‘Personally, I don’t think I was particularly influenced musically. They had a different way of doing things because they were very fortunate to have that kind of folk culture to draw back on. I don’t have it – there isn’t an English folk tradition, or if there is, you’d have to work hard to find it, because any folk culture in England has been buried! The South African guys did have very strong musical traditions to draw upon, so when they thought of their homeland it was pretty obvious what they were going to do and take it in their own direction.
‘I wanted to be free of copying American jazz and find my own experience, and although they showed how that didn’t need to be American, it was going to be modern and European, that’s my culture, that’s what I’ve got. It was about acknowledging these different influences – I was acknowledging the tremendous influence of people like Ellington – but at the same time it was a different stream. Although things might have overlapped, stylistically, somewhat [with Chris], I was on a different path by then. It wasn’t a hard and fixed thing, it was always a pretty fluid situation.’
Mike has a theory as to why it took so long for the Blue Notes’ South African-ness to come out in their playing, a delay that worked out in the music’s favour. By his own admission, there was a degree of disconnect between how the South Africans viewed their lot, and what sympathetic Londoners believed to be the case:
‘I’ve always felt there was a sea change in Chris and his musicians that happened after they’d been in London for a year or so, because it may have been at that point they all began to feel very homesick. They were very, very popular, but I think, and I was never able to discuss it with anybody, they simply missed home. I remember sitting in a car with Louis one day, driving to a gig somewhere, and he started saying how they loved their country. Which was a shock to me, as I assumed, being naive or whatever, that they couldn’t wait to get away from South Africa, with its ghastly, terrible regime and everything, but they absolutely loved the country… the bush, getting out in it and everything.
‘When Mongezi died [in London in 1975, of pneumonia], the most tragic thing was he died completely alone. Nobody was there. Somebody told me that would never have happened in South Africa, everybody knew where everybody was and there was a huge community spirit, and there isn’t one in English life. Really, there isn’t one. It’s nobody’s fault, the English are just more divided somehow, I think it’s a great pity. They missed that, they missed the countryside and the community thing, and in a way, I suppose, the Brotherhood was an answer to that need. Apart from Louis, who’s had innumerable heart problems, they all died very young. Much too young.
‘I just wonder if it was that that brought them around to the music they really wanted to play, because they came into London very much on the hard bop sort of thing, and the sort of South African element, the township element, only asserted itself after a while in the Brotherhood. Of course combining that music with the free improvisation they’d got into was an incredibly potent thing. It was a wild band – twenty people or something, all kinds of characters, but the nucleus was the Blue Notes.’
Mike’s disclosure that, with the very best intentions, he and others got it wrong about the musicians’ feelings toward South Africa, is not unlike the Danish reaction to the Blue Notes. His making it here is testament to his earlier statement about the honesty of the jazz world, and to its generosity, inasmuch as any misconceptions didn’t hold the South Africans back. Louis has a far more straightforward explanation as to why so much time passed before the Blue Notes began to explore their African roots:
‘It was the time was right, because there were big bands like Osibisa and the black thing was happening, with the black sound, and you couldn’t escape that. Also, we were busy at the time with different bands, where you couldn’t just go back home [musically] because the music was so beautiful, and we wanted to voice it, but the quartet and the quintet weren’t big enough. We wanted a trombone in there, to kick it off with, like that, just to play some home things and to make them proper as well. We were like perfectionists and we wanted to kick arse. So we wanted a baritone player and we wanted another alto player and in the end we wanted another one and another one … [laughs] So we had Elton Dean in there and Mike Osborne and Dudu … can you imagine? And Evan Parker and John Surman, Alan Skidmore …
‘To make the African sounds and to make them modern, we had to have a big band. We used free music players, and we would use a tuba which wasn’t popular in South Africa, but because this was a modern sound we could use that. The Brotherhood was something else, man, and I’m really proud to be part of it.’
The ‘Brotherhood’ he and Mike are talking about is the Brotherhood Of Breath, the big band that happened when the music for which Chris and the other Blue Notes had been striving during those Old Place lock-ins hit critical mass. A perfectly balanced blend of free jazz invention and township swagger, it took jazz into the rock world, and made a lasting impression on the mainstream.
BROTHERHOOD OF BREATH MADE THEIR DEBUT at the Notre Dame Theatre in Leicester Square (now the Leicester Square Theatre), on 27 June 1970. The core of the band was South Africans Chris, Dudu, Louis and Mongezi, with Harry Miller on double bass; other players included Harry Beckett, Evan Parker and Mike Osborne. Among other South African artists on the bill were jazz singer Peggy Phango (who also came to London with King Kong and stayed) and poet Cosmo Pieterse. The gig was well promoted, as the Arts Council had chipped in some cash – having studiously ignored jazz, the organisation now acknowledged jazz composers such as Chris and Mike – and the band played to an almost capacity crowd, with proceeds going to help developing black musicians in South Africa. It was one of the biggest jazz events in the capital for years and, according to those who were there, it was ‘Jazz, Jim, but not as we know it.’
Chris McGregor’s all-new compositions showcased the ideas that had been germinating, and revealed a jazz that connected instantly to its audience on a celebratory rather than purely contemplative level. Yet it didn’t compromise on the Cecil Taylor-ish musical adventures – Chris always maintained the piano was merely a percussion instrument that could carry a melody. That was a neat trick to pull off, leaving people spiritually uplifted and intellectually stimulated, but made a great deal easier by the South African heartbeat at the centre of it all – jazz that should be taken seriously, but that you could dance to as well. Mike explains:
‘After he schooled himself in modern jazz, he was drawn towards finding something that was much more universal and simple – or superficially simple. Certainly in the material he wrote there was always a tune, catchy rhythms and things like that. He seemed to have a single unifying vision that would embrace all kinds of things, but to play it he got lots of free improvisers, so you got both this rooted music, but you also got this wild, anarchic improvising going on at the same time.
‘I suppose that one is always looking for the grand, simple, meaningful format for your music, your art, and a lot of the time it’s hard to find that. It’s complicated, and means playing at different levels so it’s not always possible to come out with just a simple statement. Sometimes that’s not honest if you do that, it’s leaving out things, but every now and then I think you find ways, as if you’re rediscovering yourself and your art form [and you come across] a simple path. In one way, at that time jazz was developing more and more into free improvised music with no rhythm at all, but there were others who were looking for another way, and I think Chris found his with that kind of danceable pulse of Brotherhood Of Breath.’
Music with such clear communication skills meant that the group almost instantly became favourites with the BBC Jazz Club, TV stars in Europe, and one of the hardest-working acts both at home and abroad. With a line-up that gently shifted around the Blue Notes core, they played the jazz circuit, regularly filling Oxford Street’s 100 Club, and topping bills in festivals in France, Scandinavia and Holland.
IN BETWEEN BROTHERHOOD GIGS, the South Africa
ns were at the core of London’s contemporary jazz world as it imposed itself on Europe. As individuals they played in all manner of small groups, particularly with Elton Dean (Louis became a member of Just Us), Keith Tippett and John Surman. Johnny recorded with Don Cherry in France, Dudu guested on a Hugh Masekela album in London, and Johnny and Mongenzi cut tracks with Abdullah Ibrahim in Copenhagen. While this maintained their jazz status, the full group’s easily accessible excitement endeared them to a wider audience. The mainstream media treated them almost like a rock band – albeit an exotic one. The gig they played at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, in August 1973, at a festival organised by Hazel and Jackie Tracey, Stan’s wife, is a good example:
‘The weather was perfect, and it was the third day of a festival we had put on in the garden in the centre. The first concert was Steve Lacy, Steve Potts, John Stevens, Ken Carter, a real improvised thing; second was Albert Nicholas and Sandy Brown [New Orleans style], so this was jazz as going from one end of the music to another; and the final night was the Brotherhood. Because the V&A do concerts and they have a big mailing list – eight thousand or so – this was a big gig, one of the biggest they would have played in London, and because so many of the audience were on the V&A’s list we had people turning up in evening dress. Jackie took one look and said to me ‘Oh no, you’ve got a lot of refunds to do tonight!’ I agreed, but these people stayed and came out and saying “What wonderful music, why don’t we hear more of it?”.’
The Brotherhood’s danceable yet out-of-the-ordinary music slotted into the crossover between this generation of jazzers, determined to break with tradition and progressive rock, and the post-beat group sounds with an emphasis on musical virtuoso, improvisation and format-stretching compositions. In the US, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Grateful Dead were among the first to bring free jazz and rock together. In 1969, Zappa promoted the First Paris Music Festival, which was actually in Belgium, and consisted of five days and nights of music that saw Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, Ten Years After, Yes and Fat Mattress share a bill with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and the Chris McGregor Group. In the UK, at that point, many rock musicians had jazz backgrounds. Direct links were provided by the likes of Soft Machine, King Crimson and Ginger Baker’s Air Force, while drummers like Bill Bruford (Yes, Genesis and King Crimson) and Carl Palmer (Atomic Rooster, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Emerson, Lake & Palmer) cited such influences as Joe Morello, Philly Joe Jones and Art Blakey.
Louis Moholo-Moholo at Ronnie Scott’s Old Place in 1967. Now aged 73, and the sole surviving Blue Note, he still tours and records, but “only the ones I want to do”.
The London underground scene, of clubs like UFO and The Arts Lab, and ‘happenings’ like the ‘14 Hour Technicolour Dream’, welcomed the avant-garde. Paul McCartney famously attended an AMM concert at the Royal College of Art (his musical contribution involved tapping a coin on a radiator), and Blue Notes Johnny, Mongezi, Louis and Chris performed at the Natural Music International Avante Garde Concert Workshop in Cambridge in 1969, as did Yoko Ono with John Stevens and Trevor Watts of the SME (John Lennon was a late addition to the bill) and John McLaughlin.
Brotherhood Of Breath’s entry into the rock world was all but assured, and not simply because African sounds were becoming fashionable within the new rock world (see the next chapter). The band’s first album was produced by American-in-London Joe Boyd, one of the founders of the UFO club and producer of Pink Floyd, the Incredible String Band and Eric Clapton. (Boyd also produced the 1968 album Very Urgent by the Chris McGregor Group, who were the Blue Notes plus Ronnie Beer.) The Brotherhood shared a management company with assorted English folk-rockers including Nick Drake, John Martyn, Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny. Two Blue Notes side projects, Spear (Dudu, Mongezi, Louis and Harry Miller) and Tower of Power-ish Assagai (Dudu, Mongezi and Louis along with London Nigerians Fred Coker and Bizo Muggikana) went down very well with the rock crowd. Mongezi worked with Elton Dean, Henry Cow and Robert Wyatt; he guested on Wyatt’s African-jazz-tinged Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard album, one of the highlights of which was a version of the Spear song “Sonia” (from the In The Townships album). Louis and Harry Miller, meantime, were part of Mike’s Earthrise multimedia touring project, while Dudu played with John Martyn, and Chris with Alexis Korner and Nick Drake.
Well known as players, they had a strong following beyond the jazz audience, and while their albums Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath and Brotherhood may not have made them household names, they sold respectably, providing an entry point to new jazz. Much of their music’s broad appeal, especially live and among a post-hippie crowd, lay in the communal atmosphere fostered on the bandstand by Chris’s arrangements and the musicians’ spontaneous interaction. The group really was a brotherhood; those arrangements were so generous to all members of the band that they were free to interact and spur each other on without having to covet every second in the spotlight. A happy, welcoming way of working, it brought the best out of everybody and communicated itself to the audience, bringing them in to the proceedings rather than placing them as disconnected observers. Like a musical village. All that comes through in the Brotherhood’s recordings, and especially their first album, which remains one of the greatest London jazz albums of all time.
This sense of communality, among not only the twelve or so members of the band but also the people who travelled with them, gave rise to another recurring Blue Note/Brotherhood myth – that they drank far too much, in detriment to themselves as musicians and as men. It’s even been linked to their exile in London to conjure up an image of the tortured black jazzmen self-medicating into oblivion, and the group as ill-temperedly falling apart. According to Mike, that wasn’t entirely the case:
‘Everybody drank too much, nobody’s going to deny that, but that was the scene. A lot of the previous generation, just before the modern jazz guys – people like Tubby Hayes – were into a hard drug phase which killed some of them off. On the whole with our sort of generation, and this is a generalisation, it was booze and toke. There was a very strong feeling among the Brotherhood of sharing a joint, and the camaraderie that involved was a very important element of it – it was a huge part of the culture of that scene. There wasn’t anything sleazy about it, it was about sharing, and it should be told as it really was.
‘Of course some did get into drugs. Mike Osborne who was in my band was also in the Brotherhood; he was somebody who was terrifically committed to the sort of jazz life, and he did get into heavy drugs. He went crazy and he died a couple of years ago. That wasn’t the norm. People would be fairly pissed like you always were, and after a gig you’d be excited so that was part of having just played a good set. And if there was a joint going… there was always a lot of smoking going on.’
SADLY, BASIC ECONOMICS had little respect either for this ground-breaking music or its big-hearted musicians. It proved impossible to keep an outfit that size as a permanent working entity in the UK, so the players gigged all over the place with other bands. While creatively this was a win-win for contemporary jazz – the groups concerned benefited from the injections of South African innovation, and the guys themselves kept fresh by playing in different environments – commercially it still didn’t add up. At the start of the 1970s, with jazz in Britain in steep decline, much of the work for the London-based South Africans was on the continent. There, Hazel believes, the music was treated with far more respect:
‘Our big beef was with the media. When I first started Ogun [1974] and when I was doing the Brotherhood, we had people like Richard Williams, Val Wilmer and Max Jones at the Melody Maker writing about jazz, and we used to get immense coverage. I used to fill the 100 Club or bigger venues… hundreds of people used to come to Brotherhood gigs because we were getting the press coverage. Then it got ignored in the rock boom that came along, and the press completely wrote it off, because the major companies were focussed on pop music and
they’ve got the clout to pay and buy space. We got left out.
‘It was different in Europe, the music was never going to be like pop music but that didn’t mean it didn’t have a place. It was frequently on television on the arts programmes – still is – and you’ve got 24-hour jazz stations in France and Germany. Here you were lucky if you got half an hour once a week, and hardly any television. It’s no different now if it is television – they think Jools Holland is a jazz musician! Pffft! It’s unbelievable.
‘In Europe, jazz was always accepted as a valid art form. The art institutes in Europe recognised the old Arts Council and the Contemporary Music Network over here, and were very appreciative of what we were trying to do. So the media covered it, and so your audiences are bigger, and so people would promote it more [put on more/bigger gigs], and they just love it. Chris and his family moved to the south of France in 1973. He said it was for the weather, as London was too cold, but the environment for jazz was much more encouraging.’
In 1975, thanks largely to action taken by Hazel, the Musicians Union passed a motion to give jazz more support with its media profile and promotions. As she admits, however, ‘nothing changed’.
The lack of publicity and promotion may well have contributed to what many saw as the premature end of the jazz/rock coalition. Really, though, the Brotherhood belonged very much to a particular era, which was pretty much over at just the time when ideally they would have been consolidating their impact. Prog rock itself didn’t last, while those bands that did survive moved away from the previous, improvising brothers-in-arms camaraderie, as Mike explains:
‘We were drawn into that sort of area more as a creative thing than a commercial thing. For us, rock music was a kind of musical metropolis, where we used a big band for the first time, and used a bass guitar as well as double bass, and guitar and keyboard as well as normal jazz horns and such things. It was very complex music but, to underpin it, it needed those simple rhythms, and the bass guitar gave it structure. The Brotherhood were part of that, with their township influences used in the same way as my band and others used rock.
Sounds Like London Page 11