More Moyake mined from the Huntley Archive (1965)

Left to right: Peter Jackson Jjnr (drums), Nikele Moyake (tenor), Tete Mbambisa (obscured on Piano), Dennis Mpale (trumpet) Duku Makasi (tenor). Salt River Town Hall, Cape Town, 1965. (pic Ian Bruce Huntley)

One more contribution to the small handful of recordings of Blue Notes saxophonist Nikele Moyake in the year or so between his return home from Europe and his death. While this recording is also very much about Bucs Chonco (piano), Dennis Mpale (trumpet), Psych Big T Ntsele (bass), Peter Jackson Jnr (drums), Robert Sithole (flute), the more senior Moyake leads from the front, soloing often.

Tape 44 of Ian Bruce Huntley's archive slipped between the cracks in my first round of digitising and tagging close on sixty hours of music in the audio archive. Thanks Rose for picking this up.

Nikele Moyake (pic Ian Bruce Huntley)

First, an apology to regular  Huntley Archive on Electric Jive visitors for not yet being able to tweak those fixes and track title updates that you so kindly pointed out. I will get there.

This recording is probably the clearest made by Ian at the Ambassador's School of Dance in Woodstock, a venue with challenging acoustics in which to play and record with a few static microphones.

The five tracks spanning forty five minutes showcase an integration of Moyake's significant European experiences with an evolving jazz scene in Cape Town.

Besides the unusual choice of Jimmy Web's  "By the Time I get to Phoenix",  we have not been able to name the other four tracks. All help and suggestions are most welcome.

If you have not yet explored the Huntley Archive on Electric Jive, do yourself a favour and click on the image of the book cover in the right-hand column of this blog. Close on 58 hours of recordings are available for you to download and listen to. You can also download a free copy of the book. Hard copies of the book are still available, and you can order it from this site as well.

If you are interested in other posts in which Nikele Moyake features, have a look here and here and here.

Mediafire download of the recording here

The Blue Notes – a journey of faith!

Poster courtesy of Ian Bruce Huntley

Amongst Ian Huntley's reel-to-reel collection is a June 1964 sound-desk transcription of the last concert played by Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes at Rondebosch Town Hall in Cape Town, a few weeks before they headed off into exile.

The booklet promoting their last South African Tour before going
into exile in 1964. From left to right Dudu Pukwana,
Monty Weber, Chris McGregor, Mongezi Feza

Tony McGregor, Chris' brother, happily agreed to write a piece for Electric Jive in sharing this recording. Thanks too Tony for the scans of the booklet. Tony points out that the booklet introduces Samson Velela as the bassist and Monty Weber as the drummer, because at the start of the tour Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo had not yet been hired by the band. The concert track-list at the beginning of the tour is also different from what they chose to play at tour-end. 

Seeing this particular concert referenced in Mike Fowler's comprehensive Blue Notes website here, we realised that the song timings in Ian's tapes were just a little bit different. Tony contacted Mike and asked if he perhaps had an audio version we could compare with. It turns out that this particular recording was thought to be 'lost'. 

The master of ceremonies that can be heard on these live recordings is Campbell Gwidza. Stay tuned, there are two other Blue Notes recordings to come. If you missed the two earlier Ian Huntley archive postings on Electric Jive, check them out here (Love for Free) and here (Mankunku gem),

Without further ado - I hand over to Tony to set the scene for a further 85 recorded minutes of Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes that is now added to the public archive.

“Getting out of the country was the goal we had been striving for, and about what would happen afterwards, I had only a vague hope.” – from Maxine McGregor’s biography of Chris McGregor:  Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath (Flint, Michigan: Bamberger Books, 1995).
When in 1963 Chris McGregor and five other South African jazz musicians got together to form the band which soon gained a large following of jazz fundis in South Africa as the Blue Notes they were embarking on what was essentially a journey of faith – they had little in the way of physical resources and almost no prospects either.

What they had was phenomenal musical talent and originality and a passion to play which consumed them in spite of the difficulties of being a non-racial band in race-obsessed South Africa with its incredibly restrictive laws and customs.

Five of the six members came from the Eastern Cape: Nikele Moyake (tenor sax) and Mtutuzeli (Dudu) Pukwana from Port Elizabeth; Johnny Mbizo Dyani (bass) from Duncan Village in East London; Mongezi Feza (trumpet) from Queenstown and Chris from Blythswood Missionary Institution near iGcuwa (Butterworth) in the former Transkei. Drummer Louis Tebugo Moholo-Moholo was from Langa, Cape Town. He is also the only surviving member of the band, the others all having died in exile except Nikele Moyake who died back in Port Elizabeth.

After the 1963 Cold Castle Moroka-Jabavu Jazz Festival Chris obtained funding to put together a big band using the best musicians from the festival. This band comprising about 17 of the top musos in South Africa did two shows and released the now-classic album Jazz: The African Sound, featuring six original South African jazz compositions all arranged by Chris.

A journalist on the Johannesburg newspaper The Star, Maxine Lautré (later McGregor, as she married Chris), took over managing Chris’s musicians around this time and began to look for opportunities outside of South Africa for them, as opportunities in the country were becoming rapidly scarcer as apartheid hit the music scene harder and harder.

As Chris said in a later interview, “One had to be rash to play in a group like the Blue Notes at the time.” Maxine wrote to contacts all over Europe asking for help in securing paying gigs and one of these contacts organised, with the help of a tape of the band playing, an invitation from the Antibes Jazz Festival for the end of July, 1964.

Then came a hurriedly-arranged tour of South Africa with the objective of raising some much-needed cash to get the musicians to Europe within a few months. Luckily they had already begun the tedious and long-winded process of getting passports – a really difficult issue for blacks in apartheid South Africa.

“It is hard to say what we expected from Europe; certainly we thought there would be no difficulty in finding work,” Maxine wrote in her book. Indeed the only thoughts they had was how to get to Antibes in time!

The gig presented here was towards the end of the whirlwind tour and took place in the Rondebosch Town Hall. So it was one of the last times they played in South Africa, and certainly the last time in Cape Town.

It was a simultaneously harrowing time and a triumphant one. The worries about money, passports and the future generally made them all edgy. Their faith in the music held them together and the appreciation of the fans buoyed them and kept them going.

RONDEBOSCH TOWN HALL, CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
June 1964
Chris McGregor - piano, leader; Dudu Pukwana - alto saxophone; Nick Moyake - tenor saxophone; Mongezi Feza - trumpet; Louis Moholo - drums; Johnny Dyani – bass

The times in (brackets) are the actual times of the songs from Ian's tapes, shared here. The other timing comes from the list on Mike Fowler's Blue Notes blog.

1. With Every Breath I Take 9.19 (15:44)
Rapidshare here     Mediafire here
2. Schoolboy 22.24 (21:50)
Rapidshare here Mediafire here
3. Paper Moon 17.07 (22:18)
Rapidshare here Mediafire here
4. Never Let Me Go 5.48 (5:38)
Rapidshare here Mediafire here
5. I’ll Remember April 21.00 (19:29)
Rapidshare here Mediafire here