By Jasper Cook
A TEENAGE quasi-legend had it that things happened most often at either twenty past or twenty to the hour, or that clocks always stopped at those times. For me, all my young life, that wasn’t true. That’s not to say I dismiss the notion altogether. My clock, throughout my youth, lured my eyes to it most often at ten past ten. Not ten past any other hour, just ten past ten. If you blur your vision and stare at a clock displaying ten minutes past ten, its hands make a wide ‘V’.
It reminded me of Winston Churchill’s ‘V for Victory’ gesture. For years I wondered about this, even to the point of being obsessed with it. I mulled intensely over ‘V’ and ‘Victory’. What did this mean, or hold for me personally? In time, the fixation waned. I slunk, ducked and trudged through hateful decades of apartheid.
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Apartheid was the uber-feature (read: bug) of South African life. You could say that notions like ‘twenty-to/past’ were a soothing tangent to the nasty reality of growing up being told by some Calvinist with a phallic, church-steeple index finger that it was illegal to love the slender, staggeringly beautiful melanin-rich girl I clapped my eyes on at Sunday Church at eight years of age. Hell, I knew straight away that segregation was a no-no.
I did pretty well at everything I tried. True, I didn’t get rich, but, as Benson, the lead character in the eponymous TV sitcom played by Robert Guillaume, would say to the governor, ‘there‘s always time!’ I’m only eighty! It can’t be construed as failure, because I never set out to get rich. In fact, I hardly gave a thought to money, doing anything and everything I wanted to do, Because I Could. I had a voracious appetite for life as an experiment, to lurch through with the twists and turns of a hasie–jakkals chase. Bernoldus Niemand was not the only cherry-faced lurcher in Yeoville. One boss, interviewing me for yet another job I needed (to pay for my music habit), scanned my CV and asked, with metred dignity: ‘Is. There. Anything. You. Haven’t. Done?’.
‘Fashion model.’ I said. ‘Never done that.’ I could have added ‘middle-weight boxer’. Right height and weight division, residual aggro, but, hey, I needed my front teeth for trumpet and trombone, and I knew there would be a long queue of pugilists with plans for my crockery.
Casinos have similar plans for us. I know an actual genius who pocketed a huge pay packet, enough for three months rent, from a gig at a sunny casino, then descended to the slot machines. Determined to ‘crack the system’, he frittered it away before dawn. The house always wins. Anyway, I got the job. My CV made better reading than David Niven’s poetry audition in ‘The Moon’s a Balloon’. Ahem.
Other urban legends came along. In a modern twist, the six degrees of separation have been proven true yet again. I first overheard it in 1957 in the presence of UNP intellectuals[1] in the Tabernacle[2], and now that I am eighty, I can recall two fresh-faced teenage generations, spanning 60 years, cunningly confiding this special piece of knowledge to the ignorant old toppie !
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But, enough twists and turns. Back to the ‘V’ of ten past ten. How would ten-ten be a victory? It began to make a sort of sense. By the time I joined the African Jazz Pioneers, my burning desire was to join its band leader in firing up this band to fronting a vigorous liberation clamour, if you will, and I was very conscious of the liberation music of Glenn Miller in the streets of Paris in 1945. I felt we could be that for Pretoria. I felt we would somehow force change, and bring about exhilarated jiving in the streets, as with GIs romancing French girls — ‘In The Mood’ on liberated Parisian cobbles.
Looking back, we did. The AJP did turn out to be one of the flurry of bands, more especially found at the now silent, semi-derelict Roxy Rhythm Bar in Melville, that hurried in a new order. Bands like AJP, Mango Groove, Tananas, Sakhile, Bayete and Bright Blue were latched onto by a joyous South African youth searching for identity, and our throbbing Mzansi rhythms snared them.
Everywhere in the world, at events like the 1988 Wembley Nelson Mandela Concert, money poured into liberation coffers, but those were still early days for South African music elsewhere in the world. Few world wide were aware of our music. Why would they be? We were the polecat of the world. However, many concerts followed, vibrant with song and dance, theatre, colour and music. More money poured in. South African colour and sense of occasion became the flavour that led to the ‘New South Africa’.
The African Jazz Pioneers, along with most South African bands, were unknown and overlooked by the organisers of the Wembley event. Local musicians were intense and bitter about this: the Cultural Boycott was cursed more than a few times, but I personally understood. One has to realise that, in 1988, few people in the world at large had heard any South African big names other than Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba. There were others like Jonas Gwangwa, Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu in the US, and Chris McGregor’s ‘Brotherhood of Breath’ was already legendary in British and European jazz.
Abdullah Ebrahim was becoming famous worldwide: tenor saxophonist Basil ‘Manenberg’ Coetzee often referred to Abdulah’s ‘Mannenberg is Where it’s Happening‘ (recorded in 1975) as ‘the REAL national anthem of South Africa’, but jazz is not a big enough seller anywhere. In a conversation with Hugh Masekela, while recording ‘Black to the Future‘ at Bop Studios, he said: ‘Jazz chases money away!’ The session guys laughed uproariously at that, but you can guess there was more than a tinge of sheepishness in the mirth. It’s a bit like:
Q: What do you call a jazz musician without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless.
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Township jazz was a barely known genre. The first African Jazz Pioneers album was recorded in 1988, the same year as the Nelson Mandela concert. ‘Special Star’, my three-year-old granddaughter’s current favourite dance-up, and arguably Mango Groove’s best-known hit, was recorded in 1989. It was known as ‘Afro-Pop’ rather than ‘township’, but there were overlaps everywhere: they and the AJP both recorded ‘Hellfire’, composed by Mickey Vilakazi, who joined them after a year or two with the Pioneers. The AJP version sounds as close to sixties township jazz as anyone will ever get after the late eighties.[3]
Paul Simon had recorded in Jo’burg in 1986: the talk was that he had heard bootleg mbaqanga tapes, which then lured him to Jo’burg, starting something that morphed into an ugly Cultural Boycott clanger. The Graceland concert itself was recorded in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1987. Ten thousand were in the audience, which is small potatoes against Wembley’s capacity. Although the Harare concert became a huge legend, it would have been barely a pixel on the Wembley organisers’ radar. They and the BBC were nervous about filling a 100 000-person venue with any bands at all, let alone unknown South African bands. Paul Simon was already famous, but his Graceland mbaqanga direction was new. And his name was mired in cultural boycott controversy.
I understood the marketing concerns, but few of my contemporary musicians did. British marketing concerns did nothing to diminish our bitterness at being denied an opportunity to strut our stuff, especially to flip a bird at apartheid. While the Pioneers were recording our first album in Downtown Studios in Jo’burg in[4] in 1988, much of the talk during green room breaks was bitterly hissed disapproval about how almost every South African musician was overlooked. Many people came and went from London, and the grapevine was vibrant: a conversation with Louis Moholo-Moholo in a London venue would be relayed verbatim in New Brighton township 36 hours later, and it would be all over South Africa after the following weekend gigs.
As things unfolded, the Wembley organisers needn’t have worried. The venue was packed to its roof. As Mike Terry says in the clip, they could have sold out a few times over. History proves that getting world-famous bands was the right move back then: concentrating attention on the decades-long incarceration of Nelson Mandela became the modus operandi for global fund raising.
It still hurts, though. Terry points out in the clip that Stevie Wonder’s keyboard was stolen, and Tracy Chapman was sent on stage to sing one song after another until a replacement keyboard could be found. Those were still the days of record labels, and Chapman became famous at that concert precisely because she had a long stint on stage. That’s what exposure does. You can imagine our collective stress at missing an opportunity that size.
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After eight years in the AJP, my dream of being in a band that became a music byword for liberation came true, with victory over apartheid. After playing a set at Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration concert, during which Madiba did the famous ‘Madiba Dance’, I registered a double deja vu: each of his arms made a ‘V’ while dancing.
The African Jazz Pioneers were asked to line up between marquees on the lawns: the great man wanted to thank us personally. He emerged from his bullet-proof Merc and strode over to Bra Ntemi Piliso, our band leader. A brief chat in a vernacular followed. It looked very convivial. Then Madiba moved down the line. There were ten of us, and he had more than a few words with each of us, in each of our languages. That man seemed to have a little time for everyone. I was last in the line, as always, because trombones are best kept out of the way. He shook my hand, thanked me, and turned away. I thought that was it, but he turned back again, and with his famous laugh lines deepening, said: ‘I think you are the only one here who does not have an identity crisis.’
As he walked away, I thought: ‘How does he KNOW?’.
It had been quite the sight, from the huge bandstand in the Union Building grounds, to witness the reported 150 000 people dancing on the lawns to ‘Hellfire’, among other songs. Few know that it nearly did not happen for us, as with the 1988 Wembley concert. I was later told by an insider at a Kagiso Trust meeting that Madiba (who had been Bra Ntemi Piliso’s lawyer) was miffed at the exclusion of the AJP, saying ‘I think, after being locked up for 27 years, that I am entitled to my favourite band.’ The organisers buckled, and we were in !
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Zacks Nkosi’s song ‘Ten Ten Special’ was about the last train to Pimville, Soweto, leaving Faraday Station in Jo’burg at ten past ten at night. The curfew was at ten pm. If blacks were found in the streets of Jo’burg after that, they were rounded up, ‘helped’ into a cop van, and carted off to spend the night in jail.
It was eerie back then, driving home after a gig. Commissioner, Fox and Main Streets, heaving with pedestrians by day, were deserted. It was rare to spot a night watchman, let alone a pedestrian. AJP’s first album was recorded right there, in Downtown Studios, around Main Street, a block or two away from Commissioner Street. Several blocks westward in Commissioner Street was Jameson’s, where my time in the AJP began, but that’s another story.
The Ten Ten Special video featured here was the official promo for our first album. It was filmed in an old railway commuter carriage parked in the sidings behind the Market Theatre Precinct. Bandleader Ntemi Piliso was not in the video. He could not be there that day, and was replaced by another sax player whose name I forget. Large speakers were erected outside the carriage windows, and we mimed to the track. Ntemi’s solo was mimed by Sechaba ‘Shep’ Ntsamai, filmed in silhouette to make it difficult to see that it was not Ntemi.
The sound track to the video is the unmixed recording, no smoke and mirrors. The finished version on the album sounds far less raw. That song, with its pounding trombone introduction, became my trademark. People passing in kombi-teksies in Jo’burg would lean far out the window, arms mimicking slide trombone, and yell ‘Paaah, pah-pah PAH!’
It was recorded on a medium bore trombone,[5] a horn with plenty of dark, low-end grunt, allowing me to build from a hushed double piano to a shattering double forte rattle to end. It was always the last song we played at any gig: the tradition was for the band to leave the stage, and people would form a crocodile behind us, weaving through the venue, often for twenty minutes. It was a masochistic chops-buster, but who cares when it’s the last number of the night?
The band’s music did indeed become synonymous with protest and liberation: one number on the first album is called ‘Mzabalazo’, which translates roughly to ‘the struggle’. More albums followed, but that first album is the most ‘genuine fifties’ album. But who could have predicted that Ten Ten Special would be sixth on a list of the ‘100 Greatest South African Songs‘? Sandwiched between ‘Reggae Vibes is Cool’ (Bernoldus Niemand) and ‘Weeping’ (Bright Blue), in a list topped by Abdullah Ibrahim’s ‘Blues for a Hip King’, there it is, with a paragraph written by a like-minded rail fan, Paul Ash.
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Naturally, I look back very happily on those times and memories, but there are little things that I cherish even more. Some or other Black Consciousness guy was revving Ntemi up about me: ‘Why this white guy? There must be many black trombonists you can use?’ Ntemi, within my earshot, said, ‘If I were to play trombone, I would want to play it JUST LIKE HIM’, but without meeting my eye. The BC guy sloped off, exasperated. I can never forget his compliment, nor that his voice faltered, very slightly, for a reason I could not fathom, with a haunting ache.
Fifteen years after Ntemi passed away, my predecessor trombonist in the AJP, Jannie ‘Hanepoot’ van Tonder, sent me a link to an article in Learn and Teach Magazine. I put everything down and read it instantly. A few paragraphs down was this:
‘After school we loved to watch the movies from America. One day I saw a film that changed my life. The big Glen Miller band from the USA was in that film. That film made me dream the same dream for weeks. In the dream I saw myself playing a big trombone.
‘I forgot about school. I forgot about those little pennywhistles. I longed to play a long, gold trombone. I can say that is how my music began – in my dreams.’
Was I astonished? The article continues with how he and others got instruments from ‘a guy called Casablanca’. Ntemi got a sax. He had often told that story in interviews, and that he (and I) had both started out on penny whistle. But not once, had he ever, in the 14 years I knew him, 14 years of gigging, travelling in buses, planes, ships and ‘Hamba Zola Budds’ and long months while recording five albums, in my company, mentioned that he had dreamed of playing trombone. Was that why his voice faltered in his retort to the BC guy?
Rest In Peace, Ntemekwana. What times we shared !
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ENDNOTES
[1] Cathy Shallis (now Brubeck) & her then BFF, Bill Ainslie.
[2] My brother’s nickname for his room in Scottsville, PMB, was ‘The Holy Tabernacle of Mainstream Jazz’.
[3] There is one way that it was not typical: it changed the key from Eb to Ab in one section. Marabi and mbaqanga songs were typically single-key.
[4] The album itself would never have happened without the drive and enthusiasm of two young fans, Charles Talbot and Phillip Jude. ‘Mbaganga Nights’, by Leonora Meriel, tells partly how the duo started a non-racial jazz club during apartheid, but also about their impetus toward AJP’s first album.
[5] A Bach 36, for the trombone-curious: medium bore .525 inches, heavy brass slide.