North
Sea Jazz Festival Adds Soul To Cape Town
Still facing the vestiges of apartheid,
Cape Town plays host to the biggest jazz festival in South Africa's history,
honoring top musicians and propelling the country's arts into a new direction.
By Greg Winter
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Robbie Jansen, arguably South Africa's most famous saxophonist, can't remember how many times he's been beaten and jailed for playing freedom songs. But this month the same institutions that locked him up and banned his music paid him top dollar to perform at the biggest jazz festival in the country's history.
"I never thought it would happen in my lifetime," said Jansen, after closing his set at Cape Town's first North Sea Jazz festival with "Mannenburg," a song he recorded in 1976 with composer Abdullah Ibrahim that quickly became an anthem in the struggle against apartheid.
Sipping brandy in a VIP tent backstage, a stone's throw from where officials pose under posters declaring "Cape Town, the city that cares for jazz," Jansen summed up what many South African musicians thought about hosting the largest jazz event ever to hit the Southern Hemisphere.
"It feels like justice," he said, breaking into a rare, toothless smile.
Robbie Jansen at South Africa's first North Sea Jazz Festival. Photo by Mimi Chakarova. |
Honoring artists and music once reviled by the old apartheid state, this month's North Sea Jazz festival embodied the new direction of the arts in democratic South Africa. Gone is the allegiance to the pillars of Western civilization, the symphonies, ballets and operas that flourished under the old regime. In their place, the new government has thrown the country's popular arts, from jazz to African dance, to the top of its funding list, retooling its priorities to match those of the black majority for the first time.
Since publishing its 1996 position paper on the arts, the African National Congress, the one-time revolutionary party Nelson Mandela shuttled into power upon capturing the Presidency in 1994, has inserted affirmative action into the realm of aesthetics. Armed with its treatise tying cultural redress to the onset of democracy, the ANC is channeling public money to the artists and art forms apartheid disavowed.
Marching in step with the new party line, the city of Cape Town, whose police force routinely raided Jansen's shows in the 60s and 70s, now boasts of spending $460,000 to import the two-day festival from its home in the Hague, triple the amount it will put towards opera, ballet and orchestras this year. And the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the state-owned media conglomerate that once deemed Jansen's music too insurgent to play on the radio, stepped up as one of the festival's leading sponsors, despite having disbanded its own symphony ensemble three years ago.
To orchestra aficionados and theater devotees, the shift in priorities exemplified by the jazz festival has come at the cost of the country's established performing arts institutions. In recent months, the National Symphony Orchestra, the National Chamber Orchestra and a host of other cultural landmarks have closed or faced extinction, bereft of the bountiful subsidies they could once count on to come their way.
"It's an absolute epidemic," said Corina Lowry, director of the Johannesburg Civic Theater, which lost more than half of its annual $4.9 million in government funding this year. "When they close, it gets overseas headlines for the disintegration of the country, and that's a real worry."
Few of South Africa's new leaders, many of whom haven risen to prominence through the ANC's ranks, show much sympathy for the demise of the country's established performing arts companies. In a nation where 90 percent of the population is black, many officials accuse ballet and opera companies, with their nearly all-white casts, as being anachronistically eurocentric, or simply racist. Slow to integrate and out of step with the majority's tastes, officials disregard their woes over cutbacks as the cries of an over-privileged elite who have enjoyed a funding monopoly for far too long.
"If you are the only one in your family and you are used to getting the whole cake, then you will scream when you have to share," said Cape Town Mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo, before catching the festival's opening acts. "We have only one pot in this country and everyone has to eat from it."
Virtually every public sector, not just the arts, suffers from tight budget constraints and limited resources. Since majority rule took hold in 1994, arts funding has increased, plodding forward slightly faster than inflation, but far too slowly to match the swollen demand for it. While public money under apartheid flowed solely to four, regional arts councils, each with its own symphony, ballet, drama and opera companies, the government now funds hundreds of previously obscure groups, from township music schools to traveling dance troupes.
That is not to say the ANC has altogether abandoned the so-called classics. In fact, some first-time recipients of government funding play and teach classical music exclusively. But, in most cases, they are supported only because they directly benefit and include black or "colored" people.
Take the Soweto Music Conservatoire, for instance. The school started in 1947 in the squat, three room house of Zeph Mothopeng, the former Pan-Africanist Congress president who helped organize the pass law protest that ended in the 1960 Sharpeville massacre — one of apartheid's most infamous atrocities, in which 69 demonstrators died at police hands.
In the midst of their toil against the state, Mothopeng and his golden-voiced wife, Bibi, gave free music lessons to their neighbors in Soweto, a sprawling township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Choirs rang out from their cramped living room, accompanied by their blind son on a borrowed piano. Children studied the viola, cello, whatever could be found. And instruction fell to their son-in-law, Michael Masote, a violinist who taught himself to conduct by donning a janitor's uniform and slipping into the National Symphony Orchestra's performances — off-limits to black people at the time.
Michael and Sheila Masote, Soweto's first family of music. Photo by Mimi Chakarova. |
"The police would stop me and open my violin case to make sure there wasn't a gun inside," said the mild-mannered Masote, laughing. "When they saw it was a violin, they would make me give them an impromptu recital, right there in the middle of the road, to prove that it wasn't stolen."
For 40 years, the lessons continued, giving rise to the now-famous Soweto String Quartet and the first black member of the National Symphony Orchestra, Mothopeng's grandson, Kutlwano Masote. Yet the school was so far from being a priority, the apartheid government never gave it more than $100 a year.
Now, the Conservatoire's strong township ties qualify it for more than $15,000 a year in public money, enabling it to hire teachers, move out of the Mothopeng family home and double its enrollment from 50 to 100 students. Last year, Masote was even invited to conduct the orchestra he used to sneak in to watch.
To make room for newcomers like the Soweto Music Conservatoire, the ANC has cut a third of the regional councils' funding, and instructed them to spin off their in-house symphonies, opera, ballet and drama companies into independent, self-supporting entities. Commercial success, something these groups have never known, has suddenly become compulsory. When they fail to draw audiences to pay their players, they wither or die, eliciting few tears from those who have survived much worse than government neglect.
"Everybody now is on an equal footing," said Nicola Danby, director of Business and Arts South Africa, which is going after the spoils of the national lottery to keep emaciated performing arts companies from fading out altogether. "The playing field has leveled, and that's not necessarily a good thing. We need to recognize our icons, and not just fund groups because they're grassroots or community based."
While resentment towards apartheid certainly lingers, the dethroning of its cultural heritage stems less from hostility than a conviction that the performing arts can help this fledgling democracy find its legs. Bent on safeguarding its Western self-image, the apartheid regime took its performing arts cues from Europe. Today, the government is looking again to the north, but this time for an influx of tourists, and is busily parading the country's indigenous art forms to tempt them down south.
The catch phrase is "cultural tourism," and it has blossomed from a marketing idea to nearly a third of the national arts and culture budget, more than the National Arts Council itself allocates each year. Not only South African jazz, with its uniquely danceable take on the American form, but African drumming, dancing, even basket-weaving, find high places on the government's giving list — charms to attract the culturally curious from abroad.
"People are starting to understand that arts and culture have a role in poverty relief," said Steven Sack, new projects director for the Department of Arts and Culture. "We use the arts to construct the South African brand. The imaging of the country is done with a strong arts and culture dimension."
Cape Town is particularly fond of the approach, packaging itself as a culture capital in order to contend with searing unemployment that has thrust nearly a third of its population below the poverty line. Tourism is seen as the panacea , but the city is still shaking after a pipe bomb ripped through Planet Hollywood in one of the most tourist-trodden parts of town, thought to be a retributive strike on behalf of the many Africans killed by recent bomb blasts at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Worried that crime has begun to drive tourists away, officials only grew more insecure after the city lost a bid to host the 2004 Olympics to Athens.
Landing the North Sea festival thus became a high priority, and South Africa's home-grown musical talent provided the means to get it. After some dogged plugging by arts promoters and officials alike, the city's vibrant jazz scene won over the venerable North Sea festival, and enticed it to venture beyond the Netherlands for the first time in its 25-year history.
"This is an incredible window for Cape Town," said Alderman W.D. Bantom, head of the regional council that oversees the city. "Tourism is becoming the revenue generating economic engine here. I'm kind of like a super salesman selling the Cape."
The upshot of cultural tourism is an infusion of cash into festivals and events that, in the past, either foraged for corporate sponsorship or didn't happen at all. Though much smaller in size than the four-stage, 33-act North Sea event, jazz festivals enjoyed a modest existence in the late 1960s, staged by beer companies eager to tap the urban township dwellers who gave birth to South Africa's upbeat style of jazz.
But, as the activism of the age took root in jazz, the government dusted off old laws barring mass assemblies of black people and choked off the gatherings, fearing a politicized underclass. For many, jazz offered a soundtrack for resistance, a standing earned by its defiant song titles and the condemnations of musicians in exile, like Miriam Makeba, who denounced the segregated state before the United Nations in the early 60s.
In response, the white ruling class tagged jazz as a threat, as well as many black art forms, part and parcel of the revolutionary spirit of the 1970s. The government chased black musicians out of gigs by enforcing pass laws. Carrying banned albums by Miriam Makeba and Abdullah Ibrahim, then named Dollar Brand, could lead to arrest. If found by police in a house search, they could be used to prove dissidence in court. For many musicians, the message was clear: Stay away from jazz, or play it somewhere else.
Jansen chose to stay in the country, eking out a living covering the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, and by playing "long arm," slow dance music for late-night picnics on the outskirts of town. But many other musicians fled the country, primarily to the United States, where they formed a tight community of expatriates who condemned apartheid at every opportunity. Playing at some of New York's top clubs, South African musicians like Hotep Idris Galeta got the chance to perform with American icons his counterparts at home could only hear on the radio.
Still, the specter of apartheid stuck with him. Halfway across the globe, Galeta's movements were closely watched. South African police, posing as reporters, came to his home unexpectedly, encouraging him to return home to play at special engagements.
"I always knew that when I stepped off the plane, it would be straight to Robben Island," said Galeta, another festival headliner, referring to the island prison off the coast of Cape Town where Nelson Mandela spent most of his 27 years in jail.
"I was fortunate enough to leave the country," continued Galeta, stroking his gray beard, speaking with a strong east coast accent that betrays his 30 years in self-imposed exile. "But I was stateless for many years. I wanted to come home."
By the early 1980s, state repression had all but stamped out the township jazz scene, save the occasional band working the odd drinking house — a far cry from the four-stage, stadium-sized compound in downtown Cape Town that housed the North Sea Jazz festival.
As political activists ramped up their efforts throughout the 1980s, hoping to topple the state by becoming as ungovernable as possible, the apartheid regime found it had more immediate concerns than stifling music. Musicians seized the opportunity to crack through the state-led suffocation of jazz, rebuilding the arts environment by playing benefits for the ANC, performing at progressive theaters and rekindling club life. By the time democracy rule took hold, a healthy jazz scene stepped up to greet it, culminating in events like the North Sea festival.
"I definitely consider myself fortunate that at this point, when I am creating and writing, it is at time when people are paying more respect to the music that it jazz," said Moses Molelekwa, a wiry, 27-year-old headliner at the festival, his heady shiny with sweat from the hot spotlights of his fourth television that day.
Molelekwa and the young artists of his generation are the progeny of South Africa's new state-sanctioned tolerance, indeed love, for jazz and other black performing arts. Few may have gone to schools with music programs to spark their careers, but none have been dissuaded, much less assailed, by the state for pursuing them. The supportive atmosphere they enjoy is so vastly different from their predecessors that events like the North Sea festival hardly seem to phase them. To some, they're just one more stop in the tour.
"The North Sea is fine, it's ok," said vocalist Judith Sephuma with a sigh, twirling her keys in her hand as she strolls in for sound check a full hour late. At 26, the youngest of the festival's headliners, Sephuma can't remember a time when the public didn't embrace her. Within months of moving to Cape Town to attend university, she was invited to sing with the city's orchestra. Her picture appeared regularly in the local papers. Soon, she began performing abroad, working with internationally-acclaimed artists, even singing for the President. "I always knew it was going to happen for me," she said, still in jeans with less than 10 minutes before going on stage.
To many old guard artists, such entitlement, once reserved for the protégés of a racist state, marks South Africa's progress in the post-apartheid era. In 1973, well on his way to becoming a star in the dissident world of jazz, Jansen still had to sneak up to the back fence of a hotel no black or colored person could enter to talk with Monk Montgomery, brother of the famous guitarist, Wes Montgomery. After getting the American's attention, Jansen begged him to send sheet music and reeds, luxuries for jazz musicians at the time.
Even today, Jansen carries the toughness of those times. He has a voice of sandpaper and a bald head that looks like it's been rubbed smooth by it. One of his thick black eyebrows is stuck, Spock-like above the other, and his stage face naturally sets in a scowl. His jowls have fallen and, underneath his dashiki, his gut has grown wider than his shoulders. But his fighting spirit is as plain as his mastery over the horn that has made "Mannenburg" Cape Town's unofficial anthem.
"Freedom, where have you been hiding. I've been looking all over," he sang to a crowd of many colors, reviving lyrics he once chanted at risk of arrest. But, this time, all the police did was dance.