South African music: jazz at home

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Philip Tabane

One key South African jazz perfomer, and one of the country's most innovative musicians, remained at home to pursue his unique vision. He was Philip Tabane, a guitarist who combined southern Africa's deepest, oldest polyrhythmic traditions with the freest jazz-based improvisation.

Influenced by the political ideas of Black Consciousness as well as by his own links with African spirituality, Tabane kept a shifting group of musicians playing in different combinations under the name Malombo (which refers to the ancestral spirits in the Venda language). He has toured the world, but has always returned home.

From the early 1960s until today, Tabane has produced some of South Africa's most interesting and adventurous sounds, though a relatively conservative and commercially oriented local recording industry has meant, sadly, that he has been under-recorded.

Playing through repression

Jazz continued to be played in South Africa during the years of severe repression, with groups such as The African Jazz Pioneers and singers such as Abigail Kubheka and Thandi Klaasen keeping alive the mbaqanga-jazz tradition that had enlivened Sophiatown.

Cape jazzers such as Basil Coetzee, Robbie Jansen and Hotep Idris Galeta kept developing the infectious Cape style.

The 1980s saw the appearance of Afro-jazz bands such as Sakhile and Bayete, marrying the sounds of American fusion and ancient African patterns, to considerable commercial success.

New directions

Others, such as the band Tananas, took the idea of instrumental music into the direction of what became known as "world music", creating a sound that crossed borders with a mix of African, South American and other styles.

In more recent years, important new jazz musicians - such as Paul Hanmer, Moses Molelekwa and Zim Ngqawana - have taken the compositional and improvisatory elements of jazz in new directions, bringing them into contact with today's contemporary sounds, as well as drawing on the older modes, to provide the country - and appreciative overseas audiences - with a living, growing South African jazz tradition.