Music for the past and future
Shabaka and the Ancestors prove that the limits of jazz have been pushed to the brink by a generation unafraid of being ‘wrong’
The backstory to the creation of an artwork can profoundly influence its reading. Shabaka and the Ancestors’ Mzwandile, off their album Wisdom of Elders, is a case in point.
The opening song of the album, and the first song of the group’s second set when they launched it at the Orbit jazz club in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, last weekend, is an insistent, incantatory praise song I had assumed a tribute to the sterling work of Mzwandile Buthelezi.
Buthelezi has contributed to the cover art or design to the albums of Benjamin Jephta, Thandi Ntuli, Amandla Freedom Ensemble and Shabaka and the Ancestors.
It’s an easy assumption to make but the artwork itself, coupled with singer Siyabonga Mthembu’s lyrics, suggests a lot more is going on. Mthembu, the vocalist for the group The Brother Moves On and a member of the Ancestors, sings of a progenitor who strengthened his home through hardship.
In Buthelezi’s artwork, a tripleb r e a s t e d f i g u r e i mp a r t s v i b r a - tional information to an earthling and the figures are connected by a branch. Yet the singer’s announcement on Friday complicates the narrative further: as Mthembu proclaimed after a rendition of the song, Mzwandile is also the name the United Kingdom-raised tenor saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings was given by legendary Blue Notes drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo. Literally translated, it means the house has expanded.
Hutchings has played with Moholo-Moholo in the UK and South Africa. He first visited South Africa in 2008 to participate in a Pan African Space Station show alongside Ayetoro. On subsequent returns, he plugged into Mandla Mlangeni’s Tune Recreation Committee (TRC), an open and experimental platform that has seen the likes of Moholo-Moholo helm the drum kit for some performances.
But before all of this, there is Hutchings’s ancestor — a greatgrandfather who fought for the British army in World War I and was stranded in Cape Town for a month, after his squad had left. Hutchings says that, when he heard this story, he started to think about what being in Southern Africa might be like.
Of his first trip, Hutchings says he realised there were things happening he had not thought of before. “What you get in terms of jazz and the music scene in England, especially at that time, was that there were older musicians doing South African jazz,” he says during a prelaunch rehearsal in Melrose, Johannesburg.
He added: “You don’t get a sense that the music actually keeps progressing. There are guys that are innovating, that keep it on the tradition and all the in-betweens. People doing electronic music and all the different crossovers.”
In about 2012, he began visiting the country, where he saw the experiments happening at Cape Town jazz venue Tagore’s and met trumpeter Mlangeni and the TRC. “I didn’t know there was stuff like that — where it was composed material but this loose, innovative way of approaching it. With the guys I was playing with it was either you play really tight, composed tunes or you play loose, no tunes at all. There wasn’t this kind of combination.
“From learning about the South African lineage I can see exactly where that has come from. The music of the Blue Notes, Chris McGregor stuff, Barney Rachabane and the big band history that they have had there.”
Wisdom of Elders is the culmination of jamming and recording with groups led by either Mthembu, drummer Tumi Mogorosi, Mlangeni or pianist Nduduzo Makhathini.
But more than just a South African moment driven by “the quest to inhabit one’s own voice”, as Mogorosi says, the advances in South African jazz and the coming together of the Ancestors speaks to a global movement alluded to by the sentiment of Los Angeles-based tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s Change of the Guard.
In a live performance of his towering album, The Epic, Washington recounts a story of a guard dreaming about a new generation to take his place. Four upstarts rise up to challenge him, with the last one being so supremely gifted that the guard voluntarily allows him to take his life. The guard wakes up to the fact that he was actually dreaming and only watching the young boys in training. When a subsequent dream flashes 10 years forward and the youngsters again make the trek to challenge him, they find that the gate has been destroyed and the guard has already left, leaving them dejected, as their entire life goal was to usurp him.
That the limits of jazz have been pushed to brink by a generation not afraid of being “wrong”, as Mogorosi says, is palpable from the malleability of Christian Scott’s stretch music, Mo g o r o s i ’ s r e l e n t l e s s o p e r a t i c sketching and Hutchings’s distinctive rhythmic travels.
For Mogorosi, there is the abiding tendency of not wanting to overemphasise the importance of this moment, realising that it came from the sacrificial toils of a generation before. “The only thing that has changed is the attitude, but the music and the conditions stay the same,” says Mogorosi, referring to a conversation he had with pianist Andile Yenana.
“Even though we went independent, we are still facing the same determinant conditions that negate certain notions of freedom that we might cling to as artists. We are brave in the sense that there is already a foundation for us to be brave, but we still face the same conditions of people coming to enjoy the music when the artists themselves are not enjoying life.”
Mogorosi prefers to call this the age of experimentation. The brilliance of Wisdom of Elders lies in how it encapsulates the zeitgeist from which it emerges.
Mthembu’s lyrics focus on the idea of paying homage, which is carried over into tunes without vocals. Give Thanks, the freest tune on the album, is an amplified showcase of Mogorosi’s nonlinear approach to drumming, presented on the album in conversation with the “relentless” (as Hutchings calls it) percussion of Gontse Makhene.
Give Thanks, I am willing to venture, is an ode to the pioneering spirit of the Blue Notes or MoholoMoholo, the generous, last surviving member of the group.
Hutchings confesses to being e n a mo u r e d w i t h t h e i n t e r p l a y between Ariel Zamonsky’s sturdy basslines and Mogorosi’s almost tidal approach that creates an imagined groove in the mind of listeners.
Makhathini’s tasteful infusions of colour on the Rhodes piano throughout make this album a meditative affair, and the distinct playing styles of Mlangeni, alto saxophonist Mthunzi Mvubu and Hutchings make this an exercise in egalitarianism — in essence, a brotherhood of breath.