By PHAKAMISA MAYABA
It blows one’s mind how Jasper Cook keeps the show going. And the nuggets of written and spoken wisdom he offhandedly drops without even realising it. The guy doesn’t see very well, can hardly walk, and his body has withstood more than its fair share of old-man vicissitudes.
But the biting sense of humour remains, and that roaring chuckle comes just as easily. His memory is detailed, right down to explaining the fine-grained intricacies of steam locomotives in terminology accessible to the lay person, and despite the many years and troubles, he’s down to the T an enjoyable raconteur. And, sometimes when he’s up to it, he powers on the laptop and hacks away at something.
[For a link to his Jazztrains YouTube channel, where he chats with his son about his life and times, click here.]
Usually something you’ll most likely be mulling over long after you’ve put it away. With unpretentious Beatnik streaks, and echoes of Hunter S. Thompson if he were sober and grew up in Pietermaritzburg, Jasper Cook’s scribblings are as vibrant as the records he used to make as a lanky, ponytailed trombonist with the underrated African Jazz Pioneers. You read it and think, ‘Wow! This would be publishable almost anywhere.’
I can’t claim to know the man or his writing regimen, but what I can tell you is that to a hankering fan, he is something special. A wordsmith who took up the pen late in life, leaving one wondering what might’ve been if he’d started young and ‘wild’, as an old friend of his once told me with a winsome grin, almost as though they were jolling as partners in crime through the madness.
His three-part series on trains published on Toverview a few months ago is a masterclass in writing by someone who was a dedicated stoker on steam trains in the 1960s. Before the Excel programming and the sold-out international jazz concerts, that’s where he cut his teeth after being kicked out of varsity, leading to bouts of depression and not being ‘really very enthusiastic about doing anything’. He shuns the details, but one picks up that things had been seriously on the down.
‘I felt uprooted,’ says Cook during the first Jazztrains interview –‘I was supposed to see out the year at university, now I found myself mid-winter with no gigs … with resultingly very little money.’ Amid the despondency, steam trains – whether on trips from PMB to the Karoo or just walking down to the station to watch them – always made him feel good.
But ‘in December of 1965,’ Cook relays, ‘I was contemplating just stepping off the platform … to do myself in. It’s a very effective method.’ As fate would have it, the young man who wanted to step in front of an oncoming train soon found himself – following an ‘interview’ of insults, which he tells with hilarity – working on one.
Jasper the stoker in Empangeni, 1966, firing a class 19D.
eMpangeni, Cook’s first job placement choice, was described by his recruiter as ‘the worst depot in South Africa’. He steeled himself through the gruelling first shifts – shoveling tons of coal while at it – even though his employers were certain he’d be the first to show ‘jy kan dit nie vat nie’. But his resolve to save enough money to get out of apartheid South Africa inspired him to hang in there and take it all in stride. And also to seek the philosophical and good in what he remembers as an ‘uncomfortable’ job’.
‘There’s a good reason why firemen have to fire for five years before they can become a driver,’ he recounts; ‘It’s just very hard. And it’s actually one of the reasons why steam went out, because it was hard to get crew. It was too hard a job no matter what they paid them. It’s unpleasant. You keep getting bruised, you get cuts, you get steam burns. You sweat all the time. You hate it while you’re shoveling and you’re sweating. But as soon as the cool breeze gets the sweat on you and cools your temples, you start feeling like you’re in heaven again.’
‘Other people don’t feel that. You don’t feel it in normal life. You have to run marathons and sweat and get the wind in your ears in order to feel that in anything. But the engines … there your big reward is when get the wind in your ears.’ Quintessential Jasper, always erring to the bright view of otherwise stinky situations.
Jasper the muso in full flow, playing the trombone for the African Jazz Pioneers.
At the time of writing, our man was still schooling his viewers on those trains. He hadn’t even got started on the other gigs like doing spreadsheets very well, and detailing how you got there. He’d not started on the African Jazz Pioneers and how a white muso in segregated South Africa found himself as the solitary white face in a band made up of black artists. Listening to their live recordings, it seems it was all a surreal affair. They may not have been pop-star famous in South Africa, but in Europe, the gentry welcomed them as royalty. With good reason; their oeuvre makes for omnipotent enjoyment.
Songs like ‘Orlando’ are collector’s items for any earnest jazz aficionado, particularly the kind distinctly made in the townships of The City of Gold, the place christened as Jozi. And Jasper Cook was at the coalface (excuse the pun) when the train was chugging on under the spotlight of popularity. When Madiba doffed his hat, anointing them as his favourite band.
Jaz, as those who’ve known him since way back when call him, saw it all. What a life! Watching these videos, one wants to paraphrase John Travolta’s role in the movie ‘Gotti’; his body may have betrayed him, but not his mind. That’ll never happen. Not when he’s sitting there for the interview, part quirky, part serious, but all-round an old man full of things that make you look forward to the next installment. That make you wish to live a life just half as fulfilled as his. We’re waiting, hardly patiently.
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This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Phakamisa Mayaba’s website, eParkeni. Used with permission.