Farewell, muso-activist
GWANGWA: LIFE EMBODIES PEOPLE’S STRUGGE FOR NATIONAL SA CULTURE Through 65 years on stage, his playing contributed to the very genre of SA jazz.
Music is not a zero sum game with only one “best”. But if you seek to name one musician whose life embodies the South African people’s struggle for a national culture, it must be trombonist, composer and cultural activist Jonas Mosa Gwangwa, who was born on 19 October 1937 in Orlando East, Soweto, and died on Saturday in Johannesburg aged 83.
Through 65 years on stage, Gwangwa’s playing contributed to every genre of SA jazz. Overseas, he was hailed as player, producer and composer.
et he chose to step away from mainstream success for 10 years, leading the Amandla Cultural Ensemble of the ANC to win hearts for the anti-apartheid struggle everywhere and present a vision of what post-apartheid national culture could be.
He battled painful injury (accidents shattered the same femur three times), was hunted by the regime and experienced the heyday of the liberation culture and the far more ambivalent times since. Throughout, he cherished a half-century-plus love affair with wife Violet, and brought his family – scattered across half the globe – home intact to a free SA.
Violet’s death, only a few short weeks before his, had left him and the rest of the family devastated.
Gwangwa started his career in the 1950s in the Father Huddleston Band at St Peter’s College in Johannesburg.
When instruments were allocated he hoped for a clarinet, but was shy to object to the offered trombone.
There was music in the family, lessons at school, and from American jazzmen on the bioscope screen at the Odin Cinema in Sophiatown. From Dizzy Gillespie, the schoolboy Gwangwa borrowed his lifetime trademark – a jaunty black beret. He became, in his own words “this little bebopper”. Politics shaped Gwangwa too. The 1954 Bantu Education Act ended St Peters, but not before the band played at the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955.
Because trombone was a scarce sound in African jazz bands, his tricky bebop chops caught the ears of the elite Jazz Dazzlers. His vision expanded with the Jazz Epistles, whose Jazz Epistles: Verse One became the first modern jazz album by a black band.
Equally active in politics, he helped organise SA students in America, and served as first eye on the text drafted by old schoolfriend, poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, of Miriam Makeba’s 1963 anti-apartheid UN address.
He worked with Makeba and
Harry Belafonte, most famously as arranger, adapter and conductor for the 1965 Grammy-winning Best Folk Album, An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba – another first.
But he had loyalties bigger than the stage.
In 1980, Gwangwa answered the call from ANC president OR Tambo to scour the military camps of Angola for young talent to establish the campaigning Amandla Cultural Ensemble.
The call was too politically important to ignore, and the opportunity to create an entire stage show excited him so much that “sometimes … I couldn’t sleep”.
He spent most of the next decade between Amandla (rehearsing in Angola and touring the world) and Botswana (with his family and contributing to the local cultural scene with the Medu Arts Ensemble).
Interviewing him for his forthcoming biography, I asked him what he was proudest of. “Amandla. Because it involved all the things in music that excited me the most, and gave me the opportunity to bring them together … for the most important reason possible: it was for the people.”
Politics shaped Jonas Gwangwa too