"South African Jazz"

[king ubu]

Very cool, hadn't yet seen the new site :tup

Lots of downloading to do ... but hardly any time for dedicated listening in the months ahead, alas

[A Lark Ascending]

I see the Dedication Orchestra are doing a concert at 2.00 pm on Sat Nov 15th at the London JF. Includes Steve Beresford, Claude Deppa, Maggie Nicols, Evan Parker, Keith Tippett, Julie Tippetts and Jason Yarde. And Louis Moholo-Moholo, of course.

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/dedication-orchestra-84370

Might well make the trip if I can find something for the evening too - Dr John tributing Louis Armstrong doesn't really appeal (much as enjoy the records of both the tributor and the tributee). John Surman and Bergen Big Band at King's Place, possibly.

Edited June 17, 2014 by A Lark Ascending

[clifford_thornton]

Got my copy of the book a few days ago - marvellous! Only flipped through so far, there's some stuff to read, too ... hopefully I'll fnd the time to do so in the next few days.

There's also a double page in the January issue of The Wire - a most positive review of the book and the tapes already up at electricjive.

The Ian Bruce Huntley tapes are all up in one place on Electric Jive & can all be downloaded - a wonderful accompaniment to the recently published book

http://electricjive.blogspot.com.au/p/ibh-audio-archive-posts.html go to Audio Recordings

well set out with a pic of the original tape/box Ian made with each session/s

Oh my god. That looks incredible. Can't wait to dive into some of these sessions with Lissack, the brothers Beer, M. Goldberg, M. Pike and other obscuros.

Edited June 17, 2014 by clifford_thornton

[Alexander Hawkins]

I hope it's not bad form to cross post like this (please do delete if so - no problem) - but I mentioned on the new releases thread that there's a new one just out from the Louis Moholo-Moholo Unit - 'For the Blue Notes'. It's the first release of Ogun's 40th anniversary year(!). [i don't think I'm breaching state secrets either to say look out for a studio album from Louis' quartet in a couple of months too...]

Here's a nice early write-up at The Quietus. For those in the USA, Dusty Groove carry Ogun things.

[A Lark Ascending]

Merci for the alert. Ordered that one straight away.

[Alexander Hawkins]

Thanks Bev!

[king ubu]

This sounds great, Alex! I'll make sure to order it soon!

[Alexander Hawkins]

Great! I should have mentioned - I believe the quartet is slated for early September, for people looking to combine an order...

[romualdo]

I hope it's not bad form to cross post like this (please do delete if so - no problem) - but I mentioned on the new releases thread that there's a new one just out from the Louis Moholo-Moholo Unit - 'For the Blue Notes'. It's the first release of Ogun's 40th anniversary year(!). [i don't think I'm breaching state secrets either to say look out for a studio album from Louis' quartet in a couple of months too...]

Here's a nice early write-up at The Quietus. For those in the USA, Dusty Groove carry Ogun things.

Great - I'll be picking that up

[Alexander Hawkins]

Just been alerted to this on YouTube for anyone interested in a nice half hour of the new Moholo-Moholo Quartet - this is us live at Cafe Oto a couple of months back!

[Leeway]

Yes, that is a nice half hour indeed, Alexander. Some fine intense playing. Camera person was practically on the piano bench with you!

[Alexander Hawkins]

Thanks! Yeah, close indeed...lthough I have to say in fairness - (s)he was very discreet - I had no idea at all!

[Steve Reynolds]

Lordy Lordy

Bring Edwards and Moholo-Moholo over here!!

As explosive a combination as exists in this world today. Those bombs Louis drops are something else. Is that Jason Yarde on the alto?

You can come as well, Alexander!!!

Lots of tension and only limited release which is a great combination.

Seriously - no bassist I've ever seen gets a sound like John Edwards

[Alexander Hawkins]

Steve - yeah, that's Jason!

You're totally right about John Edwards. The sound is absolutely massive...and hook him up with Louis, and it's something else...whew...

Louis and those bombs...once those drums are hit, they *stay* hit!!!

[king ubu]

I first heard Dudu Pukwana and the Bluenotes (Johnny Dyani, Louis Moholo, Mongezi Feza, Chris Chris McGregor) at a pub in 1966 when I was a student at Leeds University. It was the genesis of a personal musical journey leading up to this very special project. The Bluenotes changed the face of European jazz forever, weaving a fiery eclectic mix with No Boundaries!
You can read the story of their remarkable journey under the crushing weight of apartheid in Maxine McGregor’s beautiful book, Chris McGregor & the Brotherhood of Breath: My Life with a South African Jazz Pioneer. Those lucky enough to have been exposed to Dudu’s music will forever be in the grip of of a rare and beautiful musical spirit. More than 20 years after his death, his uniquely original music lives in a powerful and inspirational way.
Duduvudu has been a family affair - a true international, multi-generational collaborative labour of love with direct involvement of those most intimately associated with Dudu, The Bluenotes, and The Brotherhood of Breath: Trumpeter Harry Beckett (his last recording session), percussionist Thomas Dyani, bassist Nick Stephens, trombonist Annie Whitehead, and guitarist Pierre Dørge (New Jungle Orchestra), Dudu’s widow Barbara Pukwana, Hazel Miller of Ogun Records (and the widow of Blue Notes bassist Harry Miller), and Veronica Beckett, widow of Harry Beckett.
The initial recordings were done in London in November 2009 with the addition of Dave Draper on guitar, Mark Sanders on drums, Jody Scott on trumpet, Ntshuks Bonga on alto, and Chloe Scott on flute. Additional tracks have been recorded in San Francisco by some of the Bay Area’s finest. The Musical Director of Duduvudu is the renowned London-born, San Francisco-based flutist, Chloe Scott. Jody Scott is co-producer/chief mix engineer on the project.
Although there have been a number of recordings dedicated to Dudu and the Bluenotes, this tribute focuses on an area perhaps not explored in depth - the blues/gospel/dance imbued in the music. As out as it gets, the groove is woven throughout. At times it reminds me of Ed Blackwell with Eric Dolphy or Ornette Coleman. Check out the bass line of Ezilalini, the funk of Diamond Express, the a capella fanfare of Sekela Khuluma, the odd-meter treatment of the classic tune, Mra.
Musicians here span an age range of 60 years, yet all respond to Dudu’s music in a fresh way. As you can see from their remembrances here, Harry, Annie, and Nick, each who played extensively with Dudu, spoke of the hymnals and the brass bands they grew up with and hear in this music, of the joy, the intensity, the fire, the groove.
The title Duduvudu brought a smile to Barbara’s face, remembering the magic, the voodoo, the spell that Dudu’s music cast over all who were touched by it - and now that means you!
Duduvudu is dedicated to the late Harry Beckett, whose endless support, humour, and encouragement made it real. Huge thanks to all the musicians who have given their love to complete this cd. Very special thanks to Barbara Pukwana for being a true partner throughout, to Hazel Miller from Ogun Records, and John Jack from Cadillac Records for helping us maintain the true integrity of this project. And of course to the fabulous Pauline Crowther Scott - the best artist, wife and mum for endless patience with me, Chloe and Jody in our obsession to make this project special and historic. And need I forget - to Chloe’s hubbie and drummer extaordinaire, Josh Jones, their 6 year old Sadie Scott Jones, and to Jody’s wife Michelle and their son Hunter for hanging in there with these wild and crazy musicians.
-Andrew Scott recording engineer, percussionist, producer
credits
released 30 September 2014

Jim Peterson, Jim Warshauer, Mara Fox, Bayonics, Rolf Johnson, Hadley Louden, Dennis Criteser, Andrew Scott, Chloe Scott, Harry Beckett, Jody Scott, Ntshuks Bonga, Annie Whitehead, Pierre Dørge, Dave Draper, Nick Stephens, Thomas Dyani, Mark Sanders, Marty Wehner, Mike Aaberg, Geoff Brennan, Josh Jones, Wayne Wallace, Ross Wilson, David Somers, Rudy Ortiz, Ernest Boykin, As Angel Nemali, As Mosa Gwangwa

http://edgetonerecords.bandcamp.com/track/duet-for-dudu

Guess I'm gonna order this one ... haven't bought much from Edgetone, but been getting their newsletter for years - funny rat residua

[king ubu]

not sure if a link is okay, so I rather don't ... but many of you folks here know about Johnny Trunk and some of the fine (and weird) stuff he brings to light - his 50p Friday offer of today's is "Something New from Africa", an LP I've known since I was a kid, as my parents own it (not sure, I think it might have "moved" into my own record shelf by now )

Miriam Makeba, Lemmy Special, Jimmy Pratt (he was with Bud Shank's quartet!) and many others can be heard ... closer to jive than to jazz, but a very entertaining record!

[Face of the Bass]

Does anyone know if the Keeping Time book is sold out, or if there is still someplace one can order a copy?

[romualdo]

Does anyone know if the Keeping Time book is sold out, or if there is still someplace one can order a copy?

here's a link to the Electric Jive site - appears to be still available

http://electricjive.blogspot.com.au/p/ibh-audio-archive-posts.html

[Face of the Bass]

Thanks, I had missed that somehow.

[uli]

npr blog has a nice article with portraits of three younger piano players. Nduduzo Makhathini, Kyle Shepherd, & Bokani Dyer sound samples are well worth listening.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2015/03/28/395541160/three-jazz-pianists-a-generation-after-apartheid

also the swiss-joburg collab

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-JcVELOopQ

[king ubu]

let me plug this one, since the world needs to know (not knowing you don't need to know is no excuse, mind me ):

http://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/inhlupeko-distress

Inhlupeko (Distress)

by The Soul Jazzmen

1. Inhlupeko 10:35
2. Relaxin' 08:11
3. Mr Mecca 06:34
4. How Old is the World 08:47
5. Love For Sale 10:05
6. Dollar the Great 04:05

 

about

Inhlupeko, alongside the other massive jazz hit of the era, Winston Mankunku's Yakhal'Inkomo, sums up the South African jazz sound and mood of the late 1960s, its bluesy inflections heralding a more hard-bop feel of music in the decade to come. Defiantly modern, and seeking inspiration from the "black heroes" of John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Elvin Jones, Ron Carter, Johnny Hodges and Lockjaw Davis, this album envisioned what a new South Africa might sound like.

Tete Mbambisa composed four of the six tracks on the album. Of the two others, the title track is the work of tenorman Duku Makasi. The other track is a standard, Love for Sale, also frequently covered by Makasi’s contemporary, the equally important Winston ‘Mankunku’ Ngozi. Pianist Mbambisa’s memories reveal a great deal about the environment in which the progressive black players of the era worked. The album, recorded at the EMI Studios in Johannesburg – “they had the best sound at that time,” recalls Mbambisa – was the brainchild of two important jazz organisers of the era: Ray Thabakgolo Nkwe in Johannesburg and Monde Sikutshwa in Port Elizabeth (PE).

“Ray and Monde talked about doing an album with Duke and some other Eastern Cape musicians. After a while, they called me up from East London to do the arrangements. People know that’s my gift: from the time I was involved in vocal groups I have had an ear for arranging. Apart from Inhlupeko, Duke’s tune, I selected the tunes. We were all travelling at the time, doing shows, but there were long rehearsals for this material. We’d play, and discuss, and then go off to a shebeen – and carry on discussing the music. A lot of thinking went into it. I’d say probably about a month. I was travelling with the musicians in a kombi – it was supposed to be a jazz tour with Mankunku too, but he had another gig with Chris Schilder (Ibrahim Khalil Shihab) in Rustenburg, so in a way it became a launch for the Inhlupeko material.”

In fact, Mankunku was launching his second album as leader, Spring. Music writers at the time made much of the fact that the title track of that album was ‘stolen’ from the melody of Inhlupeko (and Makasi used to joke with Ngozi about it) but Mbambisa feels that something different was going on. “It was that Trane style. We were all in the same kind of place musically at that time.” South African jazz players felt a strong affinity with John Coltrane, who had died only a couple of years earlier. The expressive mastery of his playing and the soulful, spiritual searching of his mood served as both revelation and inspiration. It was the search for that Coltrane feel that guided Mbambisa’s final choice of players.

The acknowledged affinity in creative approach –in the words of trumpeter Johnny Mekoa: “these were our black heroes…and the music sounded a bit like our mbaqanga here” – fed, rather than stifled originality. In the music they created, South Africans always started from what another trumpeter from an earlier era, the late Banzi Bangani, called “that thing that was ours”, not only in musical idioms, but also in history and experience.

As scholar Robin Kelley has noted, both urban Africans and urban Americans were consciously crafting “modern” music – and in South Africa’s case, it was a modernism deliberately and defiantly set in opposition to the narrow, backwards-looking parochialism of apartheid, where some white universities did not even permit gender-mixed dancing until the 1970s. The sophisticated, snappily-dressed black players of South Africa’s cities in the 1960s were not trying to ‘be like’ America; rather, they were enacting in their performance, and reaching through their horns for what a new South Africa might sound like. Coltrane’s searching voice was a natural lodestone, for as Kelley has also observed: “the most powerful map of the New World is in the imagination.”

The studio session that laid down the tracks was far from the original liner note fable of a spontaneous blow over a bottle. As well as the extensive rehearsal that had preceded it, it carried its own stresses. “In those days,” Mbambisa recalls, “they used to tell you all the time how much they were paying for an hour in the studio. So they give you pressure: ‘Come on guys! This is costing me!” However, thanks to that extensive preparation, the pressure wasn’t too much of a problem. Mbambisa has always disliked an overworked feel on his recordings: “that’s why my albums catch that live feel, even from the studio.” That was particularly important for this session. The quality he was looking for was, he says, “connectedness. If you can’t be connected, forget it. So I told them: Hey, guys, let’s try and do these in one take only or we’ll lose the feel.” He says that none of the tracks used more than two takes, and most were completed in one.

But the hurried, penny-pinching recording was also reflected in the way the album was presented. Makasi’s name is inconsistently presented as ‘Duke’ and “Duku’ in different places. Even the title, Inhlupeko, appears in that form (the isiZulu spelling) on the cover and notes, but ‘Intlupheko’ (the isiXhosa form) on the disc label, suggesting a hasty process. The word itself can be translated as ‘distress’, but like many African-language words with their multiple poetic resonances, also as ‘inconvenience’, ‘trouble’, ‘poverty’ and more. For the artists it had all those resonances – to whose more political implications Nkwe would certainly not have wished to draw attention in his translation. The players were not told about the planned cover images, nor, as Mbambisa’s story confirms, were they sent copies of the LP. There was no advertising and no formal launch, and Mbambisa recalls that Sikutshwa also received no communication about the release. The LP was clearly pressed in a fairly small run, for when Mbambisa tried to buy his own copy, he could not immediately find it in any shops.

The image conveyed by the cover also fitted well with other cultural currents of the era. The 1960s and 1970s were dominated by apartheid’s re-tribalisation project: a propaganda push to both the majority population and the world that black South Africans (even those whose families had been city-dwellers for decades) were essentially simple, rural people with no place in the cities and no capacity for sophisticated culture. Official patronage was given to neo-traditional sounds, particularly via the State broadcaster, the SABC, split into narrow, tribally based stations, the purity of whose musical contents must be verified by apartheid ‘experts’. In this context, state censors would certainly smile more kindly on an album whose images placed a syncretic music like jazz in a more disreputable corner.

Matsuli Music is proud to be re-presenting this cornerstone album with restored audio on heavyweight 180g vinyl with accompanying sleeve notes by Gwen Ansell, author of Soweto Blues – Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa.

 

credits

released 01 September 2015

Recorded 1969

Bass – Pych "Big-T" Ntsele*
Drums – Mafufu Jama
Piano – Tete Mbambisa

Tenor Saxophone – Duku Makasi
 

Producer – Ray Nkwe
Engineer – Bonne Ter Steege
Photography – Alf Khumalo
Reissue production - Matt Temple, Chris Albertyn
Sleeve notes - Gwen Ansell
Design - Toby Attwell
Audio restoration - Colin Young
Vinyl cut - Frank Merrit

[mjazzg]

Thanks. I for one am pleased to no longer have an excuse. Tasty stuff as is some of the label's other releases

[king ubu]

mine is already on its way!

the label has indeed brought out some good stuff, hopefully they'll do more like this!

[aparxa]

 Chris McGregor's Brotherhood Of Breath ‎– Brotherhood  is such an uplifting record!

 

On 28/12/2013 at 7:51 PM, king ubu said:

Me third! Heard the title track on a compilation someone here recommended to me many years ago ... had to absolutely hunt down that CD (best: it's a twofer including a fine Chris Schilder album with more Mankunku)!

Me fourth! And reissued on LP this year!

[king ubu]

First spin right now ... just got took out of the mail box on the way home from the daily grind - and yowzah, my feet keep dancing!

Did @Alexander Hawkins forget to alert us all in good time or did I just visit the site too seldomly to catch the news? Either way, saw the group play in Italy around two years ago, and it was a hoot. And so is the disc. The tracks segue into each other and the whole thing builds and builds, Edwards and Hawkins are intense and it seems that's what's needed these days to really push Mr. Louis to deliver his best. I think that gig in 2016 was the last one I heard where he really hit it hard ... I've heard him several times after, in London as well as in Italy, but never in working groups and not with groups that really pushed him constantly, though he's of course always wonderful to hear and see!

Anyway, the rhythm section gels and the two horns match wonderfully on this recording from a bit over a year ago at London's Café Oto. Yarde contributes some mean soprano - dig him on #4, "Ezontakana (Those Little Birds)". But I guess the best thing is how beautifully they melt together, i.e. on #5, a drop-dead gorgeous take on Dudu Pukwana "B My Dear".

So yeah, finally documented on disc