The sixth South African Association of Jazz Educators (SAJE) Conference kicked off on November 28, 2002 in Pretoria, South Africa with the theme of “Jazz Education in Developing Countries” and the support of such sponsors as the French Institute of South Africa, the U.S. Embassy Pretoria, the South African Music Rights Organization, the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music at the University of Natal, and the Technikon Pretoria, where the Conference was held through December 1. It was my privilege to observe and learn from the event firsthand as an invited guest artist from beyond the region’s borders, as did John Fedchock (trombone, New York), Bobby Shew (trumpet, Los Angeles), Francois Jeanneau (soprano sax, Conservatoire Nationale de Paris, France), and Ron McCurdy (trumpet, Past IAJE President, University of Southern California).

My own goals may have differed from those of many of the approximately 150 attendees, as I wished to experience not only the regional jazz musicians but also those who play the indigenous music of the area; and I wanted to learn more about the current nature of jazz education in South Africa. I hoped that I would hear how South Africans express jazz through improvisatory performances of regional folk and popular tunes, and my best opportunities came via the concerts of the small-group youth bands that shared their music during various receptions and lunches.

The Technikon Pretoria Student Band, led by Jabu Magubane, presented a jazz program largely of grooves derived from local music and did so at a restrained volume; some of the other small ensembles, such as the Eclipse Ensemble (Dobsonville College) and the Mmabatha Foundation Band projected their music forth much more loudly. As I continued to listen to such quality groups as the Fuba School of Music Jazz Ensemble, I realized that the student solos were almost exclusively diatonic, plus the occasional blue note: there was little chromatic alteration or extension within solos.

Since my own presentation during the Conference was to embrace chromaticism, I discussed this aspect with a number of educators present who confirmed that the diatonic path was the one most traveled—whether due to the surrounding songs of the local townships, the encouragement of local elders, or to the relative fear of chromatic experimentation shared by young improvisors in any country. This safer point of improvised entry is not typical of the South African university-level groups, however—meaning either that the idiom’s vocabulary expands by that age or that the diatonic folk influence is rather a contemporary wave for the youth of South Africa.

The strong interest in and response to South African popular song in jazz format was in evidence by the enthusiastic audience response to such works when presented from the stage. For example, Darius Brubeck (piano), Mike Rossi (sax), Marc Duby (bass), and Lulu Gontsana (drums) offered Mamazala, a slower tune by Zim Ngqawana (a former University of Natal at Durban student and currently a visiting artist at the University of Tennessee) evocative to my ears of gospel-influenced songs (and of the early Keith Jarrett/Jan Garbarek collaborations); and the attending crowd began singing along, frequently bursting into shouts and applause reminiscent of a church revival or a New Orleans bar. That same night the University of Cape Town/Technikon Pretoria Combined Big Band presented director Mike Campbell’s arrangement of the kwela-beat, Abdullah Ibrahim composition Nelson Mandela; and at times the crowd could barely contain itself. These reactions far outstripped the audience’s response to most “straight-ahead” or “standard tune” renditions at the Conference.

And that audience was the largest in student population since the Conference’s founding. In many cases, they and their instructors could try out in performance on site the concepts to which they had just been introduced just an hour or so earlier. As I lunched with Ron McCurdy, I could hear trombonist Gareth Walwyn, an instructor at the Diocesan School for Girls (Grahamstown), soloing with the Funda Unit 6 Jazz Ensemble using the chromatic inflections he had explored in my workshop the preceding hour.

South Africa’s appetite for jazz has somehow eclipsed that of its neighboring countries and is not new in coming. Dinga Sikwebu, a machinist’s union worker and one of the few jazz enthusiasts at the Conference, described how he owned CDs originally recorded in the 1950s of South Africans playing bebop. “During the apartheid [segregation] era, the government emphasized that each nation [state] should be listening exclusively to music expressed of its own citizens, supposedly in order to raise pride in one’s local background. Jazz was not of any one local nation’s creation; so listening to and performing jazz was rather a subversive activity.” South Africa was liberated from its national policy of apartheid less than a decade ago. There was a palpable excitement among the citizens I met in November, black and white alike, who were optimistic about the future of their “new” country—perhaps more optimistic than U.S. citizens had been in the late 1800s after the American Civil War—and this optimism comes out in the music.

Sikwebu stressed the need for South African jazz institutions to offer jazz appreciation lectures and workshops for the public: “The interest from the public is there: many people want to learn more about understanding jazz.”

If this sounds familiar in your own neighborhood, so will Michael Skipper’s cautions as the Head of Music at the Diocesan School for Girls and at St. Andrew’s College. In his lecture he pointed out the need for institutions of learning to find a way to deal with the forces of popular music in a positive manner along with the existing streams of jazz and classical study. “Are we simply going to ignore Contemporary Popular Music and hope it goes away? Are we going to continue to concentrate on the minority that demonstrates an interest in Art Music and ignore the others? Both these responses would seem to be a recipe to ensure extinction. To ensure the survival of our subject and its relevancy in the eyes (and ears) of teenagers, we must make the effort to find out what Contemporary Popular Music has to offer and incorporate it in our subject.” He also noted that with the post-apartheid emphasis on cultural arts instruction in the broadest sense, there has actually been a perceived decrease in emphasis on teaching music as the exclusive focus of an instructor’s teaching assignment. “As a young colleague of mine remarked the other day, ‘They don’t want Music teachers; they want Art and Culture teachers!’” In addition to Skipper’s presentation, papers were offered at the Conference by Profs. Mike Rossi and Mike Campbell (University of Cape Town), David Lilley and Marc Duby (Technikon Pretoria), Darius Brubeck and Jeff Robinson (University of Natal, Durban), Carol Martin (TIDES Trust, Cape Town), and others.

The balance of indigenous and jazz music influences was apparent in the multiple streams of music presented at the SAJE Conference. Trumpeter Bruce Cassidy performed on EWI (electronic wind instrument) with longtime collaborator Pops Mohamed, who elicited music from an array of African instruments including the mbira and various hand percussion. Mohamed’s later workshop included his plea that all African students pursuing a degree on a traditional Western instrument (such as violin or piano) also study at least one indigenous African instrument “so that our culture and musical history may be not only preserved but also present so as to be fused with other genres of music, such as jazz.”

In another fusing, the “Indo Jazz Crossover” offered saxophonist Chats Devroop (University of Pretoria) with a tabla player, a sarod player, a sitar player (one doubling on oud), a bassist, and a vocalist in a program of inspired improvisation surrounded by the stirring, repeated “vamps” of the ensemble. In an earlier conversation, Devroop had expressed to me his ongoing gratitude—as had others such as Darius Brubeck—to Jamey Aebersold, Chuck Sher, David Mash, Dennis Tini, and Chris Collins for their repeated efforts to supply South Africans with much-needed jazz-educational resources, as the international exchange rate is very unfavorable for South African purchases of materials sold in the U.S.: such items cost nearly ten times as much in South Africa. A number of Conference-attending students, including young trombonist Jimson Rakola, politely asked me what materials I’d brought that I could leave with them.

Though he has played trombone for only a few years, Rakola listens to J.J. Johnson recordings and is hungry for more information. “I have a trumpet teacher as my teacher. He is very good, but some things I might learn more directly from a trombone teacher—such as alternate positions, which I had not heard of before John Fedchock’s workshop here at SAJE.” See the accompanying sidebar for more information as to how you can assist South African jazz education.

Bebop jazz was also in full bloom at the Conference, and I found a highlight of the event to be the opportunity to hear live several pianists who must represent the most lyrical among the South African resident cadre: Darius Brubeck (Director of the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music at the University of Natal at Durban), Melvin Peters (freelancer, Durban), Avzal Ismail (Technikon Pretoria), and Andrew Lilley (University of Cape Town). They, along with guitarist and local legend Johnny Fourie, bassists and instructors Marc Duby (Head of Music, Technikon Pretoria), Mike Campbell (University of Cape Town), plus drummer Lulu Gontsana (“house drummer for South Africa,” as described by Brubeck) combined in various ways to create high-level rhythm sections throughout the Conference. It is easy to hear why Gontsana’s drumming is so revered by South Africans, and we repeatedly heard performances by a young man following in his footsteps: Bucco Xaba, a student at the Technikon, whose contributions to small and large jazz groups during the Conference were superb.

In some ways, the SAJE Conference brought to my mind what American jazz education may have been in the late 1960s or so, with a half-dozen university jazz programs, high interest from many circles, and the need to increase networking and resources among those interested. Nearly thirty institutions of some sort were represented at the SAJE gathering, a tribute to the long hours of work planning and organizing the Conference invested by David Lilley (SAJE Secretary, a Lecturer at the Technikon, and a trumpeter who fronted his own small group during the weekend) and Evelyn Levitz (also at the Technikon), with the additional assistance of others including Darius and Cathy Brubeck, plus Darius’ assistant at Natal, Glynis Malcolm-Smith, and the administrative oversight of Technikon Pretoria staff Marc Duby (Head of Music), Eric Dinkelmann (Dean of Arts), Hugo Durrheim (Vice-Rector), Reggie Ngcobo (Vice-Chancellor and Rector), and the Technikon Foundation. Through their work they were able to bring together not only musicians from far corners of South Africa but also the international guests, perhaps celebrated best when trumpeter Bobby Shew and trombonist John Fedchock presented with a local rhythm section their closing-night sets at the Technikon site.

My experiences with South African indigenous cultural history and music had actually begun earlier in my trip, as I had spent time at the Makweti Lodge in the Welgevonden Game Reserve absorbing the sights and sounds of birds and animals that surely inspired such instruments as the cuica drum. My exposure continued the day after the Conference with a trip to the Lesedi Cultural Village outside of Pretoria, where representatives of the Zulu, Basotho, Xhosa, and Pedi tribes live in proximity so that visitors such as my wife and I can visit and learn of their housing, foods, history, and music. [Click here for pictures from Lesedi.] There I was able to purchase a number of African musical instruments of higher quality and lower cost than I could find in the U.S.

At Lesedi we were treated not only to a wonderful display of ritual music and dancing by the tribe members but also to the delight of some fifty school children, perhaps age ten, dancing happily to the popular music outside and indigenous music inside of the village. It was clear to me that in South Africa, more so than even in my native New Orleans, children feel free to experience and respond to a wealth of musical melodies and rhythms that can inspire a future of not only listening to music but creating it. With the continued efforts of the SAJE, the youth of South Africa will have ever-expanding opportunities to hear and create jazz in their own way.

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