Gwen Ansell
Police or the inquest court may tell us how pianist Moses Taiwa Molelekwa and his wife Flo Mthoba died on Tuesday. But, despite gossip and speculation, no one will be able to tell us why.
Last time I spoke at length to him ironically, at the Alexandra funeral of bandleader Ntemi Piliso he was talking positively about composing for his next album. “The songs must be strong and different. This album will have to see me through the next five years or so.” Born in 1973, Molelekwa grew up in Tembisa during the harshest period of political violence on the East Rand. Friends died or despaired and turned to crime around him, and I often quoted his assertion that “music saved me”. I did not add what he said to me next: “That sometimes makes me feel very guilty.” Molelekwa began experimenting on the family piano when he was 12. His parents and grandparents were all musical; when his father heard the boy’s playing, he marched him to the Fuba Academy in central Johannesburg for lessons. That formal, structured teaching was only one of the influences the young Molele-kwa absorbed. He described itinerant Pedi drum troupes, pop and soul blaring from neighbours’ radios “and the stokvels, organised by jazz clubs my father belonged to. There were tunes I heard there that just hit my soul.” Early heroes included Abdullah Ibrahim particularly the tune Ubu Sukh/ Night-time Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. “[Hancock] was one of the pianists that broke barriers to say that jazz can go beyond.” After Fuba came work as an arranger, international tours with Hugh Masekela’s Lerapo and work with Umbongo, a group formed to celebrate the music of the late Victor Ndlazilwane. Umbongo won the Gilbey’s jazz prize in 1991 and featured at the first Guinness Jazz Festival on the Market Precinct in 1993. Among those who heard them was Robert Trunz, boss of a United Kingdom record label called B&W (later Melt 2000). “I was walking across the precinct when I heard this piano and thought: what the f**k is that? It’s not Abdullah Ibrahim, but it’s so good.” Trunz signed Molelekwa, and an award-winning debut album, Finding Oneself, was released in 1995. For Molelekwa, the album summed up the writing he had done during and after his college years. It included the song Ntate Moholo, a piece that had evolved from a musical idea of his grandfather’s “the most precious gift he left to me as a musician”.
A second album, Genes and Spirits, followed in 1998. In that, Molele-kwa explored rhythm, from the jagged beats of hip-hop to the intricate pulses of the Beti people, learned from Cameroonian guitarist Bryce Wassy.
Recently, Molelekwa found himself increasingly absorbed by composing. “I want to explore chants and ritual music: repeating patterns,” he told me.
Last year he played triumphant concerts in London and Grahams-town with pianist Joanna McGregor and contributed the richly patterned Free Spirit to singer Sibongile Khumalo’s album Immortal Secrets. He was a dreamer. Sometimes, absorbed by his music, he lost track of time and missed appointments. Occasionally he suffered paralysing spells of depression. But he built a talented young unit around him, often preferring to discuss the skills of other members rather than his own. Outside his valued musical colleagues, he sometimes felt isola-ted. “I want to get into free music, but I meet very few people here interested in those things even fewer my age.”
He talked frankly about the pressures he felt: the competing pulls of family responsibility and free creativity; the hateful labelling of South African critics that his music was (or was not) “jazz”; the high expectations of fans and media for whom he was “the youngest” this, or “the next” that. “It was a huge burden,” says a colleague and neighbour, bassist Carlo Mombelli. “Why couldn’t they let him be simply himself?” Mombelli, 12 years the pianist’s senior, has nevertheless acknowledged him as a powerful influence. “He was one of the few musicians here exploring and doing unusual things. His compositions were unpretentious but complex. He never tried to impress, but rather to touch us, and that’s what I loved about him.” Fellow pianist Themba Mkhize agrees. “He had a voice of his own, and a relationship with his music. When he played, you could feel a kind of spiritual atmosphere in the room.” It was that power to raise spirits that spoke to another pianist, Paul Hanmer. “He was totally himself, yet able to evoke echoes of all the idioms of South Africa. He could bend, twist and explore a theme to show us how quirky and how beautiful our rhythms are. In his piano, he played drums and horns, marimba patterns and church. He played me and all the people I’ve known. I don’t think we can imagine yet what we’ve lost.” artslink.co.za