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Contents
editorial
DJO BANKUNA
Pissing On The Rainbow Nation
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ôs haatie wit mense nie. Hoekô haat julle vi ôs?
GLENN HOLTZMAN
The Music Department in South Africa as a Mirror of Racial Tension and Transformative Struggle: A Critical Ethnographic Perspective
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Black artists and the paradox of the gift
Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani
ZWELEDINGA PALLO JORDAN
JOHNNY DYANI: A Portrait
JOHNNY MBIZO DYANI
A Letter From Mbizo
ARYAN KAGANOF
Johnny Dyani Interview 22-23 December 1985
SALIM WASHINGTON
“Don’t Sell Out”
LOUIS MOHOLO-MOHOLO & HERBIE TSOAELI WITH JOHNNY DYANI
In Conversation with Mbizo
ZOLISWA FIKELEPI-TWANI & NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
When Today Becomes The Past: The Archive as a Healing Process
ASHER GAMEDZE
Tradition as improvisation | Continuity and abstraction
GILBERT MATTHEWS & LEFIFI TLADI
An Interview with Lars Rasmussen
EUGENE SKEEF
The Musical Confluence of Johnny Dyani and Bheki Mseleku in Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script i: The Figure
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script ii: Ontology Of The Bass
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iii: Musical Offering
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iv: Home And Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script v: Experimental Philosophic Incantations
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script vi: The Posthumous Life
ED EPSTEIN
Spiritual
CAROL MULLER
Diasporic musical landscapes: Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Dyani, and Sathima Bea Benjamin in an African Space Program (1969-1980)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Riot in Progress (Legalize Freedom)
S’MAKUHLE BOKWE MAFUNA
Notes on the Exile Years
KEI MURRAY MONGEZI PROSPER MCGREGOR
Who the Son was?
ARYAN KAGANOF
Somebody Blew Up South Africa
JONATHAN EATO
Interludes with Bra’ Tete Mbambisa
MAX ANNAS
Morduntersuchungskommission. Der Fall Daniela Nitschke
SHANE COOPER
Lonely Flower
THANDI ALLIN DYANI
"I love you. You don’t have to love me but I love you."
galleri
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Shades of Johnny Dyani
HUGH MDLALOSE
Jazz is my Life
TJOBOLO KHAHLISO
Shebeening
FEDERICO FEDERICI
Notes (not only) on asemic phenomenology
ANDRÉ CLEMENTS
Vita-Socio-Anarcho
DEREK DAVEY
Verge
borborygmus
MUSTAPHA JINADU
Trapped
VUSUMZI MOYO
From Cape-to-Cairo – AZANIA
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
In a foreign tongue...
SHARLENE KHAN
Imagining an African Feminist Press
DILIP MENON
Isithunguthu (A conversation in Joburg)
CATHERINE RUDENT
Against the “Grain of the Voice” - Studying the voice in songs
GEORGE LEWIS
Amo (2021), for five voices and electronics
STEVEN SHAVIRO
Exceeding Syncopation?
BRUCE LABRUCE
Notes on camp/anti-camp
PATRICIA PISTERS
Set and Setting of the Brain on Hallucinogen: Psychedelic Revival in the Acid Western
frictions
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Doctor Patient
KNEO MOKGOPA
Vuleka Mhlaba (What Would Happen if Madiba Returned?)
CHURCHIL NAUDE
Die mooi mooi gedig en anner massekinners ….
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Travelling on the Khayelitsha Train
SISCA JULIUS
Islands in the stream
FAEEZ VAN DOORSEN
Nobody’s Mullet
GADDAFI MAKHOSANDILE
The Face of Hope
VONANI BILA
Extracts from Phosakufa (the epic)
NIQ MHLONGO
Mistaken Identity
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships part 2
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
How to Become an African President
JEAN RHYS
The Doll
OSCAR HEMER
Coyote
MICHALIS PICHLER
Bibliophagia
claque
LINDELWA DALAMBA
From Kippie to Kippies and Beyond: the village welcomes this child
GWEN ANSELL
Zim Ngqawana: A child of the rain
MKHULULI
Black Noise: Notes on a Semanalysis of Mogorosi’s DeAesthetic
LIZE VAN ROBBROECK
DECOLONIZING ART BOOK FAIRS: Publishing Practices from the South(s).
DYLAN VALLEY
The Future lies with folk art: Max Schleser’s smartphone filmmaking THEORY AND PRACTICE
PAUL KHAHLISO
Riding Ruins
DIANA FERRUS
Ronelda Kamfer’s Kompoun: unapologetic and honest writing.
UNATHI SLASHA
Piecing Together the Barely Exquisite Corpse: On Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on the Speculative Archive
WANELISA XABA
One from the heart: Dimakatso Sedite's Yellow Shade
BLAQ PEARL (JANINE VAN ROOY-OVERMEYER)
Uit die Kroes: gedigte deur Lynthia Julius
FRANK MEINTJIES
Wild Has Roots: thinking about what it means to be human
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony - a discourse on the unrelenting and ruthless process of colonial conquest
ekaya
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Call Me By My Name: Ubizo and Ancestral Names for Abangoma
HILDE ROOS
In Conversation with Zakes Mda: "The full story must be told."
INGE ENGELBRECHT
Tribute to Sacks Williams: A composer from Genadendal
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
A tribute to Hilton Biscombe
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN
Resisting the Siren Song of Race
off the record
SANDILE MEMELA
Things My Father Taught Me
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
On returning to my grandmother’s land (notes for a film)
HILTON BISCOMBE
A boytjie from Stellenbosch
KHOLEKA SHANGE
Art, Archives, Anthropology
RITHULI ORLEYN
On Archives, Metadata and Aesthetics
KEYAN G. TOMASELLI
The Nomadic Mind of Teshome Gabriel: Hybridity, Identity and Diaspora
FINN DANIELS-YEOMAN & DARA WALDRON
Song For Hector - the utopian promise of the archive
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn - episode 2
GEORGE KING
Sustaining an Imagined Culture: Some Reflections on South African Music Research in Thirty-Five Years of Ars Nova
RAFI ALIYA CROCKETT
Loxion Fabulous: Temporality and Spaciality in South African Kwaito Performance
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GWEN ANSELL

Zim Ngqawana: A child of the rain

Zimology Quartet live at Birds Eye Switzerland (2007)
Anthology of Zimology Volume One (2008)
50th Birthday Celebration Linder Auditorium – 12 December 2009

“Everything flows…it is not possible to step into the same river twice” (attributed to Heraclitus, c. 500 bce.)

More people today know the legends of Zimasile “Zim” Ngqawana than know his music. Let’s not kid ourselves: jazz is currently a niche music in South Africa. It’s sidelined by media outside a few specialist slots, and often staged in venues where entry fees and transport costs to a metropolitan centre exclude many who would love it. The official rush to embrace a market-oriented ‘cultural industries’ discourse and now the hegemony of global digital capitalism as the curator of music consumption intensify this sidelining.

Ngqawana’s memory and narratives live on because of his fierce fans and his profoundly influential relationships as mentor and creative partner with others: film-maker Aryan Kaganof, bassists Shane Cooper and Herbie Tsoaeli, pianists Nduduzo Makathini and Kyle Shepherd, vocalist Omagugu Makathini, trombonist Malcolm Jiyane, reedman Mthunzi Mvubu and more. Those artists carry forward not only their recollections, but the spirit of that shared work, in scholarship that opens it to their own students, and in their own innovative practice.

That’s how we know about the work of the Zimology Institute and its struggles to inhabit a small decolonial moment and liberated space for making and learning music. It’s also how we know the way thieves wrecked the Institute for its scrap value and about Ngqawana’s subversive, defiant, creative response, archived on film in The Exhibition of Vandalizim.

But beyond jazz musicians, students and fans, Ngqawana remains best known for one tune that made it onto radio beyond the specialist shows and stayed in playlists for a very long time: his re-visioning of an isiXhosa rite of passage song, Qula Kwedini, from the 1998 album Zimology.

Versions of Qula almost always cropped up in the reedman’s live sets and their recordings (though not on his subsequent studio albums for the Sheer label, Ingoma, Zimphonic Suites and Vadzimu). Audiences from every cultural background cherished and called out for it; those who shared his, often sang along too.

Ngqawana’s life story has been well documented: childhood in Gqeberha and his self-made reed flute; early gigs with the Afro-Teens, the Black Slaves and Pacific Express; gaining acceptance to university programmes at Rhodes and UKZN on talent alone; Amherst and other US studies and residencies that sat him beside Archie Shepp and Yusuf Lateef; his drum ensemble at Mandela’s inauguration; his role in the SA jazz renaissance of the 1990s; his struggles to get jazz into South African concert halls and foster concert-hall respect in clubs – nominations, awards and the countless gigs and tours that followed, before his untimely death from a stroke in 2011.

The five years preceding that tragedy saw him at the peak of his musical powers. Three live recordings from that period on his own Ingoma imprint – the 2007 Ingoma Quartet live at Birds Eye Switzerland; the 2008 Heidelberg-recorded Anthology of Zimology Volume One and the 2009 50th Birthday Celebration, recorded at Johannesburg’s Linder Auditorium, give us access to how his technical command was constantly expanding, and his vision of the possibilities of a theme changing – sometimes “stretched,” he noted, “beyond recognition.”

There’s much more to hear on these six-odd hours of music than three versions of Qula, of course. The Birds Eye set features Ngqawana’s early, classic quartet: Nduduzo Makathini on piano, Ayanda Sikade on drums and Herbie Tsoaeli on bass. It opens with Ngqawana (in poet Sterling D. Plumpp’s words) travelling “from here to Harlem and back/on a Trane” in the pianist’s arrangement of Mongo Santamaria’s Afro-Blue. But it also reveals the reedman’s playfulness and how he enjoyed fucking with an audience’s expectations. “This is not a sound for entertainment,” his liner notes solemnly admonish. And he’s right.

Musician-scholar George Lewis has pointed out that free improvisation represents the recovery of a silenced voice; it’s a challenge, in McCoy Tyner’s words, “as serious as your life”.

That’s true of the whole lineage of Black music, challenging oppression by its very existence.

The set is centred on a 20-minute-plus DJ Zim Suite: 20 minutes of pure groove, above which the improv continues with precisely the same edgy spirit and intensity as if it was riding something far more self-consciously “serious”. The concept is Ngqawana’s, but only those rhythm players could carry it off with quite such a joyfully iconoclastic vibe, joined by the reedman’s bird-whistle in place of deejay scratches.

“European music”, he once observed, “is sometimes obsessed by melodic lines. But you can live without melody. Rhythm can be enough”.

And, yes, you can dance to it – except the intelligence of the playing compels you to stop and listen.

The Qula in this set is short and solemn. The bird-whistle here is an evocation of the natural world, a prelude to call-and-response song, extended vocalese and the horn exhalations of human breathing. Ngqawana is often quoted advocating the realisation of self, but that was never an individualistic project. Here, Qula is grounded in community: the realisation of self as, in Ngqawana’s words [a] “human being on this planet.”

The Heidelberg two-disk set sees a change of bassist to Shane Cooper (and gives us a chance to briefly visit Cooper’s moving tribute, Passacaglia for Johnny Dyani). Ngqawana’s liners describe these performances as “the end of the [Zimology] era”; a deliberate expansion of the improvisatory possibilities of the known material and foreshadowing where the sounds could go next. “The new music (…) will be all about consciousness.”

As befits a goodbye, gospel, spirituals and the blues infuse the musical thinking here. Ngqawana had for a long time mused about new ways of giving his music a Xhosa cadence by revisiting “the way my father would have sung a hymn” and that’s what he explores here in the Spiritual Suite. But although he was fiercely proud of the South African jazz sound, he never turned his back on other diasporic voices and the shared spirit of Black creativity; the sprightly closer, Bureaucracy, slips niftily between goema, Afro-Cuban and calypso.

Qula Kwedini has become a 17-minute suite: the song itself, a dedication to Initiates, a brief, swinging flight and a conversational Recitative. The sequence is grounded in Ngqawana’s masterly flute technique. But his singing voice here is different: it’s a greybeard’s voice (he notes in the liners that he’s now old enough to have fathered his co-players) looking backwards with regret and lamenting how “the whole humanity project has been hijacked” by a reductive fragmentation. Hoarse vocalese becomes scat improv becomes a seer’s voice speaking in tongues and, by the conclusion of the suite, a conversation of elders.

The 50th birthday double-disk set is in some ways incomplete. The concert was designed as a multimedia event with dancers; it would have been useful to see on DVD how those other elements were integrated.  

Still, the music is strong enough to stand without them. Again, there’s a change of bassist: magisterial veteran Ernest Mothle brings a deep and subtle signifying to his role. There’s lots of blues, lots of Coltrane homage (particularly explorations of the South Asian modes of Trane’s later period) and preaching, spoken and played. It presents a relatively seamless collage – with many more short numbers than had been usual in a Ngqawana live performance – of all the elements that had characterised his musical life. But this retrospective lens is nothing like a conventional, straight-line look backwards. The elements are visited in the order that makes the best sonic and intellectual, not chronological, sense, and predominantly through new compositions.There is, for example, an intense, furious Blues for Afghanistan, part chant, part blowing, mostly sermon; Ngqawana’s exploration of consciousness was never only inward, and a world of war and destruction continued to engage his indignation.

As well as revisiting Qula and Ebhofolo, Ngqawana’s music history tracks back to a transformation of Mongezi Feza’s anthemic You Think You Know Me (but you’re never gonna know me): that song’s patterning dissassembled and its motifs spliced with spoken reflection and spaces of silence for remembering. 

Among the new works, the four introspective Samurai numbers – Sword, Peace, Tears and Laughter – allude to the martial arts discipline of one of Ngqawana’s own past mentors, Abdullah Ibrahim, but are much more about Ngqawana’s own intense concentration as he inhabits the moment of his music, cycling through its graceful forms. Here is the sonic focus on consciousness that was promised during the Heidelberg sets.

The birthday Qula is another exercise in deconstruction. Not only are the patterns of the tune teased apart, but so are its instrumental voices. We hear it as a piano solo, then a duet, then a trio – and then we must hold our breaths for the most subtle of bass solos. The music is distilled to its essence: strings and spirit.

Some audience members at the 2009 event said afterwards they thought there had been “too much talking”. That may have been true for anybody imagining they were buying a ticket for an evening of greatest hits – although Ngqawana fans should have learned by then that he would never do something so predictable. That was not Ngqawana’s object in presenting the concert. For him, it was a precious opportunity to lay out and archive his vision for a future direction that was not limited to music – however long or short that future might be.  

Because, although much of the music is joyful, death and ceremonies of mourning – hymns such as the heartbreaking weNjenje uYehova, sermons, tributes, requiems – are a recurring theme in speech and music. During You Think You Know Me, Ngqawana reflects

“When you’re improvising, you’re not dependent on the note…you’re ready for death any time”.

The liners state, “At 50 years, one realizes that the physical dimension will soon fade away…consciousness continues, for it has no beginning nor end”. Ngqawana knew he had inherited a family vulnerability to strokes, and that his rigorous practice regime, including the taxing technique of circular breathing, increased the risk. He relished life and never sought out death, but his Sufic philosophy put it in its place – his priority was strengthening his ability to speak through the music.

Perhaps what is most poignant about the birthday Qula is that while its other musical elements are radically altered, the vocal part on this version is the closest of any to Ngqawana’s 1998 original. The voice of this child of the rain (as his clan name has it) returned to the source. But his tireless work and restless, innovative spirit had been terraforming for 30 years. It was definitely no longer the same river. 

 

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