Johannesburg (Part 2)

At the time, Lyneve and I lived on a plot in Chartwell, north of Fourways. It was a 45-minute drive to Dorkay House each way. Johburg traffic was bad enough that, even if I were to be ready to play at Dorkay House by 5pm, I would need to leave the plot around 3pm. To avoid having to feed parking meters until 5pm, that’s how I eventually chose to do things. In its way, it was the same for all of us. Soweto and Alex were far enough from the city centre that getting home was tough.

The way things turned out, I pitched at Dorkay House for auditions for six long weeks. Part of the reason was that about half the rehearsals were cancelled. I was seldom told why, and also seldom phoned in time to avoid a trip, so many 90-minute round trips were fruitless.

Another reason (discovered years later) was that most of the band ¹ had never heard of me, nor knew where I was born and brought up. They were frankly not expecting much from me musically. In those days, the jazz centres were Jo’burg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Durban. I think there must have been a band or two in East London. Queenstown had produced the Matshikizas and Mongezi Feza at least. Every musician in Johannesburg seemed to know all the musicians from these jazz centres, but coming from Pietermaritzburg, I was unknown. It did not really irk or surprise me: I am self-taught, and didn’t rate my playing very highly, although at the same time I was convinced that the Pioneers were the right musical home for me.

Things progressed a little when, after six weeks, I had a chat with Ntemi after a rehearsal, asking if he thought I had a chance to join the band. “I’ve been coming for six weeks to rehearsals”, I reminded him. He was surprised. He hadn’t realised it was that long. So, he said:

“Come and sit in with the band at the Roxy. Let’s see how you cope up.”

So, I did, and for another six weeks, joined the Pioneers on their weekly spot at Roxy Rhythm Bar in Melville.

Ntemi approved that I could read music OK, and evidently found my playing acceptable, but said nothing. After that further six weeks of rehearsals and sitting in at Roxy’s, I once more gently reminded him that six weeks had passed.

Again, he was surprised. At Roxy’s on the seventh week, he turned to me from the sax section in the front and motioned for me to take a solo. We were playing “Mbombela”. I had a great time and cut loose for an extended blow. The only time I am not shy is when I am playing an instrument. Roxy’s went a bit crazy. The audience knew the band very well, and I took this to be because it was a long time since they had seen a trombonist in the ranks, or maybe they welcomed a new face.

The reaction from the band, though, was not encouraging. I did get a few smiles from drummer Sipho Mtshali, who knew me from my sister’s house at 20 Hopkins Street. There, he would often turn up to practice. My sister had given a room to Bheki Mseleku to live in there, and he used the front room in the main house for rehearsals. He was usually joined by Matsemela Manaka. Biddy (Partridge) Samuels would often sit in on alto sax. Different bassists would come and go, most often Johnny Gertse. Quite often there would be no bassist.

If Sipho Mtshali didn’t pitch, Gilbert Matthews would. Bheki Mseleku was still getting his piano and tenor sax chops together in those days. Matsemela was more into poetry than music. I thought, but never knew, whether he ended up in the group “Malopoets”. His brother, Moss, did.

Anyway, back in the Roxy, we had ended the first, tumultuous session on “Mbombela”. I did not recognise anyone in the audience and wandered outside for some fresh air. A young guy joined me. I had seen him around Roxy’s nearly every time we were there. He told me he had enjoyed my solo. I was relieved, because the band was totally inscrutable. It was impossible to read on their faces or from their body language as to how they felt about that solo, and I was tense, even beginning to feel unwelcome.

It turned out this young man who had complimented me was living at Roxy’s. It must have once been a hotel. There were rooms upstairs, and he lived upstairs in one of them. He told me he was from Cape Town originally. Then I remembered seeing him jamming one night. That night, the band introduced him, and themselves, as from Cape Town. It was a great band, for my money one of the great original South African bands, along with Mango Groove, who became fixtures at Roxy’s. They were Bright Blue, and the tenor player was McCoy Mrubata.

Having said this about Bright Blue, I may as well say that, for my money, the most original and vibey South African band, ever, was Winston’s Jive Mixup. Their trombonist was none other than the man who unwittingly made way for me in the Pioneers, the great trombonist, composer, arranger and band leader Jannie “Hanepoot” van Tonder, who has long carved a niche and a name for himself in the Afrikaans “Alternatiewe” group “Blues Broers”, with whom he is a living legend, switching from drums to trombone by turns, and running various bands in Cape Town. Respect.

The encouragement coming from McCoy was a lifesaver. On my outside, I was all grinning confidence before the set, but inside, I kept appealing to that Irish chap, O’Fook. I said his name over and over. Stress is good in moderation though, and it usually worked for me. That night it did. We played the usual three sets at Roxy’s, and Ntemi gave me solos on “Riverside”, “Woodpecker” and “Hellfire” By the time I whacked out the notes for Zacks Nkosi’s “Ten Ten Special”, we had brought along a wonderfully joyful crowd for a swinging evening, leading them in a crocodile procession through the tables and past the bar. What a night!

We packed up, still with no indication of whether I had been able to (using Ntemi’s expression) “cope up”. I couldn’t find him. Someone said he’d left for Alex already. Eish. I was left hanging for some days, until the next rehearsal. At Dorkay House, I popped that breathless question. Ntemi sat with me, looked at me for long minutes, and then blurted:

“Well, what I want to know is, where have you been?”

Later, he joined me in Queeneth’s office. She was gracious. She said, “I’ve spoken with Boet Ntemi”. She turned to Ntemi and motioned to him to speak. He said, in his courtly way:

“If you will have us, we will have you.”

I soon settled into the rehearsals and regular gigs at Roxy Rhythm Bar. For the first few months that was the pattern. In time there came a gig in Durban. Queeneth used to spring these things on us. I had of course no idea what to expect, how a tour (this was to be for just a single weekend) to Durban would pan out. In for a penny, in for a pound, and off we went. I was a little astonished to find that we were travelling through the night. It didn’t really make a lot of sense to me, to tire ourselves out that way, only to spend a whole day before the gig. Sleeping during the day in Durban was a tough ask, because it is usually intensely humid and warm there.

The Rainbow

We left on a Friday night, and the first gig was to be on Saturday night, at The Rainbow, near Claremont township, Pinetown. I found out later that the club owner, Benny Pretorius, was trying something new. Usually, he would book the Pioneers to play on Sundays, starting at lunch, after which we would pack up and head straight to Pietermaritzburg, to do a gig at the Pietermaritzburg Jazz Club. After that again, we would pack up, and drive through the night to get the guys with day jobs back to their workplaces on Monday morning.

The Rainbow gig would normally follow a bigger money gig somewhere in the Durban area, on a Saturday night. This time, there was no big money gig, and Benny was trying out the AJP on a Saturday night, as well as the usual Sunday lunchtime gig. Benny, along with other venue owners, had found that certain bands were “bankers”. In the same way that Gerrie at Roxy’s had found that the AJP tended to fill his club on a Thursday night (paying his costs for a whole week), Benny had found that certain bands on certain nights were a “best fit”.

It was a joyful enough gig, but for a first time on Saturday as a trial night, we probably did not draw enough of a crowd for Ben’s liking.

After the gig, I wondered where we would sleep for the night. Queeneth was locked in a room with Ben, possibly counting money. It got later and later. After midnight, she appeared, beckoned, and said, “You must sleep now”. I followed her. Walking in the dark, and reaching a kind of outbuilding, she pointed and said, “In there. I’m sorry, the lights are not working”. She left. I grabbed my things, stepped into the pitch dark. Amid sighs and other sounds of others evidently settling in for the night, I felt my way around. I was dog tired. A voice said, “Just find a place anywhere. There are no beds here.” My feet came up against something on the floor. Stooping, I prodded it. It felt just wide enough to sleep on, was some inches off the floor, and exhausted as I was, I sank onto it, and passed out into a sound sleep.

First light woke me. Peering into the gloom, I saw the other band members sprawled here and there. I had been sleeping on a tennis net. I don’t remember what the others landed up in or on. Probably more sporting equipment, judo mats or something. Durban can be very warm, and I had not felt the need to cover myself with a blanket to sleep. Just as well. If there was something I could have flung over me, which I doubt, I would not have found it in the pitch dark. I swung my feet off my tennis net bed, surprised then to find that the floor was an inch deep in water. Well, I hoped it was water — I trace its source to a urinal next door.

I have to admit this was a shock. How could this great band be expected to sleep in conditions like this, in a dingy, semi-derelict place, awash with water ponging slightly of piss? Well, I didn’t want to be the “moaner guy”. If that was what the band was used to, why rock the boat? I buttoned my sore, bruised lips.

Back in Johannesburg, I took it up with Queeneth, in private, in her office in Dorkay House. I was met with silence. She was the first person I had ever met who did this: reply by meeting my gaze, with a half-smirk, and complete silence. I became quite used to this way of hers, of just going mute, even admired it as a technique!

Years later, I asked Ben Pretorius. He said that he’d always accepted in good faith that Queeneth had arranged acceptable accommodation for us. It made me think. He must have left for home already, thinking that we would decamp elsewhere. If he had stayed, he would have known that we slept in a building adjacent to the club, and would have surely known it was once a shower room. Luckily, as I said, the last problem one has in Durban is one of getting cold at night. It is usually sticky and humid. I was myself wet through with perspiration from the gig, and too tired to care, but accommodation became a “thing” with Queeneth and me, and the next time we went to Durban, she listened, and we were put up at Mariannhill, at a church property. That night, I shared a room with Robert Nkosi, a generally quite sulky man, who refused to open a window. “Those little soldiers,” he said, slapping at a mosquito. “They won’t let you sleep.” It was stifling hot in that room that night, and I woke dehydrated with a thumping headache.

Thus began a long tradition of me sharing rooms that nobody else in the band wanted to share! Next morning, I was plied with questions from the other band guys.

“Did you sleep on the floor?”

for one, a weird thing to ask, but there was a reason. Apparently, once before, when someone entered a room to share the night with him, he insisted that one bed was for him, and the other for his guitar, so that person had to go and find a bed elsewhere. I felt quite lucky, hearing that. I had at least slept on a bed, even if it felt like a sauna!

Maybe it’s loneliness that does this to musicians. One of my favourite trombone players, Bill Harris, was said to tote a life-sized doll, perhaps one of those used in shop windows to model clothes, with him, even seating “her” in a chair next to him in the band sometimes. It didn’t stop him from playing marvellous trombone. It truly amazes me how accepting other musicians can sometimes be.

Remembering Basie

I took a fair amount of flak from friends and other white musicians after joining the AJP. The best-known newspaper jazz critic at the time was Don Albert, whom I knew by his Durban nickname, “Bamboo Glasses”. He earned that by wearing a pair of bamboo glasses back in the days of the Blue Note. At a benefit gig for Ricky Annandale in the Linder Auditorium, Don cornered me and asked indignantly:

“Why do you want to play this Imber Kunger shit?”

He couldn’t pronounce Mbaqanga, hence “Imber Kunger”. Now, to be fair to Don and all the other people critical of my move, the band was, in fact, terribly out of tune. In fact, during my first 12 weeks with them, they never tuned up once before a rehearsal or gig. They unpacked their horns and launched into a number. As you will read, this became even worse with a new keyboard player after we left Dorkay House.

White musicians and some listeners too, on hearing how out of tune we were, closed their minds (and ears) and took a hike. I felt they were missing the most important thing: there was not another band around capable of setting up as throbbing a rhythm as that. My experience has shown that most white listeners were less concerned with rhythm than with intonation. Certainly, the difference between white rhythm sections and black rhythm sections, in my experience, is that, and, yes, to generalise, black rhythm sections were “on”, and with few exceptions, white rhythm sections were not.

It’s worth looking back at the history of the Count Basie band for some perspective. In “Buck Clayton’s Jazz World” — his life story — this autobiography (written with Nancy Miller Elliott) gives valuable insight into the early Basie band. I can’t quote accurately, because I passed the book on to my brother Al in Canada many years ago, but he commented about the very early Basie bands being panned by critics for being out of tune. He quoted a critic as saying something like:

“The Basie band is out of tune. If you don’t think the Basie band is out of tune, listen to the rhythm section. If you don’t think the rhythm section is out of tune, listen to the sax section. If you don’t think the sax section is out of tune, listen to the brass section.”

This surprised me on reading it, but I was already with the AJP, and it probably gave me some courage, enough to stick it out. It leads me to think that I have something in common with my brother musicians, both in the band and anywhere in the world, for whom rhythm is more important than intonation. The basic truth about the two, in my opinion, is that rhythm and dance are liberating (whatever else they may be), where intonation is not especially liberating. I have never heard anyone saying:

“Wow, did you hear how IN TUNE that band was? I could not stop myself getting up and dancing.”

It is just like passenger rail: every last man and woman in the street wants first to know if a route will make a profit. No man in the street asks if the new road they are building will show a profit, and none ever has.

So, my response to these comments, never mind that they were true, was:

“I … DON’T care.”

I left them to carry on with their pallid, swingless lists of dots, and chose to stay where my heart, ears, mind and feet were happiest, in the most rhythmically throbbing band I had ever been in. That does not mean any disrespect for my previous bands. All were good, and all very swinging. But there has to be a winner, and when it came to driving, pounding rhythm, the AJP was my personal best. There were serious contenders: the Elite Swingsters could really swing, and for my money, no band was more passionate and swinging that Winston’s Jive Mixup.

I read elsewhere that the Basie band, when it started out, did not even have charts. Everything was played by ear and from memory. This is another similarity with most of the township bands. South African jazz lead sheets have only relatively recently been written down, starting with publications by Jannie “Hanepoot” van Tonder. Other student publications have followed.

Queeneth loved to brag that the band was a reading band. It is easy to understand. None of the other contenders around were seen with written music parts on stage. Legendary big bands like that of Winston Siljee had gone.

Queeneth had come by a bag full of charts, she claimed, from the great Zacks Nkosi, by virtue of being his niece. It was part of a whole elaborate sales story she trotted out when selling the band, which is to say, she said it, all the time, to everybody. It may once have been Mr Nkosi’s music bag, but her story of him appearing in a dream, entreating her to create a band in his memory and tradition, is credible, but not (as she claimed) that it “must be a reading band”. That was all Queeneth!

A lot of people bought the story. In the same way, there was a neat little blurb put about here, there and everywhere, that the African Jazz Pioneers were once big in the Fifties, but were denied the right to play during apartheid, and the musicians had retreated into the townships, to wait out the time until they could emerge from the townships again. That really went down well in anti-apartheid journals all over the world, but it was just not true.

The fact is there was no band named the African Jazz Pioneers around in the Fifties. The AJP was a name seized on by both Queeneth Ndaba and Ntemi Piliso, following an article in a newspaper. This article ² described the band members as “these African jazz pioneers”, and that is how the name came into use. It is a really nice name, but both Colin Smuts and Don Mattera, at different times and at different gigs, shared with me, in their own unique words, the same story about the name coming from a journalist³.

Queeneth claimed that she had come up with the name. Forget it. If anyone did, it would have been Ntemi. If I am asked to believe that a skill-less ex-vocalist, so-called manager, came up with the name, rather than Ntemi, who had at least 300 registered original compositions to his name, I will go with Ntemi. Not Queeneth.

She was not in the way of doing anything very original. Even the clothes she made, for herself and the band, were copied from West African apparel. The personnel of the African Jazz Pioneers were drawn from various bands, among them the Harlem Swingsters, the Merry Blackbirds, the Alexandra Swingsters, and more. I do admit to some admiration for Queeneth’s florid marketing, though, and there is no doubt about how persuasive she could be.

I was five years old in 1950, yet many people, in my time in the band, shared:

“You guys were playing together in the 50s, right?”

It must have been my long, white beard that aged me enough for them to think that!

When we cut our first album, the liner notes were fraught with intentional inaccuracies. For one, the guitarist was said to have been Kay Manana. I was very fond of Kay, and he was usually with the band wherever we went, sartorially elegant in a pin-striped suit, and looking the very part of a thirties American swing musician, but he had not played a note for years. He told me that arthritis had stilled his fingers years before we met. Yet there he appears, on the cover.

Actually all of the guitar playing in the first album was by Bheki Khoza, who took a session fee for his work. He chose not to wait for royalties. I think it was actually rather a sweet thing that Queeneth perpetrated this little myth about Kay Manana, and she had innocent motives: to honour Kay, who dreamed of being on the album, for his musical contribution through the decades, and he was out of his mind with happiness to be pictured on the cover, and to perpetuate the myth that he was the “guitar guy” on the album. As per the following section, there were other inaccuracies in the liner notes.

In the same way, Kippie Moeketsi was said to be a founding member of the band. While probably true, I was told he also hardly played a single gig, and never an entire gig. Yet Queeneth ensured that his picture was there alongside those of other AJP members, wherever she could. Kippie was famous, and this was actually Queeneth marketing away.

Finally, the working rhythm section was deemed by Koloi to not cut the mustard. I was not privy to this, nor the decision to record over them with session musicians. Only Bheki Khoza was retained. Onto the master, all three of piano, bass and drums were overdubbed. On piano Koloi used Jabu Nkosi (son of Zacks), on electric bass was Sipho Gumede, and the drummer was Frank Paco. In a fairly exacting and heroic day’s work, the three came into Downtown Studios and replaced the work of Sipho Mtshali (drums), Bheki Buthelezi (electric bass) and whoever was on piano on the original tracks. I know our lady pianist, Sylvie, who normally stomped along with us on our live gigs, did not participate in the recording, and did not rejoin the band after the recording. It was said that her husband did not like her playing in a band. I have no idea whether that was true, but a lot of men were like that in those days and earlier. There was another man named Simphiwe (Mkhize?) around at the time who may have been in the first section. Bheki Khoza will know. He is younger than me, and has a sharp memory.

CASA

Culture in Another South Africa is a well document festival, held in Holland in December 1987. It is a wonderful memory. The head of the Dutch AABN ⁴ wearing her hats as head of both it and the Dutch communist party, had somehow got funding for it. It is well documented, so I won’t say much about the political rationale, which was simply to get SA artists together with exiled SA artists. It seemed a successful experiment to me politically but most joyously it was a wonder to share stages with some SA greats.

I met Bra Jonas Gwangwa in that trip, and heard Abdullah Ebrahim live (squatting in the wings out of the way) - the deepest of joys to have heard the African piano to end them all. No one could get as much sound out of a piano. I was speechless for hours afterward.

I did not know it at the time, but I very nearly did not make the trip. Much as the Pioneers had never heard of me, nor had any of the exiled musicians. There were apperently tense discussions prior to the trip: was I a spy? I would not have blamed them. That was SA, and I am melanin-challenged! Someone ⁵ said:

“Hang on - Cook? Jasper Cook? There is a guy Cook in IDAF. We can ask him”.

And that is how it was discovered, by Queeneth, and all in “the movement”, that I was the brother of the Deputy Head of Internation Defence and Aid for Southern Africa.

At one of the concerts, maybe in a venue named “De Balie”, we waited at the foot of a steep flight of steps, to go onstage. At the top, in silhouette, was an urbane looking man, with what looked like a pipe (the kind you smoke) in his hand. In time, we clambered up the steps. “Holland” said Shep Ntsamai “is all about steps. Eish”. I was always last: trombone is best kept out if the fray. At the top, the man with the pipe said:

“I believe you are the brother of a very good friend of mine”⁶.

Queeneth was standing right next to him. Her jaw dropped nearly to the floor. She had been warning me for months about how ’the movement’ would ‘discipline me’ for this and that. The man with the pipe was Thabo Mbeki.

Backstage, after the act, she came to me, furious, and hissed:

“How can you make such a fool of me? Why did you not tell me about this brother of yours?”

It was a silly question. 1987 was still dark days. One did not go around saying “My brother is in the

[tick which applicable]

liberation movement”, certainly not IDAF or the ANC. That was instant jail, possibly worse. Later, Queeneth managed a wry laugh about it. “Of course” she said “You could never talk about it”. I don’t know what she had been saying about me to ’the movement’. It surely was not good, by her reaction, but I don’t know, and I don’t care. I was long accustomed to such things. We all were. There was no trust, not anywhere. Everybody, everything, was suspicious.

The First Album

We cut our first album in 1988, when I had been in the band for about two years.

Few people are aware how it came about. It was due to the efforts of two men, Charles Talbot and Philip Jude, who loved the music and threw their weight behind the band. Over the two years I had been with the band up until then, literally hundreds of people had said:

“This band MUST be recorded, it is a crime they never have”

Only Charles and Philip actually did something about it. Their enthusiasm was very infectious, and I think they both were corporate young tigers, or at least had some corporate ears listening to them. Anyhow, they persisted, and due to their passion and enthusiasm the album saw the light of day. Perhaps they knew Fred Withers of Gallo personally; I can’t recall. It’s their story. I hope they tell it one day, because they put a lot of passion and effort into seeing to it that this beautiful music was preserved on record. Update: It was indeed written about ⁷.

That the AJP had not ever recorded was true insofar as they had not under that name. But all had recorded with their alumni bands in the fifties. It was not that the individual performers had never seen the inside of a studio.

Gallo had said go to the album; I don’t know how much any of the other band members knew about the impending recording, I certainly dismissed what little I heard as unlikely and nothing to get too excited about. Suddenly though, we found ourselves in Downtown Studios, with Koloi “Bra Kar” Lebona as the producer, and a sound engineer named Jasper. I wish I could recall his surname.

The recording sprung seemingly out of nowhere, without any discussion of “who got what” in terms of remuneration. By the end of our time in the studio, that naturally caused some tension. That resulted in me getting a solo spot on “Mzabalazo”. We had laid the backing tracks and the entire “geography” down, leaving some time for a solo intended for Bheki Khoza. In the event, I joined the band at Downtown that day, to find some tension in the air. I did not understand why, but soon realised that it was at least something to do with Bheki Khoza not being present that day. I later heard that he decided to take session fees rather than trust that he would receive performer royalties.

In time he would prove to be on the money! There were nearly “never” going to be performer royalties for us, as will be discussed later. The other issue, explained Bra Kar, was budget pressure. We had exhausted even the extra studio time left to us in the budget, and this was to be the last day of recording. We had to get “Mzabalazo” in the can in the two sessions available on that last day of recording. This was not a band that enjoyed hurrying! So, we tuned up, listened to playback. Bra Kar clicked the intercom on and said, “Who will do the solo?”. No one spoke. We knew it had been left for Bheki. Bra Kar repeated, “Nobody wants a solo?”. A long silence followed. Ever rash, foolish and impulsive, I broke it and said, “I’ll have a go”.

I did one trial run against the track, and then told Bra Kar I was ready to put it in the can. I blew my heart out, because I really loved that number, and enjoyed too the notion of it being for “the struggle” as the name suggests. A little unhappy with that take, I asked for another go, but Bra Kar clicked the intercom and said:

“First, we are stuck for time, and second, you wrote your name on that! Not you, and not anybody else, will do better on that number than you have just done.”

So that was that. That is what good producers do. I had misgivings, though, because I was mad with excitement at the opportunity to blow a solo on this number. In fact, you could truly say I was breathless with excitement. The trouble is, breathless is something that no trombonist needs. So, in that high-tension state, I was not properly ready and composed, and cracked the first note badly. Later I found in the mix that Jasper, the sound guy, had worked his magic and patched that cracked note up. It sounds now like a tiny falter. I am forever grateful to him for that, because the rest of the solo remains for me as my favourite out of all the solos I ever recorded with the AJP. Even Sam Tshabangu commented later with a laugh, “You got that … sound. It takes me way back.”