Lisnaholic

How strong do you like your jazz to be? If jazz were graded the same way that alcohol is, the music in this thread would be a safe 4% - like a decent beer, it`s something you can consume over an extended period with no lasting adverse effects. What I`m calling “vintage South African jazz” is a short-lived, regional flowering of music in the years between the end of Second World War(1945) and the apartheid clampdown which occurred after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. But before we get there, let`s skip back a few decades:-

ORIGINS

Jazz music, created in New Orleans in the 1900s, was exported back to Africa by boat, turning up first at ports like Johannesburg and Cape Town. When I first came across this idea, I imagined a ship like the Mayflower, loaded with jazz 78s which were handed out dockside to waiting shopkeepers and musicians. Of course, the process wasn`t quite that simple, as this seven-minute documentary makes clear:-



And here is an example of the marabi music with which the documentary concludes:-



Another source mentions the specific bands who were inspired by/copying the exciting new American swing music:-

Unfortunately, not one of the above bands shows up on Youtube, so I`m going to fill the gap with a clip from the same period; the original a cappella recording of a song that we`ve all heard in one version or another :-



In fact – or at least according to the band members themselves - it was actually The Harlem Swingsters, active in the 40s and 50s, who invented the first genuinely homegrown South African jazz style. Like many of their peers, the Harlem Swingsters started out by playing American swing music, but one morning, over an open-air breakfast of corn bread while they were on tour in the Transvaal, they hit on the idea of combining swing with marabi to create a new style which they called majuba :-



In a parallel development, a guy called Soloman “Zulu Boy” Cele of the Jazz Maniacs was mixing swing with traditional Xholo music, which led to a style known as mbaqanga, which is a kind of jazz-pop with lots of vocal harmonies, perhaps following on from that Wimaweh song you may have clicked on earlier. Whatever was actually happening, by the late 1940s South African jazz had acquired a lively, recognizable style of its own.

THE GOOD YEARS

The fifties was apparently a good decade in South Africa; the country was more prosperous and the attitude towards the black population became slightly less harsh. In this optimistic atmosphere new music played by black musicians flourished.
Here are a couple of examples of the new jazz; songs were almost exclusively two and a half minutes long, with a light melody to start off which would be reprised to conclude the song. Today those parts may sound grainy and dated, but in the middle sections there was always time for a little soloing which comes across clear and strong, like an unbowed voice from a past era:-

.......

While the African Swingsters were popular, the cutting edge band of the time were the Jazz Epistles. They didn`t call themselves “swingsters” as everyone else was doing ; bebop was the style they emulated, and their line-up included musicians who became internationally famous:- Dollar Brand (later known as Abdullah Ibrahim) on piano, Kippie Moeketsi on alto saxophone, Jonas Gwangwa on trombone, Hugh Masekela on trumpet, Johnny Gertze on bass, and Early Mabuza or Makaya Ntshoko on drums. Their 1959 album, Jazz Epistle, Verse 1, was the first album recorded by a black South African band, if wikipedia is to be believed:-



Another South African musician of lasting fame who started out in the 50s was singer Miriam Makeba, who worked with the Manhatten Brothers before forming her own group, the Skylarks, and writing her breakthrough hit, Pata Pata in 1956.( Her breakthrough, btw, was a long time coming as PataPata didn`t become an international hit until eleven years later):-



Meanwhile, back in Sophiatown, Jo`burg, in 1959, Todd Matshikiza wrote South Africa`s first jazz musical. Called King Kong, it celebrated the life of heavyweight boxer Ezekiel”King Kong” Dhlamini. Both Miriam Makeba and the Jazz Epistles featured in the original production, which might well have been the finest hour for vintage SA jazz. Youtube has let me down again though, and I can only find this opening track from the 1961 London production of the show:-



Finally, can`t leave this section without at least a quick mention of Chris McGregor and Dudu Pukwana, who played together at a jazz festival in Soweto in 1962. They later went on to form the Brotherhood of Breath in the USA, but of their appearances at a handful of SA jazz festivals I have found no trace.

To Be Continued….

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953