The Blue Notes: South African jazz and the limits of avant-garde solidarities in late 1960s London

ABSTRACT

For the Blue Notes, an ensemble comprised of South African jazz musicians living in Britain, 1968 was pivotal. After 3 years on the margins of the London jazz scene, their debut album Very Urgent was released in May that year to positive acclaim. Very Urgent was understood as an important statement of the British jazz avant-garde movement that captured the spirit of 1968, infused with the Blue Notes’ musical South Africanisms. In this article, I explore how shifting understandings of jazz in the 1960s aided and undermined the Blue Notes’ musical identities: as mbaqanga, hard bop, and free jazz musicians. I argue that Very Urgent and, to an extent, the Blue Notes cannot be understood solely in the terms favored by their early reception in Britain. Rather, both represent a complex matrix of personal, musical, and political relations that constituted British and South African jazz art worlds in the 1960s.

KEYWORDS:

• South African jazz
• London
• the Blue Notes
• exile
• Very Urgent

Acknowledgments

This paper is culled from my doctoral dissertation, supervised by Roger Parker at the University of Cambridge, St John’s College. It was written during the fiftieth anniversary of Todd Matshikiza’s death and is dedicated to him and to his wife Esmé Matshikiza. I want to thank Rhodes University’s Cory Library which, along with the Mellon Eastern Cape Jazz Heritage Project, included me as a core member of their research team and allowed me access to the Todd Matshikiza archive. I also want to thank the University of the Witwatersrand for funding my work on Matshikiza and the Blue Notes, and the National Research Foundation’s Thuthuka program for supporting my larger project on Matshikiza, “Beyond King Kong.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Chris McGregor, quoted in McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 104.

² Hutchinson, “What’s it Like to be Black, Sir?”.

³ Daniel and Vale, “1968 and South Africa,” 137–46.

⁴ Hutchinson, Road to Ghana.

⁵ Hutchinson, “What’s it Like to be Black, Sir?”

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Dalamba, “A Sideman on the Frontlines.”

⁸ Bethlehem, “Restless Itineraries,” 53.

⁹ Lucia, “Abdullah Ibrahim and the Uses of Memory,” 125–43; on Makeba see Bethlehem, “Restless Itineraries,” 47–69 and Sizemore-Barber, “The Voice of (Which?) Africa,” 251–76; and on Matshikiza see Thorpe, “I Slipped into the Pages of a Book,” 306–20.

¹⁰ Dalamba, “A Sideman on the Frontlines.”

¹¹ Bethlehem, “Restless Itineraries,” 50.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ The system was not absolute. In the mid-1960s, for example, both Ronnie Scott’s club in London and Manchester’s Club 43 were given a limited exemption by the Musicians’ Union (and the Ministry of Labour) from the need for reciprocal agreements, and could employ some foreign nationals without exchanging days worked by employees. Frith, Brennan, Cloonan and Webster, The History of Live Music in Britain, 84.

¹⁴ Maxine McGregor, Interview with Robert Serumaga.

¹⁵ Heining, Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers, 261–2.

¹⁶ Ibid., 262.

¹⁷ The album was reissued in 2008.

¹⁸ The Wire, Front Cover.

¹⁹ Witherden, “May 1968 Remembered,” 46.

²⁰ Ibid., 34.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid., 31.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself, 235–6.

²⁵ Ibid., 239–40.

²⁶ Carr, Music Outside, vii.

²⁷ Moore, Inside British Jazz, 67–132; and McKay, Circular Breathing.

²⁸ McKay, Circular Breathing, 133–4; and Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.

²⁹ Nkosi, “Jazz in Exile,” 35.

³⁰ Carr, Music Outside, 105.

³¹ Nkosi, “Jazz in Exile,” 36.

³² McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 90.

³³ Beinart, “The Beginning of a Tradition,” 49–55.

³⁴ McKay, Circular Breathing, 167.

³⁵ Nkosi, “Jazz in Exile,” 36 (my emphasis).

³⁶ Rosenthal, Hard Bop, 41–61.

³⁷ Ramsey, Race Music, 3.

³⁸ Ballantine, Marabi Nights, 124–5.

³⁹ McKay, Circular Breathing, 167.

⁴⁰ Wickes, Innovations in British Jazz, 61–78.

⁴¹ Ibid., 62–5.

⁴² Heining, Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers, 100.

⁴³ Fischlin, Heble and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 99.

⁴⁴ Dalamba, “Passports to Jazz,” 51–80.

⁴⁵ Heining, Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers, 265.

⁴⁶ McKay, Circular Breathing, 167.

⁴⁷ Banks and Toynbee, “The Making of the British Jazz Avant-Garde,” 104. The other group is the Brotherhood of Breath.

⁴⁸ Heining, Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers, 100, 264.

⁴⁹ Banks and Toynbee, “The Making of the British Jazz Avant-Garde,” 105.

⁵⁰ McKay, Circular Breathing, 87–128.

⁵¹ Banks and Toynbee, “The Making of the British Jazz Avant-Garde,” 106.

⁵² This is the case even when works of expressive cultures come from racialized contexts. Bethlehem, “Restless Itineraries,” 49.

⁵³ Banks and Toynbee, “The Making of the British Jazz Avant-Garde,” 104; McKay, Circular Breathing, 167; and Heining, Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers, 261.

⁵⁴ Nkosi, “Jazz in Exile,” 35.

⁵⁵ Ballantine, Marabi Nights, 4, 10.

⁵⁶ Banks and Toynbee, “The Making of the British Jazz Avant-Garde,” 105–6.

⁵⁷ McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 1–9.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 7, 12.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 11.

⁶⁰ Rasmussen, Cape Town Jazz, 1959–1963; and Albertyn, Keeping Time, 1964–1974.

⁶¹ Ballantine, “Introduction,” 1–4; and Eato, “A Climbing Vine through Concrete,” 241–67.

⁶² Coplan, In Township Tonight, 233.

⁶³ Ansell, Soweto Blues, 109.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 127–8.

⁶⁵ In South Africa, a liberal university is one that attempted to ward off the state’s systematic implementation of “university apartheid,” which was underwritten by the Extension of University Act of 1949. Phillips, “What did Your University Do during Apartheid,” 173–7.

⁶⁶ Ansell, Soweto Blues, 133–4.

⁶⁷ Lunn, “Hippies, Radicals and the Sounds of Silence,” 63.

⁶⁸ McDonald, The Literature Police, 258.

⁶⁹ Daniel and Vale, “1968 and South Africa,” 145.

⁷⁰ Rasmussen, Cape Town Jazz, 116–8.

⁷¹ McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 11.

⁷² Daniel and Vale, “1968 and South Africa,” 145, 141.

⁷³ Lopes, Jazz Art World.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 235–6.

⁷⁵ Rasmussen, Cape Town Jazz, 44, 60.

⁷⁶ Lunn, “Hippies, Radicals and Sounds of Silence,” 77–81.

⁷⁷ McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 12.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 13.

⁷⁹ Rasmussen, Cape Town Jazz, 60–1.

⁸⁰ Monson, Freedom Sounds, 95–6.

⁸¹ Coplan, In Township Tonight, 243.

⁸² Nxumalo, Liner Notes.

⁸³ McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 46.

⁸⁴ Nxumalo, Liner Notes.

⁸⁵ On marabi as the foundational music of South African jazz see Ballantine, Marabi Nights.

⁸⁶ Nxumalo, Liner Notes.

⁸⁷ Nxumalo, Liner Notes; and Fischlin, Heble and Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 99–140.

⁸⁸ McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 46–64.

⁸⁹ Lopes, Jazz Art World, 266–8.

⁹⁰ McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 23.

⁹¹ Beinart, “The Beginning of a Tradition,” 49–55.

⁹² McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 51 and 65.

⁹³ Monson, Freedom Sounds, 94.

⁹⁴ Louise Bethlehem’s seminal paper on “The Rhetoric of Urgency in South African Literary Culture under Apartheid” has little immediate correlation with my discussion here, since music, unless understood crudely or else when deliberately programmatic, cannot easily be understood as “stenographic.” It is worth noting, however, that music may be engaged in certain kinds of semiotic contracts, whose elucidation is more properly the work of music theorists. For now, I borrow her terminology for its sheer rhetorical force. Bethlehem, “A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger,” 365–89.

⁹⁵ Rasmussen, Cape Town Jazz, 93.

⁹⁶ Dlamini, “The South African Blue Notes,” 317.

⁹⁷ Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950,” 148.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 131–62.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 133.

¹⁰⁰ Heining, Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers, 264.

¹⁰¹ Frith et al., The History of Live Music in Britain, 169–96.

¹⁰² Osiris Visions was an offshoot of the London underground newspaper, The International Times, in charge of designing its posters and album covers. Its work appears on albums for bands like Soft Machine and The Who.

¹⁰³ Halperin, Liner Notes.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid.

¹⁰⁶ Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 136–7.

¹⁰⁷ Dlamini, “The South African Blue Notes,” 250.

¹⁰⁸ Heining, Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers, 264 (my emphasis).

¹⁰⁹ McGregor, Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, 117.

¹¹⁰ Wickes, Innovations in British Jazz, 65.

¹¹¹ Toynbee, Tackley and Doffman, “Another Place, Another Race,” 5–6.

¹¹² National Sound Archives, British Library, “Mbaqanga – The Gwigwi Mrwebi Band”.

¹¹³ Bruinders, “Parading Respectability,” 1–4.

¹¹⁴ On indlamu see Ballantine, Marabi Nights, 80.

¹¹⁵ Fordham, “Chris McGregr Group.”

¹¹⁶ Lucia, “Abdullah Ibrahim and the Uses of Memory,” 125–43.

¹¹⁷ Ibid., 133.

¹¹⁸ Ibid., 134.

¹¹⁹ Cape jazz has become synonymous with so-called “Colored” musical signifiers like (Cape) Malay melodies and ghoema rhythms. This reductionist view is challenged by musicians’ testimonies. Rasmussen, Jazz People of Cape Town; and Martin, Sounding the Cape, 209–58.

¹²⁰ Dlamini, “The South African Blue Notes,” 160.

¹²¹ Badat, The Forgotten People, 118; and Kelk Mager and Mulaudzi, “Popular Responses to Apartheid,” 392–3.

¹²² Dalamba, “Passports to Jazz,” 134.

¹²³ I would like to thank Dr Cornelius Thomas of Cory Library, Rhodes University, for allowing me to reproduce this score prior to the cataloguing of Todd Matshikiza’s Papers.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa [Grant Number: 106960]; and by the Mellon Staff Development Grant, Faculty of the Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand.

Notes on contributors

Lindelwa Dalamba

Dr Lindelwa Dalamba teaches music history, specializing in South African jazz and other musical modernisms, in the Music Department of the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Arts.