Like a Pied Piper of the townships, Porgy Klaas is using the power of music to give talented youths in crime-ridden Guguletu a better chance in life, writes Ray Joseph
The front room of jazz bassist Porgy Klaas’s tiny tin-roofed house in Guguletu near Cape Town is a constant hive of activity with keen youngsters spending long hours every weekend learning the intricacies of jazz and jamming together, often late into the night.
For Klaas, who was taught to play the double bass and to read and write music by a generous neighbour 15 years ago, it is a labour of love. Born in Kensington in 1955, Klaas and his family were booted out of their home under the Group Areas Act in 1959 and forced to move to the township where they had no friends or roots.
“It was just a lucky quirk of fate,” says Klaas, that the family ended up living next door to jazz bassist Spanky Ndamana.
“I used to sit outside his house for hours on end listening while Spanky and guys like Max Diamond, a drummer, and Bucks Ngoco, a famous pianist in his day, jammed for all they were worth. The music really spoke to me, it touched me and I knew then that I wanted to be a jazz musician.”
The musicians eventually noticed the keen youngster sitting outside and began sending him on errands.
“The guys liked to smoke a bit of ganja to get them in the mood when they played and they used to send me to go and score for them. That was my `in’ and they began allowing me to sit in while they jammed.”
“It was Spanky who really took me under his wing. That cat was a real fundi, he could read and write music and had even recorded a few albums of his own. He was my hero, my inspiration and the guy I have to thank for taking the time to teach me.”
His dream, says Klaas, was to learn the saxophone – but his family was poor and the cost of buying a sax was way beyond their meagre means. “There was this double bass standing in the corner of Spanky’s lounge and I told him that I wanted to learn to play it. But Spanky would not let me take it home and insisted that if I wanted to learn on it, I would have to practice at his house,” says Klaas.
His mentor soon realised that his young pupil was serious about wanting to learn and bought him a “first step learn-to-play the double bass” book, which he still treasures today and uses to teach his young pupils.
By 1982 Klaas, with trumpeter Blacky Thembi, formed his first jazz band, an outfit called the Black Keys, and they soon took the township by storm with their cool sounds. But two years later the band split up when most of its members, refusing to live under South Africa’s harsh apartheid laws, opted to go into exile.
“I was supposed to go with them; they had even bought me a ticket. But in the end I was forced to stay because I had to help support my father, who was very ill, and younger brothers and sisters, who all depended on me. Finally, in 1992, Klaas formed his second band, Sikona (“We Are Here”), but shortly afterwards it split, only to reform under the same name, but with new members, two years later.
It was at that stage that he joined Corbett, a self-help organisation in Langa that taught life skills and music and art to the township’s residents.
“I began teaching youngsters, using my own bass. There were very few instruments, an old guitar, a piano, drums and the odd brass instrument, but the enthusiasm of my young pupils made it all worthwhile.
“The job was unpaid, but I made ends meet by getting paid gigs whenever I could. Teaching, along with playing, is so satisfying, it is like food for the soul for me.”
But even now it is still an uphill struggle for Klaas, who plays gigs and does “other odds and ends” to survive. Until recently he had two double basses but a few months ago he was forced to borrow R400 to pay his rent and electricity and water bills, handing over one of his instruments as security until he can repay the debt.
His remaining double bass has only three strings. He lent it out for a music workshop based at the Nico Theatre in Cape Town, but it disappeared and was eventually found in Port Elizabeth, where a friend traced it and returned it to him.
It came back with a damaged plug which he cannot afford to repair. “But it still works,” says Klaas, as he lovingly coaxes a foot trapping jazz standard on his battered and scratched three-stringed bass, which looks worse for wear but sounds like a dream under his practiced fingers.
His latest passion is informal jazz classes for local youth, aged between nine and 14, which he holds in the sparsely furnished front room of his tiny home.
“In the townships there is a big problem with gangs and lots of kids are forced to spend their time on the streets with nothing to do.
“There are quite a few musos who come along and help out, using their own instruments to teach the kids. I have an old acoustic guitar and my bass, one guy brings his trumpet, another an electric piano and other guys come with saxes and other horns. I am also teaching the kids to read and write music and to sing.
“The jams we have here are amazing. The kids come from all over, they are hungry to learn and over the weekends the house is filled with music.”
Klaas’s dream now is to teach his young pupils as much as possible so that, by Christmas, he can get them busking on the streets of Cape Town to give them exposure to a live audience, and hopefully make a bit of cash for themselves.
“Music is the food of the soul. What we are doing is to help these kids feed their hunger to learn and also to keep them off the streets,” he says.