“Jasper? Yes. I know him. Nice coupla guys.”
“Ahem. How to put this: is there any job that you have not done?”
The first quote was friend Gavin Stewart, former Professor of Journalism at Rhodes University. The second was Nic Oldert, champion kayaker, and boss-to-be at a publishing company, interviewing me for a job. They hint at what follows.
Gavin’s “Nice coupla guys” resonates more than I first thought: there have been other Jasper’s in my life, all of them memorable. I will round them up in my Afterword cahpter, along with what a blast my life has been.
Ten Town Special
I have spent nearly all my life in ten places. My children Nandi, Tamara, Dovovan, Atlanta and Shashi were born in bigger cities, Nicola in East London, Eastern Cape - not a big city. When I think of these cities, they group in my mind as “where [child] was born” - all other events feel comparatively unimportant. Not everyone is a midwife, so I chose to tell other things that happened in those, and other, settlements. If I were to paint a picture of my life, it would like like something by Suerat, a dot of paint against each story. You get that picture pun. So I will pare them down to the main tales - the tale of ten towns.
Growing Up
Looking back, I was very clever at school, but totally clueless in life. School was navigated: the shortest, least troublesome route was to do well, get good marks, and hide in that woodwork. It didn’t always work: I was a natural show-off, with a constant need to entertain, but miraculously, never once got “six of the best” in my entire dozen years at schools. A goody-two-shoes and blushingly, hot-faced-shy in between obsessive clowning. About normal. Let’s leave it at that. I do need to say this: my heart did not ache for the town I was born in as much as it did for two other places. One was the Great Karoo, where we went for all of our school holidays. The other was Mbabane. I went there as a baby, in the days when it was in Swaziland, when Manzini was named Bremersdorp. Of the two places, I preferred the Karoo. We are all different.
Grown-up
I never quite felt a grown-up. Even at eighty-one, I feel that was for respectable people. Yet, I enjoy respect when I get it!
Adult life started in terror of being cooped up in an office: death by four walls. It was not about work: I could, and did, work as hard, or harder, than most people I know. My father had worked thousands of hours of overtime during WWII and after; as a family, we had the strongest of work ethics. It was simply four-wall claustrophobia. I longed ceaselessly to be outdoors, and not outdoors in a city, but out in the veld, in the plains and the hills. Like most of us, I eventually got into offices from time to time, but it was not a lifelong thing for me.
In studio M4, SABC in Auckland Park, I sat on the 2nd trombone chair. On lead trombone was Big Vic, a commanding trombonist with his own gorgeous self-taught tone and a snappy jazz phraser. Vic was a large man, an interesting character, memorable for his performing as much as for his race condition. By that, I am not referring to a software program race condition—those lead to unpredictable outcomes. While that does sound truly Big Vic too, I mean that he exploited his melanin-rich appearance, reclassifying himself serially as white, Coloured, and Indian during his lifetime. The apartheid government, in their ever-complex legal mish-mash, constantly tied itself up in legal knots, and did not know what to make of him!
In front of us was a George Hayden arrangement of “Boereseun” by Danie Bosman. It makes no difference that this was an Afrikaans song, by an Afrikaans-speaking composer, and that it was being performed in the studio by an Afrikaans singer, Jurie Ferreira. It could just as well have been by Spike Jones and his City Slickers, or by Bill Evans, because how my inner ear heard any and all acoustic music would be the same: my aural library was stocked with soundscapes and vibe-palettes born of the veld, registered on hikes, walks, and holidays in the Karoo from my first year on this earth.
A gentle touch of the ride cymbal would become the sigh of a windmill: a strange phasing sound of flange upon flange, or the wistful, ghostly groan of plunger on brass, deep in its borehole casing and swelling upwards into the Karoo air.
The rap of a rim shot, especially by Grady Tate on a deep rosewood snare drum, would trigger in my mind the clop of a horse, or an “Oom” rapping the bowl of his pipe on his heel—or in London, England, an F-word uttered by a Cockney would be heard as an English phonetic rim-shot. The English lexicon evolved deeply in wars, so there were a lot of those rim-shots to be heard. A flam on any drum became the whiplash of a dwarrelwind passing overhead. A flute or clarinet feature would trigger a reverie, recalling days in a furrow in the shade of fruit trees, binoculars ready, waiting for a Diederick cuckoo to flit into the canopy above. Seeing his exquisite plumage would make my day.
Dense reed beds in the vlei would drone and hum like bass flutes on windy days. There is a siding on the East London line, a few kilometres from Burgersdorp, called “Dreunberg”, where the wind howls through koppies. Dreun is precisely my association with mellow, low, orchestral woodwinds. Dreunberg, once blasted by cantering steam locomotives, now silently witnesses a different power: rows upon rows of solar panels silently osmosing sunlight.
Half of my dreamscape is music, the other shared between nature and farming, railway and software engineering; and through it all, Karoo sounds never leave me. Even in clammy winter, sleeping rough on the Thames embankment in London, they would “gatecrash my dreams”, as Art Kelly would say.
Given that music is mainly an urban living, I was not cut out for it. My earliest memories are of rural settings, both Swaziland and the Karoo, and those locations were where I and my siblings found the happiest days of our lives. I lacked any such attachment to my birth- and home-town, Pietermaritzburg, or for that matter, to any city. Not being big on fancy words, I will try to avoid them in this book, except to say: I am a Karoo agoraphiliac.
In the heat of a Karoo summer day, you will not hear even an insect. One of my favourite pictures of my son-in-law is of him, standing utterly still, head canted to one side, in the veld outside Nieu Bethesda, gazing toward Kompasberg, and trying hard to hear anything at all.
Amid these divergent stresses, there was a single convergent relief. In the late seventies, we—that is I and Brockey Alan Wright, friend, lead trumpeter, and co-roadie—stopped a truck near the stream that carved Meiringspoort out of Karoo mountains. In deep, cool shadow, sheltered from the baking Karoo sun in the canyon, we unpacked our new Getzen Eterna Severinson Model trumpets. Al pointed his bell upward toward the summit of the crags, and peeled off a phrase. I harmonised with the return echo. It was addictive. After far too long, dragging our heels, we repacked our horns and drove on in silence. I challenge anyone to speak after such a sonic dunking.
When physics finally agrees that trees will not grow without contented dusk and dawn birdsong, it will have got where I got that day in Meiringspoort. “What came first” is not about chicken and egg, but about tree and bird.