State of Emergency. 1987. Under apartheid legislation, blacks who were
born, lived and worked in South Africa, no civil rights. They were officially
citizens of a 'homeland' to which at intervals they had to go to get
pass-books stamped with work-permits. The townships Soweto and Alexandra,
in Johannesburg, the centre of the mining and financial industry, had no
infrastructure. People were mass-removed from their homes under
resettlement acts and had no right to opposition. This apart from
detention without trial, exiling, banning and murdering of individuals.
This apart from democracy.

"There was a drum-tap. Like rain drops, there was a constant tapping, a
sharp drip upon the loud parchment. Then came the first soft crash of the
attendant cymbal - it was the prelude of the thunder. And in the gutter
the crazy instruments at last struck up their sentimental jazzing one-time
stutter - gutter - thunder."

Where did I hear that sound? Remember Gil Scot Heron's "Have You Heard?
Johnannesburg?" It was in the house with the banned poems under the
shirts. We had been to the opening of an Athol Fugard play at the Market
Theatre & at home the economist had put a jazz record on the grammophone.
And that is what it sounded like, then, in 1987. Thunder before rain.

But the quote is from Wyndham Lewis's "The Apes of God", a satire on
ruling-class dilletantes in thrall of jazz, in which novel jazz
is also described as "gross proletarian nigger-bumps" and "the idiot
mass-sound of marxistic music."

The economist, that evening, let me listen to jazz. The next day he gave
me the names of record stores in Joburg centre, a map, and the bus fare. I
was twenty years old and I had not forgotten my white socks. In my pocket
the poems of Breytenbach and Neruda, Lorca and Cronin, Jonker and Eluard.

The jazz records I got were by Dollar Brand (aka Abdullah Ibrahim) Hugh
Masekela and Plum & Cherry and what the economist had shown me
was that the production itself - from record label to retailing - was in
the hands of black businessmen.

Dollar Brand is a poet too and this is what he wrote on District Six, in
Cape Town, an area where people had been forcibly removed and which had
become a whites-only residential area:

early one new year's morning
when the emerald bay waved its clear waters against the noisy dockyard
a restless south easter skipped over slumbering lion's head
danced up hanover street
tenored a bawdy banjo
strung an ancient cello
bridged a host of guitars
tambourined through a dingy alley
into a scented cobwebbed room
and crackled the sixth sensed district
into a blazing swamp fire of satin sound

Like 'rhapsody on a windy night' and 'lovesong' the wind is the cat (but
in the past participle) and Dollar Brand lets that haunt be. Because jazz
is urban like the cat's whiskers on the drum and the dispossessed will
possess urban space through that totem.

The history of South African jazz is informed by American jazz and black
urban culture, also influential on publications like Drum Magazine, which
published in the 1950s the first major investigative articles on apartheid
and its by definition malpractices, as well as poetry and urban fiction and
jazz reviews, all written by black writers. Metropolitan history.

Writing the city with the swamp fire of satin sound, self-possessed.
Hat tipped backward, her shoes white on the ochre dirttrack. Jazz tapping
on the township roofs from filched highway crashbarriers so the veld began
to cosmos. Spring going places with brass. Jazz the leopard hide that
lined the pocket, jazz the white-socks typo. Jazz the textual sentimental
and the totsi. Jazz the passbook and the non passeran. Jazz the cultural
capital and the social accounting. Jazz the generic city and the
individual citizen. Jazz the satin sound of these my ambassadressess.
Jazz the possession and the influx control of memories that I have no
adornian musicology to keep.

But Adorno was to be reconciled with the truth in a poem which Ken Bolton
wrote which is called "At Work":

I turn the radio
way down: I want to write
a poem

& today I can't
with the radio on
On the other hand

They've promised
the Dynamic Hepnotics
& I'm hanging out for them

thinking of Adorno-
would he 'like'
"The Hepno Beat"?

Ideally *Yes"
but he was
Formed By His Time

never got to Dance
to the Hepno Beat
or see

the live film clip
on Countdown this week
or read Jody' article

in this Art & Text
where his name figures prominently
much loved

where rock n roll's
inadequacy
is discussed & his lack of

love for it
regretted
Adorno ripped

& out of it, raging,
at Crab's Cocktail Hour
I'd love to see

glasses, shining,
a mild cigar, in his hand,
waving

And like me tonight
on his feet
*white shoes!*

Perhaps he smiles on us
from above, & thinks

Yep
Within the contradictions
I guess Let them have their fun!



Yes let them.


Karlien






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