South African music: the new jazz
But the cross-cultural influences that had been brewed in Sophiatown continued to inspire South African musicians of all races in the years that followed.
And, just as American ragtime and swing had inspired earlier jazz forms, so the new post-war American style of bebop had begun to filter through to South African musicians.
In 1955, the most progressive jazz-lovers of Sophiatown had formed the Sophiatown Modern Jazz Club, propagating the sounds of bop innovators such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
The jazz club sponsored gatherings such as "Jazz at the Odin", at a local cinema, and from such meetings grew South Africa's first bebop band, the highly influential Jazz Epistles. The band's earliest membership was a roll-call of musicians destined to shape South African jazz from then on: Dollar Brand, Kippie Moeketsi, Jonas Gwangwa and Hugh Masekela among them.
In 1960, the Jazz Epistles recorded their first and only album, "Jazz Epistle Verse One". At the same time, composers such as Todd Matshikiza (who composed the successful musical "King Kong") and Gideon Nxumalo ("African Fantasia") were experimenting with combinations of old forms and new directions.
"King Kong" (the tale of black South African boxer Ezekiel Dlamini) became a hit, and travelled overseas. Many of South Africa's leading black musicians were attached to the show, and many found the freedom on offer outside the country an irresistible lure, remaining in exile there.
Among them was singer Miriam Makeba, who had achieved fame in South Africa with The Manhattan Brothers and later with her own band The Skylarks; she went on to a highly successful international career.
As the apartheid regime increased its power, and resistance to it began to increase,
political repression in South Africa began in earnest.
In the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and the subsequent state of emergency and mass arrests, bannings and trials of activists challenging apartheid laws, more and more musicians found it necessary to leave the country.
SAinfo reporter
