Who Does South African Jazz Really Serve?

It’s been a challenging few months for musician and composer Zwide Ndwandwe. Earlier this year, news broke that he was no longer part of Kujenga, the band he co-founded and helped lead into the ranks of South African jazz royalty since its 2019 debut. Both sides issued statements, each claiming to have been wronged in one way or another. That is mostly behind him now, and he has turned his focus to his solo project, Zwide Serves Bass. 

Four new tracks are available on streaming platforms, with the latest dropping last Friday. Titled “nomen nudum ii,” it sets a recording of a 1978 lecture Archie Shepp gave at Florida State University over an intimate bed of Ndwandwe’s driving bass lines, guarded by intricate drum work and sharp, piercing horns that flatter the soul. The Cape Town-based musician spent a week in Johannesburg, organizing listening sessions, live performances, and intimate discussions with comrades about the music we call jazz.

One of those gatherings, held in Melville before a handful of mutual friends and lovers of live music, saw Zwide Serves Bass dig into what exactly constitutes South African jazz alongside Motheo Mofokeng of the Afro-pessimism Azania blog. It was an illuminating discussion that touched on the finer, unspoken aspects of the music: how it has been captured by corporate interests and, as a result, defanged, stripped of its potency where the freedom and liberation of oppressed people at home and elsewhere are concerned; and how the very notion of a “South African jazz” is inherently anti-Black, given that the construct that is South Africa was planned and implemented as an anti-poor, anti-Black establishment, and is still run as one.

On “nomen nudum ii,” Shepp notes the irony of “the Black race” having created and shaped music around the world while “many of its people remain aloof or totally ignorant to its many facets and dimensions.” Like other influential figures of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, Shepp saw jazz as an extension of Black classical music and a profound tool for political liberation. What Zwide Serves Bass and Mofokeng set out to do, and do successfully, is lay bare the scale of this defanging, and begin to exorcise it, by offering historical accounts and proffering contemporary anecdotes.

“The aim of South Africa has been to uplift or support a political economy that [is based on] an anti-Black logic, and I basically want to make the argument that jazz itself, as an institution that starts through white people claiming it the way they claimed our bodies, ends up becoming something that serves the interests of an anti-Black unconscious,” the musician argues.

The roots of the music we know as South African jazz are manifold: the dock workers who shared records with locals on the Cape Town shore at the dawn of the 20th century; the missionaries who taught Western harmony to African children; the rise of marabi, a music built on repetitive, hypnotic, cyclical chord progressions that combined traditional African call-and-response melodies and rhythms with American jazz, blues, ragtime, stride piano, and Christian spirituals; and, later, the emergence of the big bands.

“Through that, there’s this project to assert an identity of Blackness that is much more respectable than what the idea of Black music or Blackness was at the time, which was being fueled through the [South African Broadcasting Corporation’s] Bantustan project,” the musician continues. “They’re doing it particularly because the Black migrant workers are coming to cities like Joburg, and they’re getting more urbanized. They want them to understand what home or Blackness is through this apartheid project. South African jazz ends up being prompted as a response to the racist caricatures and perceptions of Black music as simple, straightforward, not advanced, not sophisticated. The Black musicians of South Africa look to jazz to assert this argument that ‘we can play sophisticated music as well.’”

Ndwandwe sees something telling in this premise of a more advanced, superior music. “What it signals is that white validation becomes important to our understanding and our idea of jazz music, because essentially, in order for us to push back against this derogatory idea of Blackness, we have to show that we can also be kind of white,” he says.

Threads of this conversation also run through the work of Tumi Mogorosi and Nduduzo Makhathini. With his 2022 album Group Theory: Black Music, Mogorosi set out to decenter the composer, affirming that music is a collective effort, a shared activity. In Voicenotes, our exploration of South Africa’s improvised music scene, Mogorosi says: “There’s no way to get Black music without group theory. And group theory is this thing where there’s no center; things come from different points. For me, that’s always been the case about whatever we wanna call the un-owning of ideas would be developed within that group orientation. Of course there’s guidelines, but I think all those inputs destabilize the center of the composer. That’s why you have standards that get reinterpreted from the 1920s to 2020. It’s not really about the composer, but about the music itself. There’s no way to get Black music outside of the group. There’s no composer for Black music.”

Makhathini enters the conversation through his academic work. His doctoral dissertation, Breaking into Sound: Dis/Locating Ntu Cosmology and Improvisation in South African Jazz (Stellenbosch University, 2023), treats cosmology as the frame that gives the music its meaning, and critiques earlier writing on South African jazz for disregarding the music’s spiritual nature. Along the way, he contends with the rigid strictures of an academy that lacked the language to understand and eloquently interrogate, let alone anticipate, the divination and ritual practice his work deals with.

Importantly, Makhathini strives to situate South African jazz on its own terms. “With the notion of ‘jazz-iness,’ I suggest that some relationships with the sonic, that is now understood as (South African) jazz, have [much] older alliances with the musical sensibilities that were practiced in African music predating the slave trade,” he writes. “These include notions of improvisation, call-and-response, repetition strategies, syncopation and polyrhythms (among others) that would later be identified as some of the characteristics of jazz in the United States.”

Kabelo Mokhatla, who has played drums in Makhathini’s trio, including on NPR’s Tiny Desk, wrapped up a South African tour in July with one date in Cape Town and two in Johannesburg, the last of them at Hugh’s, a jazz club that opened in Braamfontein in January. At the Open Wine bar in Cape Town, he had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand, obliging his every request and letting him set the room's temperature. Joining him on the bandstand were Kertu Aer on bass, Brathew van Schalkwyk on piano, and Justin Bellairs on saxophone. Tamzyn sat in on trombone for a few songs, Asemahle sang on others, and Khaya Mthembu Salter joined on guitar. Each of these musicians is vital to the music, and a critical component of a functioning scene.

The Hugh’s gig carried particular sentimental weight. It was the Hugh Masekela Heritage Scholarship, established in the late trumpeter’s honor, that took Mokhatla to New York’s Manhattan School of Music and, in many ways, changed his life — and the foundation behind that scholarship is a partner in the club. 

“For me, being an artist is not only about making music. It is about paying attention to life, asking questions, and finding ways to communicate things that sometimes can’t be said directly. Drums gave me that language; they allowed me to express things I didn’t always have the words for. I also think being an artist comes with a great responsibility,” he reflects from New York, where he’s based.

The Tembisa-born drummer echoes Mogorosi’s idea of the group: “Music became a way for me to imagine a different life, and to reconnect with people. So I don’t want my art to exist only for myself. I want it to create a space for people to feel, to reflect, to heal, and hopefully see something possible for themselves.”

As September drew to an end, jazz lovers gathered in their numbers at the Sandton Convention Center to attend the two-day Joy of Jazz festival, supported by one of the biggest banks on the African continent, Standard Bank. While teething problems persisted, it was still great to see the musicians get love and support for their art. But it’s also worth asking when South African Jazz’s biggest stages are festivals and award circuits underwritten by banks, telecoms, and liquor brands. Its imagery sells premium spirits and private banking packages, while its sound has become shorthand for aspiration — the soundtrack for having arrived. This is the same music that was once policed in shebeens and slumyards of Sophiatown, Alexandra, District Six, and beyond, now being sold back to the Black middle class as a marker of taste.

And while sponsorship isn't inherently corrupting — musicians have to eat — when the institutions that fund, program, and reward the music also profit from the country's inequality, the music's capacity to call out injustice becomes dumbed down. The protest has been rebranded as heritage, and everyone is lapping it up. 

Watch our new short film “Voicenotes: Tales From the South African Jazz Alter-Ground”