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

Love for Free: Hidden South African jazz archive revealed

Chris Schilder aka Ebrahim Kalil Shihab at the Zambezi Restaurant,
Hanover Street, District Six, 1965. Picture by Ian Bruce Huntley

The recorded store of South Africa’s jazz heritage just got a little bit bigger than anybody realised. If you could ask just about any jazz musician who played in Cape Town during the mid 1960s, all would remember Ian Bruce Huntley with an affectionate smile. Ian was this lovable ‘jazz fanatic’ who would be on stage setting up recording microphones from his Tandberg 6 reel-to-reel recorder at many of the live jazz gigs that were played between 1964 and 1966 and then again from 1968 to 1972. Now and then he would also be taking pictures with his Leica M3.

Ian Bruce Huntley in 1967

After more than forty-five years of privately preserving these reel-to-reel recordings, Ian has just concluded a non-profit “public good” agreement that, amongst other things, gives Electric Jive exclusive permission to archive and share this wealth of historically important and amazing music. A new adventure is in the planning stages, and there are some wonderful surprises ahead. I am starting to seek out and have discussions with some good and helpful people, to plot a path which results in a companion book of photos, articles and a full discography of the history that is stored on those reel-to-reel tapes.

Today’s posting serves to announce a jazz musical heritage and excitement which we shall be unpacking on Electric Jive once a month for many months to come. In the medium-term, I am hoping to set up a searchable sub-page archive on Electric Jive to give expression to the agreement whose purpose is “to honour the musicians and their music, to promote the recognition that they are due, and to stimulate wider public interest in and appreciation of this heritage. We do not seek profit or commercial gain in making these recordings available.”

My recent spare time has been focussed on organising and digitising and backing up recordings very few people knew existed. Acutely aware of my own deficits in jazz and musical knowledge I am just excited to keep learning further, and to be able to start sharing this important heritage more widely.

The mid 1960s was an important period of transition, and in many respects Ian’s recordings mirror how the Cape Town jazz scene absorbed, processed and re-packaged that context. While much of the rest of Africa was euphorically bathing in the inception of decolonization, the iron grip of apartheid was really beginning to take hold in South Africa. Globally, the Cold War began to make pawns of countries.

Tete Mbambisa and Psych Big T Ntsele
Pic by Ian Bruce Huntley

In the United States jazz musicians of the African diaspora celebrated Africa’s newly found freedoms, but most walked a careful line on the side of the American Empire’s project of global democratization. A whole new era of musical dialogue between Africa and America was begun.
While many Africans were charting new paths and identities, there was a diverse group of Cape Town-based South African jazz musicians improvising in finding their own meaning and inspiration, listening intently to the likes of Coltrane, Davis, Monk, Mingus, Blakey and a host of other bop musicians.

Robin D.G. Kelley sums the period up well in his recent book: “Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times” -: “African musicians did not exist to bring something ancient to African American modernism; rather, they were both creating modern music, drawing on the entire diaspora as well as the world, to do so. Indeed, perhaps with the growth of trans-Atlantic collaborations and dissemination of culture, we can no longer speak so confidently about jazz as an American art form, or render African Jazz musicians outside the pale of the music’s history. And we certainly need to go beyond listening to non-American artists for ways they incorporate “their culture” into jazz – whether we’re talking about South African or Israeli jazz musicians. Jazz reveals that, even in the search for tradition, its chains do not always bind us, and the most powerful map of the New World is in the imagination.

While he is not a musician, Ian Bruce Huntley has made a significant and until now, unrecognised contribution in recording and preserving an extremely valuable, important and invigorating legacy. Despite attentions of South Africa’s State security apparatus, it was still possible in the mid 60s for racially mixed bands to perform at select public places such as the Zambezi Restaurant in Hanover Street, District Six, The Ambassador’s Jazz Club In Woodstock, The Vortex in Upper Long Street, The Art Centre, Kings Hotel and the Grand Prix Restaurant in Sea Point, The Room At The Top. All of these venues hosted an ebb and flow of South African jazz musicians – those that stayed and those that left the country and returned occasionally.

Ian’s recordings were always made with the permission and blessing of the musicians concerned. Often, after gigs, he would head back with band members to his flat in Main Road, Mowbray, and play it all back to them, way into the early hours. Ian’s Xhosa friends gave him the name “Ka-Nini”(Gwanini?), literally meaning ‘of the night’ – or, someone who comes alive at night.

Friends saying goodbye to Ian who had to leave Cape Town in February 1967: Left to Right - top: Harold Schlensog; Peter Buchanan; Paddy Ewer; Margaret Schlensog; Selwyn Lissack; Ian Huntley; Willie Nete; Themba Matola; Martin Ngijima (with pipe); Front: left to right: Roger Khoza; Howard Sassman; Chris Schilder; Winston Mankunku Ngozi.

In 1967 Ian was suddenly transferred out of Cape Town via somewhat mysterious instructions sent to the government map-making office where he worked. At around the same time he was also evicted from his flat because he was allowing black friends to sleep over there. Ian has many stories to tell, and I look forward to sharing some of these, and his recordings and photos, on this blog.

For today’s post I have selected an introductory sample of single tracks from some of the tapes I have digitised so far. In addition to making many of his own recordings, Ian also collected an impressive legacy of local and international jazz recordings. Some of the recordings are of excellent quality and leave me in wonder of how this amateur enthusiast with minimal equipment in the 1960s was able to achieve this. Some of the tapes have not lasted as well, while the levels in others are not ideal. Once you start listening, I am sure you will agree that the minor blemishes pale into insignificance.

Kippie Moeketsi, Victor Ntoni and Dani Ndlovu - Langa Community Centre 1971
Picture by Ian Bruce Huntley

I have to start with a ten-minute Kippie Moeketsi rendition of Body and Soul that just blows me away. Back in Cape Town in 1971, Ian was persuaded by friends to part with fifty rands to pay for an airticket to get Kippie Moeketsi to come down from Johannesburg and play a gig. When Ian and the band picked Kippie up at the airport in his Renault 4L, Kippie had arrived without an instrument. Ian persuaded his friends Lawrence and Sherlaine Koonen at The Record Centre to give him a loan, and bought Kippie a brand new Selmer Mark 6 alto saxophone. This concert involved Kippie Moeketsi and  Danyi Ndlovu on saxophones, a really top-of-his-game Victor Ntoni on bass and Nelson Magwaza on drums.

Body and Soul: Mediafire here Rapidshare here

Two more recordings at the Art Centre during 1966, not long before Winston Mankunku Ngozi was to catapault to national fame as 1967 Jazzman of the year for his Yakhal’ Nkomo.

First up Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi (tenor saxophone), Chris Schilder (piano), Phil Schilder (bass), Monty Weber (drums) – Love for Sale. Mediafire here Rapidshare here

Next is a striking recording of a Coltrane composition, “Ole” made at The Art Centre on 20^th August 1966: Morris Goldberg (alto saxophone); Winston Ngozi (tenor saxophone); Chris Schilder (piano); Midge Pike (bass); Philly Schilder (bass); Selwyn Lissack (drums). At nearly 18 minutes long, your patience through the gathering free introduction will be rewarded.

"Ole" - Mediafire here Rapidshare here

Ronnie Beer and Tete Mbambisa
Pic: Ian Bruce Huntley

Going back further in time at The Room At The Top in 1964 we uncover a whole lot of gems, including an 18-minute rendition of “Arabia” featuring Dennis Mpale (trumpet);  Dudu Pukwana (Alto sax);  Ronnie Beer (tenor sax); Tete Mbambisa (piano); Martin Ngijima (bass); Max Dayimani (drums).

Arabia: Mediafire here Rapidshare here

Martin Ngijima. Pic by Ian Bruce Huntley

 The final track I share with you today is of Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes playing Mingus’ Boogie Stop Shuffle at Wits University on 22^nd March 1963. The recording was made by Professor John Blacking. Ian just happened to transcribe this rarity onto reel-to-reel. The band: Chris McGregor (Piano); Elijah Nkwanyana - trumpet (and also a little baritone sax); Dudu Pukwana – (alto saxophone); Martin Ngijima (bass); we are not certain of the drummer, but believe it to be Early Mabuza. The tape of the full concert will become available in due course.

Boogie Stop Shuffle: Mediafire here Rapidshare here

I look forward to sharing more with you next month. Cheers!