JAZZ – inspired by the works of US greats, and mixed with smatterings of local sounds such as mbaqanga and ghoema – was a genre that tugged at the heartstrings of the majority of South Africa’s music lovers during the 1930s and '40s.
In the relative calm before the apartheid storm, “big bands”, with suave, tuxedo-clad front-men such as Peter Rezant of the Merry Blackbirds, were all the rage.
For this genre and others, Johannesburg was the place to be, with dilapidated Dorkay House in Eloff Street being the gathering place for some of the country’s top musicians.
A veritable who’s who of the music world, including Dollar Brand (later to become Abdullah Ibrahim), Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Miriam Makeba and Kippie Moeketsi came in regularly to jam, share ideas or simply chat.
But it was to multiracial Sophiatown, on the West Rand, where the fashionable and, for that matter, the tsotsis flocked.
In shebeens such as Back o' the Moon, the House on Telegraph Hill and Aunty Babe’s, customers could listen and jive to the best of new American sounds, or to the live acts of top local musicians.
Life was always difficult for black musicians in this period, but it became infinitely more precarious for them after the National Party came into power in 1948 and began implementing its policies.
In an interview with French journalist Gerard Rouy, for the magazine Jazz Music 239, Louis Moholo, drummer for the Blue Notes, said: “In South Africa, it was impossible to survive making music.
"Music was considered as less than nothing. If you didn’t have a job as a manual worker or servant and you said you played the drums, they would put you in prison and send you to work in the potato fields.”
In many ways, conditions were even worse in the Western Cape.
Here, a white union, the Cape Musicians Association, worked tirelessly – and spitefully – to stop black musicians from being employed for well-paid gigs.
The results of the association’s efforts were often bizarre. On one occasion, police marched into a “coloureds-only” venue where top jazz pianist Tony Schilder was being backed by a white drummer. With the arrogance so typical of the 1960s, they informed Schilder that in terms of the Separate Amenities Act, a white musician could not share the stage with him.
But, like all bad laws, there was a loophole in the act to cause a sufficient amount of embarrassment for the guardians of apartheid – if the drummer sat on the dance floor with his drums and played, he would not be breaking the law. So, that’s what he did.
One another occasion, saxophonist Winston Mankunku Ngozi was “made legal” at the Weizmman Hall in Sea Point, by being kept apart from white members of the group he was playing with – by a curtain.
As with Schilder, the blame was put on the Separate Amenities Act. Also in Sea Point, at the Waldorf Hotel, singer Donald Tshomela had to pretend to be a waiter to make his presence legal.
Dennis-Constant Martin, in his book Sounding the Cape Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa, mentioned that a few “light-skinned coloured musicians managed to pass for white”, mentioning pianist Henry February and bassist Brian Eggleston as examples.
“On occasions, pianist Richard Schilder was presented as a recent immigrant from Hungary,” Martin wrote.
Another music writer, Colin Miller, wrote that guitarist Cliffie Moses had confided to him that his band, the Four Sounds, had played for 10 years at a venue called the Three Cellars without once being allowed to eat in the restaurant.
According to Rashid Lombard, the musicologist who made the Cape Town International Jazz Festival a reality, the experiences of Moses, Schilder and others were the tip of the iceberg. “It happened all the time,” he said.
The tragedy for music lovers was the extent to which they were denied opportunities to hear some of the best musicians playing together – simply because they were not of the same race group.
The result was that some of the best jazz sessions in Cape Town during the high noon of apartheid took place in private homes, rather than in clubs and concert halls.
Martin said: “Cliffie Moses’s home in Mowbray, Kenny Jeptha’s garage in Kensington and numerous other private dwellings became a world apart for musicians of different colours to meet and express themselves through music.”
As the National Party began refining apartheid, skin colour was also used to stifle music on the airwaves. According to the gospel of apartheid, programmes had to be organised on the basis of language groups. Thus, the only station on which Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse’s music could be enjoyed was Radio Bantu.
Interestingly, Radio Bantu refused to play anything by Jaluka, who were fronted by a “white Zulu” named Johnny Clegg. The music of Juluka, said the bosses of the station, was an insult to the Zulu culture.
So what was there for musicians to do?
Exile was an option – and many did choose it, and were heavily criticised in some quarters for leaving. But the critics, for most part, were unaware of the pain that leaving inflicted on those who chose exile.
Abdullah Ibrahim, who left after the Soweto unrest of 1976 after initially vowing to stay in South Africa and fight apartheid through his music, said “dreaming” was especially heartbreaking for him – because he always “dreamt of home”.
But, there were those who stayed and grew the music of the people in various, innovative ways.
In this respect, one of the most enduring and successful live bands from the 1960s to the '80s was Pacific Express.
The group started off playing decent covers of American songs, but with time – especially after the arrival of Chris Schilder, later to become one of the country’s most prolific songwriters – they started gravitating towards jazz fusion.
One of their biggest hits though was a Schilder-penned ballad, Give a Little Love, sung by Zayne Adams.
Looking back, Pacific Express’s great contribution to the music of the Western Cape was the way they were able to serve as a “conveyor belt” for some of the province’s and, ultimately, the country’s greatest musicians.
Jonathan Butler, Robbie Jansen, Tony Cedras, Zayne Adams, Paul Abrahams and Basil “Manenberg” Coetzee were just three of the wonderfully talented musicians who cut their teeth in Pacific Express.
In the 1980s, during the era of the UDF, Abrahams, Coetzee and Jansen took up the mantle of “Struggle Musicians” in numerous goembas organised to raise funds for anti-apartheid activities and funerals.
Jansen was influenced by Coetzee and Abrahams to move into the Struggle music arena – and, especially after Coetzee’s untimely death from cancer in March 1988, worked energetically to carry the message of resistance to communities on the Cape Flats.
In an interview in 2007, Jansen said: “The people here needed us to educate them to tell them the reason why we had to change the system.
One of Jansen’s most famous songs, described by cultural activist Steve Gordon as “perhaps his finest ode to freedom", was How I’d Love to be Free(in my own country).
“Are you here? Are you there? Freedom, where have you been hiding yourself? I’ve been looking all over.
“Are you real? Do you just exist in the imagination of my song?"