Long live Malombo
The autumn of 2014 coincided with Philip Tabane’s 80th birthday celebration. The ageing genius was giving a rare musical performance as headline act at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival. It was a hot ticket to a performance that would be one of his last. The father of Malombo music had defied yet another internet hoax announcement of his death to give a glorious account of his larger-than-life legend. Malombo is a Tshivendaword for spirit. Just like its Sesotho iteration, Malopo, which speaks to the ritual drumming and dance of traditional healers, it is built around a two-note repetitive heartbeat rhythm, often sustained for days on end in trance.
Often perching on a chair to play, Tabane was by turns frail and fiery, spindly and splendid. Tabane was determined to deliver one of his best performances ever.
All the famed hallmarks of a Malombo gig were there: The guttural half-sung howl of witty, idiomatic Sepedi lyrics, the gestural guitar slap and strum, and all Tabane’s other idiosyncratic antics — he played his Gibson guitar with his mouth, laid it on the floor and played it with his shoes as the audience roared with fascination and nostalgia for the glory days of Malombo’s ascent to the pantheon of African musical greats.
The spectre of Tabane clawing for breath and daring to rise to the occasion was made even more moving by the soft glances he kept exchanging with his son, Thabang, on percussion. The whole thing seemed to signal a new era for Malombo music, beyond the man who gave it global prominence.
There would be more false alarms and erroneous announcements of Tabane’s death on the internet, and although there would be no further spectacular performance to defy them, they were wrong. Malombo lived on.
So, as the news began to spread that Tabane had been admitted to a Pretoria hospital and died at around 9.30am on Friday May 18, there was an expectation that a counter-announcement would follow saying, no, Malombo lives. But, alas, he is gone.
Jazz fused with traditional African sounds
Tabane’s death concludes a journey that began, at least professionally, in the early 1960s, when he was leading a band called The Lullaby Landers, which included Abbey Cindi, Zacharia Hlaletwa, Neville Ncube and Boy Seroka, with Tabane on guitar and vocals. The band experimented with ways to expand the vocal-harmonies style of the time. They won the Dorkay House Talent Contest in 1961.
They soon parted ways but were replaced with The Jazz Profounds, a classic jazz quartet who began to fuse jazz with the traditional African sounds that began to edge towards what later became classic Malombo sounds.
Led by Tabane on guitar and vocals, the Profounds featured Churchill Jolobe on the Western musical drum set, Gideon Nxumalo on marimba and piano, and Dannyboy Sibanyoni on bass guitar.
Jolobe left the group, leaving Tabane to lead the remaining trio, who triumphed in the 1963 Union Artists Talent Search. That same year they recorded The Indigenous Afro-Sounds of Philip Tabane. The maestro finally had a record to his name.
Greater glory was to come with the historic 1964 Castle Lager
Jazz and Variety Show at Orlando Stadium. The gig had Tabane leading a fresh trio, with his old flutist from the Lullaby Landers, Cindi, and a new energetic drummer, Julian Bahula.
They became known as Malombo Jazzmen, birthing a new musical phenomenon, Malombo music, a decidedly modern musical form proudly rooted in ancient local traditions.
Apart from Bahula’s buck-hide African drums and an assortment of traditional instruments, they were armed only with Tabane’s guitar and Cindi’s flute. Malombo Jazzmen went up against the popular big band jazz outfits of the era and won first prize. The competition got them top billing, national visibility and critical acclaim.
In the mid-’60s, the message of Malombo was striking a proud chord in a South Africa awakening to the stirrings of Black Consciousness. Its rise coincided with the arrests and life sentences of the Rivonia triallists, which decimated organised opposition to an emboldened apartheid regime. In such a turbulent time, this music was pivotal and consequential.
It would have resonated with pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who was then still known as Dollar Brand. In 1968, Ibrahim was just returning home to South Africa from his self-imposed exile in the US. He was leading a charge for the “Africanisation” of South African music through a series of newspaper columns called “The World of Dollar” that he wrote for the Cape Herald. Ibrahim was warning his peers against being “too interested in merely imitating Americans and Europeans”. He would match Malombo’s sterling work with his own exploration of Cape heritage, like the ghoema, in his music.
In subsequent years, the spirit of Malombo has inspired the creation of bands such as Batsumi, Malopoets, Sakhile and many others. Around 1972, a new generation of creatives based in GaRankuwa, including Lefifi Tladi, Rantobeng Mokou, Gilbert Mabale and Laurence Moloisi, launched a new incarnation called Malombo Jazz Messengers, later renamed Dashiki.
This morphing and mutation of the idiom was built into the story of the Malombo legends. The original trio known as Malombo Jazzmen split into two strands. Bahula and Cindi recruited guitarist Lucky Ranku and became known as Malombo Jazz Makers, leaving Tabane and his new drummer Mabi Thobejane with the old name.
Bahula would later go into exile, becoming known as Jabula. Tabane and Thobejane would be known simply as Malombo. They are the ones who took Malombo to the US.
The stars aligned in the US
Darius Brubeck, the US pianist and former head of the school of music at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and his wife, Cathy, were there when those stars aligned.
In 1976, Malombo were chosen as the opening act for the New Brubeck Quartet, with the now late legendary pianist Dave Brubeck and his sons, Darius, Chris and Dan. The band also featured Victor Ntoni.
Dave and Tabane established a special bond, says Darius. They exchanged gifts and Dave wore the woven wristband Tabane gave him until the end of his life.
In 1977, Cathy Brubeck, working with Peter Davidson, who was managing Malombo, organised various US performances for Malombo, which featured a 19-year-old Bheki Mseleku, then still climbing towards his own greatness.
Cathy proudly introduced Malombo on stage at Carnegie Hall as part of that year’s Newport Jazz Festival, New York, and arranged for them to appear during half-time at an exhibition football match between the original New York Cosmos and Benfica.
Darius recalls: “Eusébio [revered as the first great African footballer] was there. Pelé was there and Jomo Sono, a recent South African addition to the New York team, was there. Cosmos was owned and promoted by the Warner Music Corporation, whose label Warner/Elektra/Atlantic had just released Malombo’s Pele Pele . Herbie Mann, the famous American jazz flautist, then a producer for WEA, was also there and joined the trio.
“Tabane and Thobejane had a dramatic impact, especially when they strode across the field in tribal regalia and entered the members’ enclosure with Thobejane presenting himself as a ‘chief’ and ambassador. Tabane just stayed cool and went with the flow.”
Cathy and Darius remember an incident in Brooklyn, New York, when “Tabane and Thobejane had found someone in Manhattan to sell them a live chicken which they slaughtered, plucked and braaied in the backyard to the astonishment of the very urban neighbours. The incident became a metaphor for what they communicated in performance; something mysterious, unique and challenging.”
Malombo took on this kind of energy in performance too.
“At the Environ, a music loft venue on lower Broadway in New York’s bohemian SoHo district, audiences were amazed by Tabane’s spectacular, simultaneous guitar and multi-flute playing,” says Darius. “He matched Thobejane’s dramatic, extrovert drumming and the duo were, as we all recognised and respected, one of a kind. With Mseleku on board, the American concerts were a special and modern fusion of jazz with Malombo music.”
They played at Troubadour in Los Angeles, becoming the first act to appear there without a US record release. Later, Malombo took on audiences at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
Honoured for his genius
In 1998, the University of Venda conferred an honorary doctorate on Tabane. That same year, the South African Music Awards honoured him with a lifetime achievement award for his outstanding contribution to music.
This increased visibility at home awakened a new generation of South African music lovers and music makers to his genius. The Joburg-based twin-brother DJ outfit Revolution remixed his song, VhaVenda, into a house music hit, and the popular SABC soapie Muvhango made his composition of the same name its theme song.
For a moment, it seemed as if Tabane was sitting on top on of the world. Then, in 2006, his wife, Thuli, died. Those close to him say he was never the same. He aged rapidly. His body began to fail him. He receded from public life. Now he is dead. Long live Malombo.
He played his Gibson guitar with his mouth, laid it on the floor and played it with his shoes as the audience roared with fascination