Gwen Ansell
A father who banned you from playing, and a childhood accident that lopped off the tips of a couple of fingers don’t sound like a promising start for a jazz musician. Bheki Mseleku in tomorrow’s (Saturday, September 6) final Joy of Jazz concert at the Pretoria State Theatre proves how remarkably you can turn your history around.
Hailed by one United Kingdom critic as “the most thoughtful, powerful and imaginative jazz musician to have come out of South Africa since Abdullah Ibrahim”, Mseleku was born four decades ago in Pinetown into a musical, serious and religious family who laid all their hopes for scholastic success on the boy. After his father died, he quit school (“I didn’t agree with … teaching kids to compete against one another”) and in a now-legendary moment, discovered his talent by showing a pop group called The Expressions how to play the bridge on Yakhal’ Inkhomo.
After The Expressions came Richard Jon Smith, The Drive, Spirits Rejoice, Malombo, Hugh Masekela – the list of his jobs as a sideman read like a history of South African jazz. When he hit London in the mid-1980s, his intensity, perfectionism and skill impressed fellow musicians and promoters (Ronnie Scott was an early patron) alike and a remarkable solo career was launched.
As well as Ibrahim, critical comparisons with McCoy Tyner are frequent and Mseleku will joyfully concede that, yes, they and more are all there: “I have lived before and been a musician before.We have a superconsciousness that carries the memories of many other lives inside us.”
Tomorrow’s concert also features McCoy Mrubata and Daveyton’s Four-Forty Jazz Band. Tonight (Friday, September 5), two of the country’s top guitarists, Jimmy Dludlu and Johnny Fourie star, plus neglected reedman Kevin Davidson. Davidson has never quite found his niche in our fragmented jazz scene; in the right context he’s a modernist improviser of ferocious intensity and meticulous skill who deserves much more audience attention.
It’s probably Jimmy Dludlu, however, who’ll draw tonight’s crowds. Dludlu started his career as a 13-year-old playing weddings, served a musical apprenticeship in George Lee’s touring band Anansi and another at the knee of master-guitarist Themba Mokoena – still his hero today.
He’s worked in pop (with CC Beat) in McCoy’s Brotherhood and with early 1990s club favourites Loading Zone. Today, he leads his own group in Cape Town, producing mainly electrifying Latin and West African- flavoured music. But if you want to hear what he can really do, put him in a small group, and make him play straight ahead.