SA music: jazz in exile
Dollar Brand (later Abdullah Ibrahim, after his conversion to Islam), Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Caiphas Semenya, Letta Mbulu, Miriam Makeba - all these key figures in South African jazz developed their talents and their careers outside the country in the years of increasing repression.
Abdullah Ibrahim
Over the next four decades, Ibrahim developed his own
distinctive style, slipping back into South Africa in the mid-1970s to make
a series of seminal recordings with the cream of Cape jazz players (Basil
Coetzee and Robbie Jansen, for instance), which included his masterpiece,
"Manenberg", one of the greatest South African compositions ever, and which
became the unofficial soundtrack to the anti-apartheid resistance.
Ibrahim's extensive oeuvre has continued to expand the South African musical palette, as he has worked as a solo performer (in mesmerising unbroken
concerts that echo the unstoppable impetus of the old marabi performers),
with trios and quartets, with larger orchestral units, and, since his
triumphant return to South
Africa in the early 1990s, with symphony
orchestras. He has also founded a school for South African musicians in Cape
Town.
Hugh Masekela
A renewed interest in his African roots led him to collaborate with West and Central African musicians, and finally to reconnect with South African players when he set up a mobile studio in Botswana, just over the South African border, in the
1980s. Here he re-absorbed and re-used mbaqanga modes, a
style he has
continued to use since his return to South Africa in the early 1990s.
The Blue Notes
The Blue Notes, and later MacGregor bands such as Brotherhood of Breath, as well
as the Pukwana and Moholo bands, became an essential part of the European
jazz avant-garde, carrying the African influence far beyond these shores.
Sadly, all of the former Blue Notes except Louis Moholo died in exile.
Ibrahim is undoubtedly the towering figure in South African music, a man who
brought together all its traditions with a deeply felt understanding of
American jazz, from the orchestral richness of Duke Ellington's compositions
for big band to the groundbreaking innovations of Ornette Coleman and the
1960s avant-garde.
Ibrahim's old collaborator, the trumpeter Hugh Masekela, also had a
glittering career outside South Africa. Initially inspired in his musical
growth by Trevor Huddleston - a British priest working in the townships who
financed Masekela's first trumpet - Masekela played his way through the
vibrant Sophiatown scene and to Britain with King Kong, to find himself in
New York in the early 1960s. He had hits in the United States with the poppy
jazz tunes "Up, Up and Away" and "Grazin' in the Grass".
Also pursuing the expansion of South African jazz into new realms, though in
Britain, was the band The Blue Notes. Having made a name for themselves in
South Africa in the early 1960s, this dymanic, adventurous group, led by
pianist Chris MacGregor, left for Britain in the late 1960s and stayed
there. The other members of the band, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Johnny
Dyani and Louis Moholo, contributed richly to the sound of this
ever-evolving ensemble, and also recorded significant solo material.
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