• Issue #01
  • Issue #02
  • Issue #03
  • Issue #04
  • Issue #05
  • Issue #06
  • Issue #07
  • Issue #08
Issue #07
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
feedback
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Facebook
MOHAMMAD SHABANGU
Monday 20 January 2020
ANDILE KHUMALO
22 July 2021
STEPHANIE VOS
Monday 7 February 2022
herri_gram FEEDBACK
Instagram
the selektah
ATIYYAH KHAN
IQRA!
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
the back page
RAMPOLOKENG, MUYANGA, OOSTERLING, VD BRINK, GRUNEBAUM & KAGANOF
Forget Nietzsche
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
    • Issue #01
    • Issue #02
    • Issue #03
    • Issue #04
    • Issue #05
    • Issue #06
    • Issue #07
    • Issue #08
    #07
  • Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani

TENDAYI SITHOLE

Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script vi: The Posthumous Life

Searching for the spirit

the elusive search
anxiety sets in
the mind in racing mode
searching for the spirit
intangible, illusive, invisible
tsolo location not located buried deep underground never to resurrect
damnation in duncan village
mdantsane is just a mystical anticipation
dyani in tales, myths, narratives, accounts and mysteries
archives waiting to be subjected to black minds
blowing the dust to avoid derrida’s fever
the name of dyani in documents
indexes, catalogues, entries, and keywords
there is a name and there is something to this name
reaching for the music to make sense of its tonality and soul
dyani’s spirit has never been gone, it is here and has always been there lurking in us
the spirit lives there is no dyani’s spirit to search for
dyani lives!!!

Boxer

in the name of boxing
the rivalry between Mdantantsane and Duncan Village is still yesteryear present
boxing overshadowing
legends are still there
boxing rings still drip with sweat
round one to round twelve if opponents still stand
left and right

overhand
uppercut
punch
hook
jab
Mdantsane has been a boxing ring
the Centre where the body of Dyani was is now replaced
sucker punch and knock-out
the Centre for creative arts and youth development is not there
capitalised by the caterpillar of capitalism
everything whipped out T.K.O ting ting ting…!
there is no evidence that the body of the legend was here
there is no evidence that there was the artistic sphere vibrating
no trace where the body of the legend was
no trace of the jazz being vibrations
aisles, tills, counters and customers in and out
boxer wholesaler

Dorkay House

Dorkay House in the body of the metropolis
Johannesburg the generator of dreams and its shutters
Johannesburg of life and death
The city of the extremes
The magnetic excess of exceptionalism

     Everybody is making it in Johannesburg
     It is where it is happening
     Tales of love and hate about the city that is made of bones migrants
     and their disposable lives

Dorkay House breathing alternative life
The space of possibility and making it
The creative feel
The impulse that defies the orange spine of Impulse Records
The black spine and the only black spine of A Love Supreme
­
       Dyani’s Quartet paying homage to Dorkay House
       Jolobe’s drums on ones and twos
       Epstein’s sax on the same
       Pukwana’s sax on the same
       The same homage, the same one and twos in different registers
       No repetition in this same and different

The hub of Union of Artist
The union against the Union of South Africa and its bastard apartheid
The union of amandla
The union of black solidarity

       Dyani in Johannesburg doing his thing
       The bass in Johannesburg
       The bass from East London
       The bass to exile

Dorkay House wherefore art thou?

U.D.F.

Dedicating a blue one for the movement in struggle
Struggle on the ground with song
The congress and the charter in struggle for democracy
Liberal constitutional democracy came but with no democracy
Archives gathering dust
Umzabalazo turned now to “it is our time to eat”
Taciturn song Dyani

As one

together as one
pursuit of journey of faith as one
The Blue Notes as one sextet
Brotherhood of Breath as one
The Blue Notes again as one as comrades die one-by-one
Moyake dies as one with one tenor saxophone
Feza dies as one with one trumpet
Dyani dies as one with one bass
Pukwana dies as one with one alto saxophone
McGregor dies as one with one piano
The Blue Notes receives the The Order of Ikamanga in Silver as one
Moholo-Moholo still lives as one kulama xesha osizi with his one drum kit carrying the lives of his fallen comrades
The Blue Notes lives as one in one mystery of being one!

Sequel

No follow up yet
The book of life has been written
All is not yet known
Notes and unfinished manuscripts lying scattered elsewhere

No series yet to give a comprehensive picture
Fragments and fractures of narratives and demands of re-narratives
All is beautiful and mystical

Mystery is still the date of birth
It is still mystery of who saw what from the fall on stage
All is yet to follow inconclusively

In prayer: homage in gramasonicsophytology

the word of it all
the beginning of music
improvisation as the coming out of what is inside

homage paid to the socio-existential
homage paid to heroism and martyrdom
homage paid to homage, homage of homage

the prayer that plays with for and to
words of homage
it is all about prayer
memory excavated from scattered unarchivability

in prayer it goes like this:
one for…
blues for…
dedication to…
ode to…

requiem for…
hymn for…
song to…
letter to…

Dyani’s prayer goes like this:
Song for Biko
Dedication to Mingus
Amen!!!
Fela saying it again, Amen Amen!!!

Share
Print PDF
TENDAYI SITHOLE
ED EPSTEIN
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute