuza on drums, is one of the true delights of
this recording. The Afro American approach to 4/4 or common time (especially in jazz
music, but also in other genres) is built upon an articulation of duplets played in a manner
that implies triplets. Textbooks and conservatories have perverted this practice by trying
to teach it by the numbers, reducing swinging eighth notes to dotted eighths followed by
a sixteenth, and other corny approximations. What American musicians (and others)
who did not learn through African American models and culture miss is the actual intent.
Musicians are not playing these alternative rhythms; rather, they are playing the duplets,
the eighth notes, but inflecting them idiomatically. When working class Brooklynites say
the now-patented “forget about it!” they are not saying “fuhgged aboudit!”; rather, they are
simply speaking through a Brooklyn accent.
The way in which this “swing” feel is played by Mankunku’s band, however, is spot on.
Non-African American bands almost never achieve this so seamlessly. Moreover, the song
includes the American style swing over the bridge, but a special South African lilt over
the A section, with its own version of triplet/duplet negotiation. It sounds as if there is a
synthesis between the “straight eighths” and the “swing” feels. The drummer plays simply
on the downbeats of the quarter note, but with a swing feel felt but not articulated, while
the piano plays a harmonic/rhythmic ostinato. Perhaps this is an influence Ngozi picked
up during his tenure in Cape Town and his collaboration with musicians reared on the
ghoema beat.
Ngozi’s solo here is a masterpiece, at once understated and adventurous. His tone, warm
and rich, is always under control, but at times suggestively breaking into overtone-rich
growls and hollers. While many other saxophonists, especially throughout the African
Diaspora, were not beholden to tempered intonation, rather Ngozi strains beyond it. That
is, he demonstrates flawless control in that area, and breaks through it not through reckless
abandon, but always with deliberate control. Also, the harmonic/melodic gestures that
define the jazz idiom are all expertly rendered here, including rhythmic displacement,
harmonic substitutions, ii-V-I sequences with frequent use of so-called bebop scales, pedal
points in the bass line, lively (non-formulaic, unpredictable) and continuous rhythmic
counterpoint played upon the snare drum, and so forth. To the double consciousness
represented in the significations upon the diatonic system through the ii-V sequences is

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added the triple consciousness that Dlamini theorises through the timbre of Ngozi’s horn.
During his solos he frequently makes use of a technique that resembles umngqokolo, or
Xhosa overtone singing.
The extent of African American musical influence, however, is made plain: of the four tunes
on this debut album, one is “Doodlin’” by Horace Silver, and another, “Bessie’s Blues,” is
by Coltrane. But the remaining track makes his jazz lineage even clearer. “Dedication (To
Daddy Trane and Brother Shorter10)” pays homage to his muses, utilising the respectful
familial honorifics that are such an important part of social intercourse amongst black
South Africans. It opens with a jazz Afro-Latin rhythm with a modal melody with the
wide leaps and angularity made famous by Coltrane. This ability to make wide leaps and
to play two simultaneous melodies is one of the things that initially attracted Ngozi to
Coltrane, leading him to exclaim, “Coltrane is a Xhosa musician!” Added to this, similarly
with “Yakhal’ Inkomo”, is a straight-ahead swing approach to the bridge. The melody and
solos utilise a Coltrane-like use of quartal harmonies, double timing riffs that function
as rhythmic devices at some points and as portals into sonic explorations beyond the
tessitura and temperament of the saxophone at others. His music teaches much about
the true purpose and value of art, while revealing injustice in the music industry and the
world beyond.
One of Ngozi’s later recordings, Abantwana Be Afrika, is a very different kind of affair.
Recorded in 2003, 35 years after his first recording, this is a relaxed session of a master in
his later years. Accompanying him are young musicians who are among South Africa’s
finest: pianist Andile Yenana (who also served as co-producer), bassist Herbie Tsoaeli,
trumpeter Prince Lengoasa, and drummer Lulu Gontsana. This is a well produced, almost
slick, professional recording. But for this writer, there is less of the fervour and fire of
rebellion that marked Ngozi’s earlier work. To be fair, the old Winston is frequently very
evident in his later recordings. One such instance would be on Molo Afrika, particularly
on the track “Khanya.” On this track there is a decidedly postmodern sensibility in which
the rhythm section oscillates between jazz swing feel and a pop oriented backbeat. During
his solo there is a protracted section with the swing feel, but the over all momentum of
that section is deliberately contrasted with the backbeat sections, which all but dominate
the track.
All of this music, whether the more jazz oriented or the more pop music oriented, is all
very pleasing and well executed; the production values are first rate, the ensemble passages
tight and flawless, and many of the solos stand up well to repeated listening. Perhaps this
music represents an increased professionalism in the country’s jazz musicians. As the stakes
grew higher (however marginally) in terms of remuneration, the pressure to record music
that would appeal to a wider audience was certainly felt. This can be heard most strongly
on other recordings prior to this, such as Jika, which was recorded on Nkomo, on a label
started by Ngozi and his close colleague, Mike Perry. So in general, Ngozi’s recorded music
becomes much more dance beat oriented. That is to say, electronic instruments tend to
replace acoustic instruments, straight eighth grooves tend to replace swing feel, predictable
drum patterns replace more improvisatory rhythmic accompaniment, and so forth.

10
     The subtitle reads “Brother Silver” on the Yakhal’ Inkomo CD, but reads “Brother Shorter” on Ngozi’s
     later release, Abantwana Be Afrika (2003).

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