Johnny Mbizo Dyani: Genius, mystery and Afrofuturism through jazz
Tuning in to living and departed jazz musicians to appreciate the indelible impression made by the Afrofuturistic bass master and key member of the Blue Notes. By
Although Afrofuturism, which addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora, is most commonly associated with techno-culture and speculative fiction, it also encompasses other genres, such as alternate history and non-traditional music that focuses on blackness and space.
Like Sun Ra before him, Johnny Mbizo Dyani is an Afrofuturist. They both recorded music that created a new synthesis using Afrocentric and, respectively, space-themed and segregation-less titles to reflect their linkage of ancient African culture (Egyptian for Sun Ra and Xhosa for Dyani) to the Space Age. They promoted their Afrofuturist ideas by touring festivals worldwide.
The mystery of Dyani also adds to the genius. There is talk that the often volatile Dyani only found out when he was 20 years old that he was given his Dyani identity after he was adopted by a family from iziPhunzana in Duncan Village two years after he was born in 1943. His biological mother died giving birth to Dyani and his two brothers in a village outside of Zwelistha, King William’s Town (now Qonce). The other two infants perished with their mother, but Johnny Dyani survived.
He was in Europe when he learned of this, and his spirit and character seemed to become more unsettled. His refusal to be displaced mentally – whether because of his own family history, or his diasporic reality – allowed him to connect to his spiritual convictions.
The “Mbizo” in his name was only added after he learned his childhood truth – Mbizo was apparently his paternal father’s name.
Many countries were sympathetic to the struggles of SA artists in the 1960s, but America was by far the most effective in magnifying the fall of the apartheid regime.
The more charged-up protest artists were attracted, by default, to the environment of the civil rights movement in the US as well as the pop culture values that their music could suckle from. The Woodstock Festival and New Orleans jazz culture were just some catalysts that would keep exiled musicians energised. The usual suspects Abdullah Ibrahim, Pops Mohamed, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela were naturally attracted to entertainers linked to the civil rights movement, such as Harry Belafonte and John Coltrane.
By the mid-1960s, John Coltrane was already established as the guiding light of a new form of avant-garde jazz that was upending ideas of just what jazz music was.
The time also produced Miles Davis and Nina Simone, who blurred the lines of racial and genre conventions. Simone’s legacy is ongoing, with her music being sampled by artists such as Kanye West and Lauryn Hill.
Their South African counterparts who trickled in in the 1970s and 1980s were also in the midst of mastering the “fowl run” of free blowing on the music scene in America while fighting apartheid from afar, carving their own identity of SA jazz.
The Blue Notes are the most significant avant-gardists in this case: Johnny Mbizo Dyani, Mongezi Feza and Louis Moholo, as well as others such as pianist Tete Mbambisa, whose achievements have been hidden from jazz history until recently. They were music geniuses.
Dyani suckled music from Tete in the dusty shanty-town streets of iziPhunzana outside East London.
Tete, born in 1942, learned to play the piano in his mother’s modest shebeen. He credits the place’s pianist, “an old man called Langa”, with teaching him his first chords, along with listening to his brother’s record collection. He was influenced by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Louis Jordan, and the Four Freshmen, a “pure fowl runner”.
As the pianist with the Jazz Giants, Tete won a prize at the 1963 Cold Castle Jazz Festival and, by 1969, was working with Winston Mankunku and playing, composing and arranging with tenor-player Duku Makasi’s band, the Soul Jazzmen, on the landmark album Inhlupeko. Black Heroes, on his only big-band album, Tete’s Big Sound, was one of the biggest hits on the SA jazz scene in the 1970s – and Retsi Pule picked up the baton.
In an unpublished article, Sinazo Mtshemla clarifies a 1985 interview with Dyani by Aryan Kaganof, saying: “Although Dyani does not directly link this to the fowl run, I’d like to suggest that it is him explaining how the fowl run works in a performance. [He talks] about the wide range of records that the Blue Notes listened to in South Africa that Europeans did not seem to have been exposed to, which were the great American musicians, such as John Coltrane, Booker Ervin, Charles Mingus etc.
“Interestingly, Dyani sees their practice of doing the fowl run as comparable to guerrilla tactics of confusing the enemy so to speak.
“It’s as much a question of playing with the feel as it is a political act: carving a new path that will not be recognisable and will not be attributed to American or European influences, but as their own thing.
“This leads to the point that the fowl run, as can be understood when it takes on the sound of free jazz, has its roots as much in Africa as in the US. The fowl run, he suggests, belongs to the ‘Family of Black Music’.”
Back in South Africa, the fowl run was out at play. Unlike elsewhere, the music in SA was still under the yoke of segregation laws. So entertainers went underground – East London, Mdantsane in particular, was the hub; with offshoots in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) and Queenstown (Komani). Not the flashy bars and motley crew-infested bars in Chicago, but the townships Zwide and Ezibeleni.
From the 1950s, the black townships spawned every conceivable form of communal performance: Sophiatown produced particularly creative musicians. There were trade union performers, Johannesburg’s Junction Avenue Company, Kessie Govender’s Shah Theatre Academy in Natal, Grahamstown’s Ikhwezi Players and Rob Amato’s Imitha Players in East London. All were legendary; all were harassed or snuffed out.
Zimbabwean-born Dorothy Masuka, through her King Kong exploits and Tete Mbambisa connections with the Soul Jazzmen, often ventured into the fringes of the republic to play “free”. No neutral clubs, no industry but the dusty shanty towns, where social strife was exorcised with the devil’s music, jazz. Jazz became a language more than a genre. It became a weapon that exposed the fallacy of racial categories.
It is this weapon we saw in the late Zim Ngqawana when he coined a new form of protest philosophy in music, Zimology. We see it in the explosion that is Ayanda Sikade on drums when he plays with the Nduduzo Makhathini trio. It’s the very same Blue Notes and Dyani-propelled “fowl run” that made bebop look like an infant when it came to challenging the status quo.
It’s the very weapon that embodies the zeal in Kesivan Naidoo and Feya Faku when they are rainmaking at the Bird’s Eye in Switzerland. The electricity in Siya Makuzeni’s trombone call. It is the cry of freedom for the homeland. Free Africa with jazz.
Social strife was exorcised with the devil’s music, jazz. Jazz became a language more than a genre. It became
a weapon that exposed the fallacy of racial categories