Sathima Bea Benjamin is a singer in transition. “People ask me when I’m coming home,” she says. “The truth is, I am home — but actually, I never left.” The truth is, she’s talking to me in a hotel in Johannesburg, far away from her birth home in Cape Town and en route to the residence she maintains in New York. But the truth is also that Benjamin is talking about identity, not geography.
Benjamin and her partner Abdullah Ibrahim first left South Africa in 1962, settling after 1976 in New York. “But the music I make has always carried Cape Town in it. I’ll be working with [bassist] Buster Williams or [current United States pianist] Stephen Scott, and I’ll do something with my voice and I’ll see them catch one another’s eyes: she’s doing that South African thing again.”
In 1979 Benjamin established the Ekapa label in New York, and it’s for the launch of her ninth title on that label, Musical Echoes, that she has been in South Africa.
Why the title? The last track, Star Eyes, sums it up. “The echoes are of me, about 19 years old, this little girl singing with a group of coloured musicians in white nightclubs in Sea Point — all those awful old divisions. At the end of the show, I’d be the only girl with all these men, and before they saw me safely home, they’d go off until two or three in the morning to somebody’s place; playing Coltrane records, playing Charlie Parker.
“And there I was, crazy about the music. I remember the respect they showed me; they recognised I was there to learn — they never even offered me a drink. So I heard Parker play Star Eyes. Now, I’m not trying to be him, but just remember, and infuse the tune with the memories it holds for me.”
The album contains several songs from that era: three from Duke Ellington and others from Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and even Noël Coward, plus Benjamin’s own title track, composed in collaboration with Scott.
To each, she brings her highly distinctive — some critics have said over-mannered — way with a lyric. She is only over-mannered to ears that find Betty Carter or Sheila Jordan so too — although she’s swift to point out that “I don’t go as far from the melody as Betty did. I’m about subtleties, nuances.
“I don’t think of myself as a singer. I never had time for all that slinky dress and high heels nonsense. Rather, I think of myself as another musician, using melody, sound and rhythmic placements to re-fashion songs. The sounds I bring are an inheritance from the ancestors I never knew.”
For Musical Echoes Benjamin works with Scott, Cape Town bassist Basil Moses (who also played on her last Ekapa release Cape Town Love) and as drummer, Johannesburg-based Lulu Gontsana.
“I love Basil, because he’s a bassist who makes me think. Listen to the deep, earthy sound he creates on Caravan. And it was Basil who said: ‘You have to have Lulu.’
“Lulu reminds me of Billy Higgins. Higgins was the sweetest person, with the most wonderful dynamics. Some drummers, you sit next to them and they make your kidneys vibrate. Billy didn’t need to do that to push this joyous sound out. Lulu’s sound has that same laid-back joy. He listens, and he never loses time.”
It’s a tribute to the quality of the rapport the musicians established that the album was cut in eight hours over two days. The tracks preserve some of the laughter, calls and conversation of the session “and when we listened to the playback, we just took one another’s hands and danced round the room”.
Not all of her visits home were so joyous. Benjamin is still learning about some of the family memories exile prevented her from sharing with her sisters. She’s discovering fresh sorrow in the scale of the city’s Aids orphan problem, and is seeking to register a charity, The Windsong Project, to assist. And there are petty irritations in the narrowness of some contemporary approaches to jazz. One radio station, P4, deems her album unsuitable for playlisting. “I don’t understand how you can define some parts of jazz out of existence like that.”
Especially in Cape Town, one of the biggest pressures is “When will I work with Abdullah? They just expect a husband and wife must be on stage together all the time. Well, we used to do it. Remember, we are free, creative individuals with our own musical directions. I can’t say when, but it will happen: those directions will come together.” And then Benjamin smiles mischievously and adds, “But you have to remember, I have my choice of all the accompanists in the world.”