So, with Black people a rarity, it was even more of a surprise for the driver of a little Suzuki van to see Fitzroy and me standing outside a hotel in Toyama. We both had long beards, and I wore my hair in a long ponytail. Fitzroy’s beard was trimmed to a sharp point, like the letter “V”, and he wore a Kwanzaa hat. Also, Fitz is way taller than six feet. It was all too much for the van driver, whose eyes were fixed on us two, and he did not spot the turn in the road. It was a slight change of direction, but he went straight into a stout steel pylon.
He was still staring aghast at the pair of us. Later, we found that the rest of the Pioneers, ranged on a hotel step behind us, were involved in a debate as to which of the pair of us was Jesus and which was the devil. I am flattered to say they decided Fitzroy was the devil. I will also not be surprised to find that they told Fitzroy later that he was Jesus and I was the devil!
There was a loud bang when the van hit the pylon. All four people in the van were badly shaken, the driver in serious pain.
Fitzroy said, “Hawu. It’s… bheka thina?” (“Hey! It’s… they were looking at us!”). Then, he loped toward the van, seeing the driver was trapped. I followed. The driver evidently supported the “devil” theory. He cringed to his left in terror as Fitz ripped the door off the van and chucked it away over the pavement, then in even more terror as Fitz, bracing himself in the doorway, jammed his foot against the dashboard and forced it outward, freeing the suffering driver’s pinioned knees. Fitz then gently pried him from the vehicle and seated him down on the pavement.
A crowd gathered. I had time only to see the passengers in the van, still all mute with terror, now relieved as Fitz and I swung away: our transport had arrived.
Spring Water and High Acoustics
That may have been the day we visited a hall built entirely out of Japanese spruce. There, we were met by a bevy of attractive Japanese ladies who were great fun to be with. Walking down a gravel road next to the venue, I spotted a pipe in an earthen bank. Water was flowing out of it.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Hah!” she said, thought for a moment, and then added triumphantly, “Spling. Wataah.”
I asked if I could “dlink”—drink—it. She nodded and came up with a mug (from nowhere—how do Japanese people do these things?). It was amazing water. This sparkling water flowed from the bamboo pipe into a furrow which widened. There were a number of colourful koi swimming around.
“Look at the goldfish!” I told my companion.
“Hah! No goldfish!” she said, a warning index finger raised. “Koi!”
I said, “They don’t look too shy to me.”
She thought and thought. Then she joined another lady, relayed my sentence to her, and returned looking concerned. “Shy! Koi!” she said. “You” (index finger circling ear) “off the wall!"—to peals of laughter from all our lady hosts.
After a pleasant walk in a tangerine orchard on the hillside above, we entered this spruce-built hall. The wood was a lovely, warm golden colour throughout. Inside, we found a little acoustic band and listened to them performing. I have never heard such perfect acoustics. The purpose of the performance was to demonstrate just that. Shown to a buffet table, we helped ourselves to lunch.
“Bery elsie” (very healthy), said Hayato, the promoter, standing next to me in the lunch queue. I had helped myself to a selection of mushrooms. “Mountain mushroom,” he said. They made very good eating.
Workshops and the Heart of Music
In Nagoya, the last town we performed in, there was a request from an educational institution for us to conduct a workshop for the students. There was some enthusiasm, but not from Jennifer Klot, who refused point-blank to participate. She gave fairly vocal reasons. It boiled down to us not being virtuoso musicians: she appeared to think we would have some nerve to do workshops because most of us, being self-taught, were not virtuoso, trained musicians.
That was true. None of us had the benefit (as Jennifer had) of being steeped in the land of jazz for a start, and of hot-shot college teaching on our instruments. I felt a little miffed. Jennifer had indeed been well taught and was pretty good on her instrument. I know that in her terms of reference, though, she felt at the end of a long queue of alto players, possibly even felt overshadowed in her course, wherever she had learned to play sax. I do kind of understand, because who wouldn’t? Decades ago, I learned that an estimated 45 million people in the USA played musical instruments. At that time, that was slightly more than the total population of South Africa! You can’t fail to be better in that environment than you would where very few people play (or, here in SA, could afford) an instrument.
One reason why our penny whistle music took off as it did, apart from how eerily haunting and beautiful it was, certainly was that a penny whistle was affordable. The early penny whistle bands were a few penny whistle players who joined with a bassist playing a tea-box bass (my cousin made one from a tea chest) and a guitar or two. Guitars were cheap back then, and many people made their own from petrol cans. Music is all about us feeling it is the most important thing we do in and with our lives.
It’s just a plain fact that as a trumpeter or trombonist, I would fail performance tests at any USA college, or even high school—probably even here in South Africa, where the standard of young jazz music has gone through the roof in the last decade. On the other hand, I’ve had enough professionals and well-trained musicians ask me, “How do you do… what you do?”, especially when they learn I was untaught. Of course, I wish I had found (and been able to afford) a teacher as a young man. To my parents, and even to me as a teenager, it felt like a pleasant hobby while I was at school.
But once I got into bands with our local African musicians, it felt like nothing else could be that important. I have to say that was more to do with rhythm and the groove than with technical prowess. The very first drummer I ever played with in Swing Inc. in Pietermaritzburg was a guy named “Pops”. I think his surname was Msimangu. He had little technique (not the same as no ability), nor did he even own any sticks. All he had was a pair of brushes. Yet, he could groove and drive a marabi or kwela band with those two ancient brushes in a way that made it so absurdly difficult to even play—chortling is the enemy of embouchure!
“Spinny” Spinola, whom I met years later, was a little more learned, but not really a technician, and he had the same talent when it came to driving a boeremusiek band with just a pair of brushes. Pops moved on, followed by an accomplished jazz player, James Lund, who was a West Coast jazz fan of Shelly Manne back then. I played with him for the two years that Swing Inc. survived before the cops and apartheid put an end to us, and for many years later with him in the Chris Roering band. He himself was a good brushes player, but he would be the first to admit that there was something uncanny about the way “Pops” put out a groove. Maybe it’s something you either have or you don’t.
Turning back to the workshop, Stompie was relaxed about it and tried to cool Jennifer off. “We just show them what we know,” he said.
The workshops went ahead without our lead alto lady, who had set her jaw and stomped off. They went off fine, I thought. One young Japanese student approached me and asked me to show him things. I asked him to play a bit. He was technically very accomplished, sounding like a young J.J. Johnson. I told him I could not teach him a single thing!
He would not have it, however, and I was patient enough to hear him out: he showed great courage pitting his English against the problem of articulating what he felt were his weaknesses, and slowly it came out.
“My solos,” he said, a little distraught, and he put his right hand over his heart and tapped. “My solos,” he said, anguished, “No heart!”
I was at a loss. “I can’t teach that,” I told him. Still he waited, looking desperate.
“Well,” feeling for words, “think of a baby. It can’t speak, can’t say what it wants. But when it cries, it uses its whole body to cry for one purpose: to get what it wants!”
It was all I could come up with, but he looked better for it and left me very gracefully. Running on Empty in Japan
I recall this tour of Japan was beginning to fray me, but I could not work out why. After the workshop, we performed, and it went off well enough, except I felt lower on energy than usual. After the gig, our eager Japanese host managed to plonk an Asahi beer in front of me just as I was finishing one. I could feel I was getting drunk, but it was a happy gathering, so I just slowed down and left the Asahis alone.
When we collected our things and left the venue, some way toward our transport, I hit the deck. I was not unconscious and got up, but was very unsteady on my feet. “Just drunk,” I thought. But though I have had a lot of beers many times in my life and had my years of being an enthusiastic amateur boozer, no one ever claimed to have seen me stagger, let alone fall about the place.
It was a struggle, and Mily Togasa, our interpreter, after some conversation with Hayato, did his bidding and took me to a doctor. At his rooms, the doctor listened very attentively to what Mily had to say and then examined my stomach with a sonic wand. Amazing. I watched the CRT screen as he passed the device up and down my stomach. Not satisfied, he had another look. He then pronounced his diagnosis in a very final and rather triumphant tone.
Mily translated. “Nothing in you,” she said. I must have looked stupid. “No food. No food in your stomach. You haven’t been eating. That’s what he found.”
He prescribed simple, easy-to-digest food (“Not too much!”), and plenty of electrolytes, both of which we went and bought on the way back to the hotel. Boy, did I collapse again! A few mouthfuls, and I passed out asleep. Drinking plenty of the electrolytes, I was back to my energetic self within a couple of hours.
Between us, Mily and I worked out what happened. Most of the band avoided interviews, and she guessed that the band at large struggled with Japanese accents, and interviewers also struggled with our accents, but less with mine. So, I kind of became “it” when there were interviews to be done. When the others were eating, I was being interviewed. I recalled then that in the previous few days, every time I sat down to eat, whatever time of day, I had to leave the table for interviews, one after another, leaving me only enough time to get ready for a performance. Mily had not seen me eat for at least two days, though she herself was often busy at mealtimes. Well, the doctor’s findings did shake me, but I was relieved that it was not an illness.
Toyama was a peaceful, gentle place. Houses were interspersed with rice paddies, irrigated by canals with crystal-clear water and koi swimming in them. The pace was not hectic. I even wondered if there was a lunchtime siesta (but forgot to ask and never found out), it was so quiet.
A big and slightly hectic thing for me was the bullet train. I say slightly, because once inside them, it’s a very quiet and relaxed ride. We had already experienced the TGV trains in France. There was little to choose between them in terms of speed, noise, or comfort levels, except for one thing: when two TGV trains passed, there was a bang on the window, but not so with the Shinkansen bullet train. Passing trains were a non-event aurally.
Switzerland
Apart from the recording we made at the Montreux Jazz Festival, we had another trip to Switzerland. Arriving there, I followed the band from the aircraft to where we bunched up in a queue to go through passport control. We were all tired, as usual, after an all-night trip. I felt neither alert nor even wide awake. Soon, however, my senses were prickled.
The uniformed men (they looked like police to me) marched forward to me and hurried me through. Before I knew it, I was through passport control and waiting for the others. And then it caught me. It was that old feeling: I was fine because I was white, so I was literally herded through without question. Then, though, they started in on the band. I protested, but was menacingly told (a hand was held over my face, which I did not enjoy) to stay out of it.
I immediately disliked all the Swiss officials. They were the very definition of officious, perhaps worse. None of their faces looked like they had ever, in a lifetime, been creased with a smile. A forbidding lot. They were cadaverously pale, short of sunshine, and in my exhaustion, I found I had little patience with their towering arrogance. It took them a couple of hours, but they found nothing to give them an excuse to keep anyone any longer. Our documentation was perfect, as it always was with Lorraine in charge. We trudged to our transport and made our way to a hotel in Zurich.
Fribourg
Zurich was interesting to me for a few reasons. For one, how efficiently it was run. It was, of course, very expensive. You get what you pay for.
After a break of a day to recover from the flight, we went to perform at a city or town named Fribourg. There was some festival going on there. Not long after arriving, we were taken to a whole line of trestle tables laden with food: lunch.
The African Jazz Pioneers was not a band that preferred eating out back home in SA, let alone overseas. I never once saw any of my music companions, whether AJP or not, excited about any food in Europe. As a nation, we want to eat what we know, and we want to know what we eat.
A near-incident comes to mind. There were a few news-hungry journos hovering around. One approached second alto player Sechaba “Shep” Ntsamai and asked “Are you being well looked after?” In a very plaintive voice, Shep answered:
“No, we are not being fed!”
Boy, did that journo jump on that! He licked his lips and out came the notepad. I shot over and took a seat next to Shep. “What about all this food on the trestle tables here?” asked the journalist. “Yes” said Shep in the hurt tone “We are not being fed!” I intervened, took the journo a few steps away and explained: “Shep is old school. Men his age do not help themselves to food. It is traditionally brought to them. Ask him if he would eat if someone brought a plate to him”. The journo gave me a long, slow look. The notebook stayed out, but he did my bidding. “That” Shep said “is what I am telling you. We are not being fed”. International scandal averted, I went back to my seat.
Leaving the AJP
Not long after the Swiss tour, I felt it was time to move on from the Pioneers. The band had changed a lot since I had joined.
Ntemi was still a wonder to work with musically, and enjoyable as ever as a person, but the younger draftees did not enjoy me as much as Bra Tim Ndaba, Bra Sechaba “Shep” Ntsamai, and Bra Phaladi “Fellow” Madumo had done. Even Bra Ernest “Stompie” Manana got on well with me, and we had fun at times, though he was not the easiest-going of people. I do not kid myself that I am easy to get on with always, but these things take two sides.
Ntemi put in more hours daily than most. I think maybe Mpho Sithole was a close second. I myself had a voracious appetite for practice, and seldom put in less than four hours per day, and even eight or more when there was no rehearsal to go off to. Most young SA musicians get as good as they do for a simple reason: they never stop playing. In every waking hour, they are busy on their horns.
Practising is not only a matter of playing scales fast, and racing up and down the horn, running chords and arpeggios. That is the meat of it, I agree, but the other deal is developing a beautiful, enviable sound. What is the point of playing a horn agilely if it sounds ugly? And, the less you practise, the worse your intonation becomes. Whenever I took an office job for a few weeks to find some money for the rent, my intonation was the first thing to go.
Tuning was a big problem for the AJP in the early years. I am self-taught, so I did not see it as my place to hammer on about it, so I grimly hung on. There were redeeming factors like the amazing throbbing rhythm and groove. For two of the early years in the beginning of my time with the AJP, we were quite depressingly, drastically, sickeningly out of tune. There was a simple cause: our keyboard player’s electronic keyboard was hellishly flat. After months of putting up with pulling my tuning slide so far out without yet being able to get low enough to tune with the keyboard, I tried to explain to him that it was impossible for us horn players to get in tune with him. I suggested to him that we navigate together through the patches on the keyboard, find the tuning frequency, and reset it to 440 Hz.
He exploded!
“YOU! You don’t tell me how to play my keyboard! No! No! No!”
Well, I tried, didn’t I? Ntemi witnessed the episode, and shrugged. Evidently, he thought there was no talking to this guy, and I left it where it lay.
Around the beginning of my third year with the band, we heard that we were to be the curtain raisers for Sadao Watanabe, who was to be featured in a concert in the Laager at the Market Theatre. He arrived mid-morning when we were on stage doing a sound check. There was a story going around that he was greatly looking forward to hearing the band, yet, as he stood a few metres away from the stage, his arms akimbo, he really looked very unhappy. I knew it was because we were terribly out of tune.
Sure enough, he got next to me in a break. This always happened—everyone seemed to approach me to solve band problems. I was not the leader, but I was always the first person anyone approached. I was right. He told me how disgustingly out of tune the band was, to the point he was uncomfortable about his reputation, having chosen us to open the show for him. I told him I was aware of it, had tried to correct the problem, and asked him to speak to Ntemi. He refused. His blood was a little up, and he said:
“No. I am speaking to YOU. I want to know what the problem is.”
I did my best, saying we had a legacy of difficulty between White and Black people (this was still before the Mandela days), and that I was not the man to fix the problem. He pressed me further, and eventually I told him of the altercation between the keyboard player and myself. He was astounded, but cool.
“I can help,” he said, and ambled across the room to his keyboard player, Nobu.
A long conversation ensued. Nobu looked at me a lot, but eventually strode over to our keyboard player.
“Hah! Your keyboard out of tune! You stupid!” he said, stabbing the keyboard player on his chest, and roaring with laughter at him.
“Come, we fix,” said Nobu.
The keyboard player shot a nervous glance at me, and followed Nobu to the keyboard. Nobu took the keyboard player through the exact same patching that I had suggested, we tuned up at rehearsal. It was like a completely different band. The AJP played like angels that night, and forever more.
Dennis Mpale
In the years after I left AJP, Dennis Mpale booked me for a few gigs, and in time I became a member of his band, until he died around September 1998. He only ever had a few gigs after returning from exile, but had recently recorded an album, Paying My Bills. It was selling well, and his gigs were well paid.
Other than performing with Dennis, I was also lucky enough to do some well paid recording sessions, some Sun City gigs, later a short season at the Civic Theatre in Bra JG’s big band (by far the best big band I ever played in), some recordings with Bra Hugh Masekela, and a presidential inauguration gig (President Mbeki) that kept the rent paid. Things, however, got tighter and tighter. The writing was on the wall, and I saw I would need to return to office work to stay alive.
I loved my time with Dennis. From time to time he would call me to a rehearsal. I would take time off, drive over to his house in Orlando. He was a delight. There was a massive pair of speakers fronting a powerful hi-fi system, and there was always jazz filling the room (if not the neighbourhood). The first rehearsal, it took time to find his place. I entered to the (predictably enough) trumpet sound coming from the sound system—I think it was Clifford Brown with “Joy Spring”. It turned out to be more of a social visit than a rehearsal. Dennis wanted company more than anything!
That was the pattern for all the following rehearsals: both of us seated listening to some amazing jazz, Dennis with a cigarette. A quart was never far away. I never drank with him—taking the visit always at its face value of being a rehearsal, I never ever drank liquor while working. Afterwards, possibly, but never during. Also, I felt the need to be alert when driving back, not only because there could be hostility towards me in Soweto, but also because that was a very busy road, and the taxi kombi vehicles could really fly along it. Even a single drink before returning home was not something I felt I could cope with.
Early on in my time with Dennis, I asked him if he remembered me sitting on the bus with him and Elijah Nkwanyana in Pietermaritzburg. He did not. He did not even remember the show Back in Your Own Backyard, let alone playing at the Wooden Horse on the Sunday afterwards. He did, however, acknowledge that it was “most likely” that he would be found in those days in the company of Elijah Nkwanyana—“especially,” he said, pointing at the quart of beer in front of him.
We sat in silence for a while after my question, as Dennis closed his eyes and smoked. Eventually, he took up his horn, a nice Conn Constellation, a model 36B. These were very popular horns for a time: nickel plated with large bells with a late flare, they had a large, sweet sound. Dennis ripped off a few phrases, then said:
“Exile. Exile makes you forget everything.”
I don’t think he ever, even once, used my name. Once, after I asked him to repeat something, he looked annoyed, then asked:
“By the way, you deaf, huh?”
I said yes.
“Well, fuck you,” he said, laughing fit to burst. It was, somehow, very funny!
Later, I told Bra Jonas Gwangwa this story about Dennis and my deafness.
“That’s Dennis,” Bra JG said, with a knowing look, and a grin. “That’s Dennis.”
The Dennis Mpale band was without a doubt the loosest band I ever performed with. Nothing we rehearsed resembled anything we finally performed, and vice versa. It was like “Every day is a new day!” Still, it added up to the most fun I ever got out of playing. Maybe both Dennis and I were the ultimate musical anarchists! To this day, I have not yet found a trumpeter who fingers faster than Dennis. He moved around his horn with dizzying speed.
Carl Fontana
The adrenaline boost I found from playing with Jimmy McPartland in Durban stayed in my mind, too, proving a valuable tool to summon in the years of practice that were to follow in later years.
After some of the intense years I put in during my time in the SADF Entertainment Group, I heard that a trombonist named Carl Fontana would be playing at the Johannesburg Jazz Club. They used a popular night club, Plumb Crazy, as a jazz venue on Sunday nights. My brother Al was not a great Stan Kenton fan, and, since I listened mainly to Al’s swing and mainstream collection, I was not aware of Carl’s playing, but of course I was curious. Any American, I thought, would be worth hearing.
My wife, Lyneve, and I went off to Plumb Crazy to catch him. I think it was his second night of performing. Later, I heard we were lucky to have waited, because on the first night, Carl was not satisfied with the trio who were backing him. There was no such issue the night we went, and I was not prepared for what I heard. Had I been listening to Stan Kenton, I would have known that Carl Fontana and Frank Rosolino were a pair of “Italian stallion” trombonists, both with a reputation for lightning fast technique. But I had heard Rosolino only on some Gene Krupa tracks. Maybe Krupa booked Rosolino when Bill Harris couldn’t make it? Or maybe the other way round? Whatever—Mr. Krupa knew a good trombonist when he heard one. What a pair of ‘bone heavyweights!
Carl Fontana blew me away. South Africans, I’d found, were more particularly concerned with how powerfully or loud one played, and I had arrived at the point where I realised that volume was the pivot point of a compromise. Putting it another way: the lighter one played, the faster one could play; the louder one played, the slower one could play. (Obviously there are exceptions—Gary Valente was the loudest trombonist I have ever heard, and he got around the horn very quickly when I heard him in the Carla Bley Very Big Band at Club New Morning in Paris.)
Fontana was all the proof I needed. Instead of blowing the roof off, he just filled the horn with sound. In my four years as a labourer in England, I heard almost all my favourite American musicians live. Acoustics are tricky, and I was never sure of it, but it did seem they were all content to do no more than fill a horn with sound, not blow the thing straight!
Carl’s show ended far too soon, and I went onto the stage to thank him for a wonderful evening of music before we left for home, which we did after grabbing a last round and drinking it. I needed that calm drink to come to terms with what we’d just witnessed!
It was some time before we left. A few blocks away from the club, we were astounded to see Mr. Carl Fontana walking down Fox Street. Lyneve and I deliberated, did a U-turn, and returned to him, offering to take him for a drink at Rumours. He agreed, and off we drove to Rockey Street, Yeoville, where it turned out that Art Kelly, the bassist part-owner of Rumours, already knew Carl.
I was surprised to hear, in the kind of heart-to-heart that ensued between Carl and Art, that Art was one of the trio that Fontana had had issues with the night before. Art and Carl buried the hatchet over a few Rumours Irish Coffees.
I never pulled my trombone out when Carl was with us. Instead, I plied him with endless questions, and he was experienced and articulate enough to provide me with all I wanted. He would go into detail about arching the tongue in the mouth, and what part of the tongue could be used to close the air supply for different tongue attacks. I discovered that what I was working on was well known in the US, namely “doodle-tonguing”. We pronounce the consonants “D” and “L”, as in “doodle-doodle”, to separate eighth notes at speed. Some people write it as “dudal-dudal”, others as “daddle-daddle”. The idea is to lightly close the air supply with a “D” sound, and follow with the “L”. With practice it works fine, and is both easier and way more groovy than the classically taught “TK” or “tuka-tuka”, though that has its place in the precision needed for attacking (especially) staccato notes in classical or other “legit” music (brass and wind bands, marching bands).
As written in the chapter on Empangeni, I learned that tongue attack from a steam locomotive.
Noise
Noise, to you—unless you are a swakthorige (hard of hearing) like me—is very different from noise as perceived by me. We’ll get to that.
Since I find wordplay to be fun, let’s spare a thought now for one of our great musicians, Noise Khanyile. His name is pronounced to English ears as “Naw-Ees-Eh”. The only time I heard him, very briefly, was when he was making his beautiful noise on violin. Thinking of Noise Khanyile, I am reminded of a conversation with big Hyser Burger in my Yeoville days. It came up in conversation that he was a musician. I love to meet younger musicians, and was pleased to hear it.
I asked Hyser, “What genre?”
“Noise,” he replied.
I was a little stuck for words. “Oh. Oh… OK. What instrument?”
“Power drill,” he said.
I learn something every day.
Bra Jonas Gwangwa
Post-Pioneers I freelanced.
One of the first people to book me was Bra Jonas Gwangwa. We had met in exile at CASA, where, like all the exiled musicians, had struggled with what to make of me. I was no young up-and-comer, I had clearly (they could hear from my playing) been ‘around’, yet nobody had ever heard of me. I feel sorry for anyone who did not meet Jonas Gwangwa. It remains one of the greatest joys of my life to have been privileged to be acquainted with that thorough gentleman, and it was a privilege to work with him.
One project I worked with him on was a four-trombone plus rhythm section combo, one that he referred to as “Amantambo” (“bones”). Although he never recorded that band, he did overdub four parts himself on a number he named “Just Bones”, which sounded much the same as Amantambo. Amantambo played his compositions only, and the performance happened, after some rehearsal, on a stage in the Market Theatre Precinct, just in front of the main entrance. I think it was the Johannesburg Jazz Festival.