“Ten Ten Special” became the sort of “poster” for the album, and some time later, we went down to the old market where the promo video was filmed. Ntemi was not available that day. Another alto player filled in for him for the video, though Bra Shep Ntsamai mimed Ntemi’s solo against the track. You may still find the promo video here.
I loved playing “Ten Ten”. I still had a medium bore Bach 36 in those days, and it was capable of pushing out the huge dynamics needed for the introduction, a crescendo of repeated phrases played solo, leading the band in. That Bach 36 could rattle the rafters! Playing it, I was in good company: Bill Harris played one, as did Trummy Young, Jimmy Knepper (Charlie Mingus) and Barry Olsen (Ray Barretto).
“Ten Ten” was composed by Zacks Nkosi. He was long gone by the time we recorded it (he had recorded it himself on his album “Our Kind of Jazz”). His composer royalties surely went to his estate. When I played it, I did not realise that I had in fact re-interpreted it: the way I played it was like this:
[ABC notation shortcode]
whereas the way Zacks played it was like this:
[ABC notation shortcode]
Zacks’s approach was gentler and more graceful. Mea culpa.
Later, before we recorded “Sip ’n Fly”, we negotiated publishing rights. Gallo owned 30% of each, (authors 70% each) limited only to those actually published by way of the albums. This was unusual and a great gesture on the part of Fred Withers and Charles at Gallo, because the norm was 50-50.
I did play on all of the Pioneers’ albums. Some were made after I left the band, and even after Ntemi’s passing. I was invited back to play on one track in a later album.
Bust Up
I loved Queeneth. We got on really well for some months. The band was going along just fine, and then something very weird happened. We did a gig for the GM or CEO (whatever he was called then) of a famous vehicle manufacturer, a multinational company.
While we were performing, a videographer approached the stage to film us. Mid-number, the rhythm section downed tools. Negotiations followed, and the CEO guy was quite affable about paying extra for us to be “film stars,” as one of the rhythm section put it. We were happy for the extra money, and the band duly finished up and went home. The following week, we got paid for the gig. Everything was fine. The CEO had seemed pleased enough with the band, despite how things went down around the “film star” issues.
During the gig, Queeneth kept on hissing at me:
“Ask him to donate a kombi to the band.”
I argued.
“You got the gig, you are the manager, you do the deals, why me? I am just a player in the band. YOU ask him for a kombi.”
However, she continued to nudge and hiss. She had forever been a horrible manipulator. No longer able to take any more of her insufferable, underhanded pushing, and wanting a peaceful life, I approached him.
He wasn’t as fazed as I was! He took the request seriously, and gave me the email address of someone at the company. I was to email, and he would set things in motion. He cautioned me to expect nothing, saying such things were “difficult” and “procedural.” We parted on good terms. I told Queeneth.
She, however, had neither a computer nor email, and told me to go ahead and email the head honcho. I did, and heard nothing for some days. Then, out of the blue, he emailed me. I can’t even recall whether he addressed the request for a minibus for the band. What he did do was attach a copy of the cheque he had made out to pay the band for the recent gig, saying, “I merely want to be sure you got your money.”
I was quite flummoxed, staring at the copy of this cheque for a long time. The cheque was for way more money than the band had been paid (extrapolating my share to be the same as everyone else’s). I mean, WAY more.
I didn’t sleep well that night. On the face of things, there was no particular agreement in place as to how much money Queeneth took as payment for managing the band. I had never asked, and did not know if anyone else had. But the fact was, she had seemingly taken 80% of the cheque amount. I was incensed, and felt let down. In the end, I decided to take it up with Queeneth, and take things from there. In the morning, I made some copies of the cheque, and hid two in my flat. You never know.
When I showed her the cheque, at first she smirked and confided, with a slight sneer:
“Blacks don’t know money.”
Now, that drove me to the brink. She looked so superior, and appeared to feel nothing about her conduct with the band’s money. I could not believe she could play fast and loose with it. Some (most) were in relationships and had children. Unbelievable. I told her I could not believe my ears. Then, she exploded. She thought I had contacted this guy behind her back, which, of course, was untrue. I showed her a printout of the email. It had come to me unbidden, where I had actually enquired about a vehicle for the band—actually, as I reminded her, “Doing your job for you.”
She did not really understand emailing, tore up my photocopy of the cheque, threw the scraps into a wastepaper bin, then shouted at me to get out of her office:
“You are fired! Get out!”
I stood my ground. Only Ntemi, as bandleader, could fire me from the band, not her.
“It is MY BAND!” she hollered. “I OWN them! They are MINE!”
She ranted and, even worse, swore so much I could not handle it any more, and left her office.
This episode was her big mistake. Like everyone, I treasure a little respect.
I had, as I said before, the foresight to have made other copies of the cheque. When I got back home, very hot and bothered, I phoned Ntemi, saying I needed to speak urgently about something. He did not question that, and we arranged to meet. I met him alone somewhere in Yeoville, somewhere public—maybe at a restaurant, I forget where—and related the story of my row with Queeneth, the whole saga of the cheque, and of course showed him a copy of it. I also told him about me being fired, and how I had stood my ground before bailing as the woman became an absolute harridan, leaving to avoid listening to any further foul-mouthed swearing. Ntemi was hugely astonished that she had fired me, blurting:
“Only I can fire a musician, not her.”
He appeared pretty steamed up about that, and we parted. I don’t know whether he went to see her immediately after that. It was one of two times I saw him angry. The other was when he fired an alto sax player from the band, although I did not know that he intended to get rid of her at the time. That time was in France, after a concert in the Dordogne area—a small village, I forget the name now, but it ended in “nac”, like so many Dordogne town names. Salagnac? Bergerac? Ribérac?
Back to the cheque issue. At Ntemi’s request, at the next rehearsal, I showed a photocopy of it to the guys in the band, also telling them that Queeneth had fired me, and that I had argued that only Ntemi could do that. I told them I had warned Queeneth it was not a good idea to try that, and that I would leave only if Ntemi fired me. Ntemi, since I was once again visibly upset, allowed me to leave, saying he needed to talk things over with the rest of the band. As I left, he said I should ignore Queeneth. I took that to mean that I was not fired, but since he did not say that overtly, I was unsure, and some sulky and brooding days passed. Then Ntemi dropped by my place.
“You are not fired.”
As he left, Ntemi said, “I’ve had it.” I was sure he meant “with Queeneth.”
Maybe the following day, he came over from Alex to my sister’s house at 20 Hopkins St, Yeoville, to chat.
He repeated “I’ve had it” and confirmed he meant he was “through with Queeneth.” The problem, he then said, was “What do we do next?” I didn’t know what to say at the time, but promised that, if there were any gigs coming up, I would try to be a player-manager—only if it were called for, though I scared myself saying that because my day jobs were severely affected by months of Queeneth’s chaotic management. She had no idea of management; in fact, other than as a seamstress, she was not big on skills at all. She was, however, known for finding bands. She may even have been the only person whom one could contact for a black African band.
Without her, where would our work come from? Queeneth sure as hell was not going to pass gigs to us. Ntemi told me the guys were also fed up. He had explained to them he was through with Queeneth, but had not offered an alternative. It seemed to me, and it appeared the other members felt too, that the band had folded.
I couldn’t bear that. I spoke to my sister, Colleen, who agreed to the band rehearsing at her house at 20 Hopkins St, Yeoville. It would not be the first time her Yeoville house was used for rehearsals or practice.
She and I agreed that the band should stay, and play, together as far as possible, and the work would come in one day. Hearing this, Ntemi went home. He must have phoned some of the guys, because they went to fetch their instruments at Dorkay House, only to find that Queeneth had the instruments locked up securely in a room in Dorkay House, claiming the instruments were hers. One player only had a few Rand left owing on an instrument she’d loaned him money to buy, so it was blatantly untrue that they were her property. She flatly refused to release the instruments. It was apparently an unpleasant moment, and I am glad I was not part of it.
I am unsure quite how they got them back. I was later told they had help from the Rasta guy who was Queeneth’s caretaker. He was the doorkeeper for the main doors onto Eloff St, charged with admitting the “hundred Zulus” (Queeneth’s words) who were living on the top floor above the band and rehearsal rooms. This was still deep in the apartheid years, and I do admire her for helping those desperate men. (Rastas care deeply about music, and we will be eternally grateful to that caretaker. I hope he didn’t suffer. I heard she was as mad as ten cornered mambas when she found the instruments gone.)
We phoned Roxy Rhythm Bar, and found that Queeneth had phoned Gerrie at Roxy Rhythm Bar to cancel the regular Friday night there, but he said straight out he’d not yet found a replacement, and the gig was still ours if we could rustle up the band. That proved to be easy, and we gathered at 20 Hopkins on the evening to set out for the gig at “The Roxy.”
German Chamber of Commerce
I was halfway to the front door when I was surprised to find Gerda, a lady whom I’d met fairly often at gigs and at Dorkay House. She looked very strung up. She told me we were booked to play at a hugely important gig for the German Chamber of Commerce that very night. “No, we are not,” I said. A hysterical half-hour followed, Gerda in tears. I felt sorry for her, but we had never been booked for the gig: Queeneth was a thoroughly useless office bearer, and her standard modus operandi was simply to tell us to pitch on a certain afternoon. We would wait hours for more news, which was usually limited to “We play the FIRST NOTE at Eight O’Clock.” Nothing else. Not where the gig was, who it was for, nothing. It came out later that she had not divulged to Gerda that the AJP had left her, and she found out only when she herself went to see Queeneth, and found a motley group of musicians rustled together by Queeneth, who assured Gerda “These are the Pioneers.” Gerda was no fool, and knew us all well, so she flew into action, found out where we were, and that’s how she arrived to plead with us. I felt very sorry for her, but the split from Queeneth never felt anything but final, especially given how we all parted (Gerda had no idea what Queeneth had put the guys through at Dorkay House). I even asked them if they wanted to pitch at the German Chamber of Commerce gig, and some of the replies were unprintable. Gerda was distraught. She had apparently put her head on a block, finally persuading the head honcho at the Chamber that the Pioneers would be a big hit, and to boot, reliable—and this was possibly her reputation and maybe even her job coming apart at the seams.
I still to this day feel sorry for her and for the German Chamber of Commerce. However, there is a twist to the tale, and we paid a price.
We later heard that the Chamber had voted an amount of R650k to the Pioneers for “Infrastructure.” Band equipment, van, outfits, whatever. In time, that money was awarded to the Alex Arts Centre. Queeneth was on the board, along with someone named Joe, and a lady named Francis. Within weeks of the money being received, Alex Arts Centre was closed down. A notice was posted there informing students that they could henceforth report to Dorkay House for studies in their various disciplines. Many made the trip to Dorkay House from Alex, but found no such education programme in place when they pitched.
Not long after that, I heard that Queeneth, Francis and Joe bought houses in Dawn Park. Around that time, I used to visit a lady whose parents had also bought in Dawn Park—for about R220k.
As the saying goes: “You do the math.”
Under New Management
When Lorraine McArthur (now Hurdus) joined as manager, there was even more drama. We met about royalties before Sip ’n Fly, but this time it was about the percentage. We all felt the 7% that they thought was such a magnanimous deal was very small, and wanted more. The first album was doing quite well, they admitted. By then, we had learned that overseas royalties were paid at the rate of 50% of album sales. The point Lorraine and I made was that sales were better overseas than locally, so we wanted our local rate upped, this being a small market compared to Japan and France, where the numbers were bigger but the royalties halved. To our surprise, Gallo agreed, and we gained a rate of 19.5% against local album sales.
Lorraine must take the credit for negotiating the bigger percentage. This was a major improvement on the 7% against album sales, after initially offering us 5%. We felt very lucky.
The first non-African country we toured in was Holland, for a festival named CASA, for “Culture in Another South Africa,” in December 1987. We first began to hear from Queeneth of a possible tour around June of 1987. She was tight-lipped on details. We soon realised why, when she hinted that the tour would be for “The Movement.”
That was an expression she used often, usually to threaten or put me in my place. “The movement will discipline you,” she would wheeze. I never bothered too much with it. Toward the end of that year, I was aware of some kind of elephant in the room. Neither Ntemi nor Queeneth were, for some reason, looking me straight in the eye. I did not take it up with them, but I knew “something was up.” We often found ourselves at gigs on the same bill as Mzwakhe “The People’s Poet,” and I got to talk with him from time to time. He was on the board of (or some representative entity to do with) Kagiso Trust, and some time late in the year, he hinted to me that there were security concerns around my travelling with the Pioneers. That could only mean overseas, because there had been no such reservations when we went to SADC countries. He said no more than that, but I was glad: it made me understand Queeneth’s and Ntemi’s reserve toward me.
The tension rose and rose, until one day it was announced that we were about to leave for Amsterdam. We had been asked to sort out our passports. Mine was OK, but someone in “the movement” assisted those without, and by the time of the announcement all of us bar one had them—that person’s passport issue became a cliffhanger. There was now further assistance with visas. I don’t think there are too many people still alive who can imagine what fearfulness we all suffered from around this tour.
We toured the Netherlands in 1989 (this tour was not confined just to Amsterdam, as with CASA, but to other towns). Other than a couple of club gigs in Amsterdam, I recall we performed in Den Haag, Zaanstad, Eindhoven, Tilburg, Terschelling (an island) and Groningen. For different reasons, two of these performances stand out in my memory: Tilburg and Groningen.
Tilburg was a very happy gig: the audience response there was more like I was accustomed to at home. I googled and found that this may be because it is a university town. Anyhow, it was memorable for a groovy crowd. We shared the stage that day with Fela Kuti and a Jamaican reggae performer named Yellowman, among others. Most of the band stayed back to hear Fela Kuti, who had arrived very late, together with his entourage, including 27 wives who were also his backing vocalists.
As for Yellowman, he is memorable at least for his cautionary song to P. W. Botha. Hilversum: On Radio, Live On Air to Three Million People in Holland
“Pakhmaisa,” said Sam Shabangu to Bheki Buthelezi. Sam was helping to tune the bass. I know, I know. You are asking, “Why did the bass player not tune up himself?” To which I can answer only, “That was the way it was.” And, as usual, it took time. Far too long this time, because the floor manager gave us a minute. Then he said:
“30 seconds.”
Still, the bass tuning process continued. Sam motioned “up.” The string was tightened. “Too much.” Shake of the head. “Down.” The string was loosened. I could hardly bear to look. We were about to go live, performing to 3 million people across Holland, and here we were, still tuning up.
“Live in ten seconds,” the floor manager said.
I ached. Blood pressure!
“Live in five, four, (whispering) three, two…” (he went silent and signalled “one” with his finger).
The Pioneers stood, patiently waiting for the tuning to finish. Tim, ever helpful, turned to the microphone and said to three million people:
“Ah, we are just tuning…”
‘Mazinyama’ Day
Payday became known as ‘Mazinyama day. From two words: Amaza and inyama, it translates roughly to “they know” and “meat”. Levy ‘Baby Chicken’ Kgasi and I had rued that we had to live on rice or mieliepap for weeks while waiting for payday. The first thing both Levy and I did on payday was to hit up the butcher!. We “knew meat”. Thanks to the ever-playful Mothibe Hlabatau for the phrase!
Farmer and Miller
For a time, about a year after the death of my elder sister, Colleen Taylor, I was a chicken farmer managing a broiler farm at Suurbekom, not far from Westonaria, and about 10 km away from Soweto.
It is misleading to say that I was a farmer only. In fact, a 2.8-hectare plot of land was bought by Colleen’s ex-partner, Richard Lyon. On it, we built six sheds containing a total of thirty thousand birds. At the start of building operations, I slept on the ground in a sleeping bag. Luckily, I was caught once only by rain while sleeping under the sky. One doesn’t really often get wet in winter in the Highveld. The storm that caught me sleeping in the veld was a pre-dawn downpour.I should explain that Suurbekom was a dangerous area. Many gangsters lived there, and I lived near several chop-shops. I felt that if I was hidden up the slope, sleeping admidst the undergrowth (it was mostly waist high, sugar bush), the baddies would not find me easily.
I awoke to no rain, but an eerie trickling sound. Without a moon, I had to peer very intently to figure out what it was. It turned out I was on a slowly disappearing island, surrounded by water passing slower than walking speed, but picking up. I made it to my car before the rain hit. I was sleeping across the road from the plot, maybe a hundred metres away from the shed foundation we were busy on, because that was a very dangerous area, and I wanted to be well away from intruders, thieves, and whoever. It was a very gradual slope from the koppies away to the south-west, and the water was flowing from rain falling on the low mountain range a few kilometres away. I rolled up the sleeping bag and sloshed my way down to my car, intruders or not, and slept as best I could through to the dawn.
The shed was finally roofed that day, and Bra Jackson Mofokeng, the builder, and I moved in. It was, in a way, not as nice as sleeping outside—I love the sky over me—but one good thing was there were fewer mosquitoes in the shed than there were in the veld.
Anyone who has done chicken farmings knows it is an arduous undertaking. Day-old chickens are extremely vulnerable, dropping dead with relatively slight drops (or increases) in temperature. They are especially vulnerable when allowed to get wet, and naturally, any situation where thousands of any kind of animal are crowded together is basically inviting disease. Once these diseases take hold, it is easy to lose an entire flock within a day or two.
Sleep was a luxury. We had no living quarters for staff on the farm. All the workers dwelt in Suurbekom itself, coming and going daily, and I found it terribly difficult to get help for feeding during the night, ending up hefting sack after sack of grower feed from shed to shed without help. People just didn’t pitch for work. There was, as Chris Roering would put it, “a minimalistic approach to effort.” The result was a very pressured work routine for me.
To let off steam and for recreation, I loved to head into town and gig for whoever would have me. At that time, Bra Masekela was running a music venue in Yeoville, on the site of what had been the cinema, called the “J&B Junction.” For some weeks, Dennis Mpale’s band did weekends at this place. This continued from time to time, even after the chicken enterprise had gone belly-up, which was a story in itself.
Despite the endless demand for chicken in South Africa, we had overlooked one thing. There were established chicken sellers in Soweto, our target market, and they put their foot down: we were not welcome to bring our chickens into Soweto to sell them. There were “big guys” in charge of that. I was approached by one of them one morning in Orlando East. Without introducing himself, he said:
“I am not saying you can’t sell here, you see? I am saying that you can, but that you do it through ME.”
He was obviously in total control in his own area, and we began to negotiate. I told him he could take ten percent of gross sales.
“Uh-uh. Ayibo! YOU get ten percent. I take ninety.”
I won’t bore you with details of the negotiations. You can see what his intentions were. We were just not welcome, and that was simply the end of our main intended outlet. We tried to sell further afield, but everywhere we went, there was another “big guy” waiting, with similar outcomes negotiated. Long story short, we went bung.
Within a year, I was running a maize milling operation on the same plot of land. That was not as hectic as the chicken farm, but I needed to relax, and gigs were still the answer—though the music industry was in total upheaval, mostly thanks to Napster and “free music.” The record companies were in full flight, and there was no money in records anymore, and therefore no point in playing live gigs to market an album.
Yeoville was in decline already. I still had a flat in a block at the summit of the ridge above Yeoville, close to the water tower, and would sleep there after the gigs before returning to the farm.
(Chris McGregor, Maxine & the Mill, Michael Chaplin, Beezy & Barend) Resolution: No More Longing
Following up on the very successful performances at CASA in December 1987, the African Jazz Pioneers returned to the Netherlands in 1989. This tour was not so much a flag-waver as CASA. We performed at Zaanstad, Eindhoven, Den Haag, Tilburg, Groningen, and the island of Terschelling, maybe more. I could not know that in the Tilburg audience was a bass player named Eric van der Westen, who would some years later invite me to play in his band in South Africa.
Toward the end of the tour, we played at a club (De Balie I think). On stage that night were various acts, including both Dudu Pukwana and Chris McGregor. Grateful for the opportunity, I went to chat with Chris. The chat turned out to be a surprising game-changer.
I reminded him that I had visited him and Maxine at their Bayswater place in London, and that I had frequented Ronnie’s Old Place at 39 Gerrard Street, Soho, usually when either he or Dudu were performing. Chris had no recollection of that, though he acknowledged that at CASA, he had felt I looked familiar. At the knowledge that I had been in London for some years, Chris grew quite serious.
“Why did you not tell me you were a musician? I was always looking for SA musicians who know our rhythm and township feel.”
“I was too shy. Mongezi was a better trumpeter than me. I would never have filled those shoes.”
Chris was not a disciplinarian in any of his bands. I never saw, nor heard of, him rebuking anyone for any reason. But his look now was close to a kind of despairing rebuke.
“But… as I hear you now, your playing would have suited us.”
“I was not yet on trombone in London. That could have worked, but I wasn’t there yet. And you got Annie [Whitehead]!”
“Yes, but Annie came along in the ’70s. You were in London, you say, until ‘70?”
“Yes, returned to SA early ‘71.”
Chris remained silent for a long time. I felt almost rebuked.
“I don’t think I could have played free jazz along with you and the guys.”
“That just developed and I went along with it, but we left it behind with the Country Cooking album. I wanted to go more toward what you guys are doing.”
I was really, really surprised hearing that, but when you listen to Country Cooking, apart from the song being nippy, it is really just a kind of double-tempo-feel marabi. Eighth notes instead of quarter notes. Parker instead of Armstrong. Otherwise, it is truly “homebrew.” Country Cooking. I could surely have lived with that! Saying that, Annie Whitehead signed her name on that number. Her plunger solo is simply the best, better than all the rest.
As you can imagine, for a boy who first heard The Blue Notes in Pietermaritzburg all those years before in the sixties, it was pushing miraculous to find that Chris was progressing toward a more homey approach. In my hotel that night, lying in the dark, all the terrible longing of a quarter of a century or so evaporated. If Chris wanted to get more like the Pioneers, as he had said, well, then there was no earthly point in brooding about never making it into the McGregor bands. The Pioneers had turned out to be the perfect home for me. I was well and truly “in my story.”
Japan
Take Me to Your Reader
I got accustomed, while we were in Japan a few times, to people transposing their R’s and their L’s. I have a strange nerve deafness. From birth, I have struggled mainly with voices, more so with adult male voices than with female voices of any age. I tend not to hear consonants. So, it would not surprise anyone that I struggled with a question put to me by a Japanese TV personality on a show. He asked:
“How it fear, onry white pray in brack band?”
I did a disturbing dimension-warp, wondering how he knew about Brakpan in South Africa. You wouldn’t think many Japanese would have heard of that mining town. Parsing his sentence round and round, as I do, and then wondering why he was asking questions about my religious doings, in the end, I did figure out what he was asking: what it was like to be the only white playing in a black band. Looking in horror at the palms of my hands, I screamed. It went down well with the audience!
The same question was put by a French TV personality. Swap the accent from Japanese to French:
“Ow does it feel to be the eunly white in a black band?”
“It’s OK, they treat me as their equal.”
In South Africa, I was often approached as the leader of the band. That’s not surprising for home (you are white, you must be the leader). One night at a venue in Sandton, a lady in a shiny dress rustled over to me and said:
“I want you to play ‘Simply the Best’ by Tina Turner.”
“No.”
“WHUT?” she hissed. This lady was clearly used to getting her own way. “Why ever not?”
“Tina Turner doesn’t play any of our numbers. So we are not going to play any of hers.”
Withering glance.
“WELL,” said the lady, and rustled away.
Roommates and Camp Beds
On one of our France tours, we performed in Lyon. On arrival, while sorting out hotel rooms, it was decided it was Fitzroy Ngcukana’s turn to share with me. Since we were assigned a room with only one bed, that was a problem, and the hotel staff made a makeshift arrangement. It looked like a camp bed: a metal frame with concave wooden slats to place a mattress on. Fitzroy, respectful of my age, volunteered to take this bed. Once it was made up and the staff had left, he lay down on it.
Fitzroy is not a lightweight. As his full mass sank into the bed, and with a sound like a motorcycle accelerating, every wooden slat gave way, and Fitz was dumped onto the floor. Rising to his feet, he kept saying, “Shi’”, “Shi’"—as if by omitting the “t”, he wasn’t really saying “shit.” I reassembled the slats, and he tried again, twice, with the same result.
So, I said, “Let me try it.”
It did cope with my weight, and Fitzroy took the “real” bed. Heck, that camp bed thing was uncomfortable. Each slat cut into my back. I did not get much sleep in Lyon.
The Van in Toyama
In the early 1990s, Black people were a rare sight in Japan. The few who were there were usually baseball players, Japan being a totally baseball-crazy nation. Wherever one looked, there was baseball: on a little video screen in taxis, on huge screens on the sides of large buildings, on TV screens in furniture and appliance shops—everywhere there was baseball, seemingly 24/7.