I finally got Rashid Lombard cornered in New Orleans. It took enormous effort to get to that point. Why couldn’t we have done it in Johannesburg or Durban or Cape Town? After all, we are, unavoidably, sons of the same soil.
It took a jazz festival in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, to get us to finally get to grips with each other’s crazy ideas.
But maybe that makes sense. After all, in South Africa, we, as a people, still don’t talk to each other. We talk at each other. We say hullo, howzit, and goodbye. We celebrate 10 years of freedom, but don’t really know each other well enough to know what it is that we are celebrating together.
We tend to talk more deeply and sensibly in other places, hugging each other like we were still in exile, when we knew what was what.
Anyway, I know Rashid better than I know most people in the country. I would trust him with my life. This is odd, because he is an Indian—or at least a lot of him is Indian, even if he denies it.
How do you get to know Indians? How do you get to become involved with them? Mbongeni Ngema would come in the night with an assegai if I even mentioned the possibility.
So what am I doing in Bourbon Street, New Orleans, pouring my heart out to Rashid Lombard, ponytail and all?
Bourbon Street has been a life mission. Jazz originated in Bourbon Street, or thereabouts, and Buddy Bolden and Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton and Billie Holliday and Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet and Meade Luxe Lewis and Fats Waller all cut their teeth and played their souls out in its speakeasies, bars and cathouses. It was where black music poured out to when it was released from Congo Square. But I’ll come to that later.
Bourbon Street today is still pretty much the same — although it has now become a Mecca for tourists, foreigners and strangers generally, who crowd its narrow thoroughfare with their noise, chaos and love of the easy life. They have many dollars stashed in their back pockets, and big smiles on their faces. New Orleans is, after all, the famed Big Easy.
Bourbon Street is still where all the music in the world, jazz and otherwise, can be heard at any time of the day and night. You have never seen such musical profusion. Tumble out of one tight, crammed joint and you stumble into another one, where more great music is happening. It is hard to believe. The sound just blossoms, from one door to the next, because that is how it has always been.
But what I wanted to pin Rashid down about, all the way over here in New Orleans, is what jazz actually is. After all, he does run Cape Town’s famous North Sea Jazz Festival. But what do Ringo Madlingozi and Johnny Clegg and Rebecca Malope have to do with jazz? I can follow if you’re talking about Bheki Mseleku or Terence Blanchard, but what are the limits? If there are answers to these questions, surely they are to be found in New Orleans.
So we sit around and chew the fat and ask each other this question. And burn the midnight oil on Bourbon Street, of course.
Other commentators on these pages have claimed that jazz is not necessarily a black art form. But in that case, what is it?
It seems unavoidable, when you are sitting in New Orleans, that jazz is part of a fusion of several cultures — but its beat and its sensibility unquestionably comes from the pulse of the slave dance of the dislocated African. You bump up against this all the time in New Orleans—which is why I was talking about Congo Square.
Congo Square sits just outside the French Quarter. It is now preserved as a monument. But in its time, it was the one area of the city where slaves of African descent were allowed the freedom to congregate on Sundays and holidays, and hang out and be themselves, rather than having to relate strictly to the slave bell and the whip. They established typically African produce markets, swapped stories — and made music and danced. Congo Square was a little corner of freedom in an unfree world.
New Orleans wears its racial layout a little more lightly than Johannesburg or Cape Town. But if you look carefully, and if you have the fortune to be guided by someone who can show you the invisible boundaries, you will see where the black quarter ended and the white quarter began.
Why, for example, is Rampart Street called Rampart Street? Because it marks a boundary where the white side of town was literally separated by a rampart from the area where the plantation slaves who worked in the sugar and cotton fields were quartered. Look carefully again at many of the houses in the French Quarter, and your guide will point out how, just like in Johannesburg, domestic slaves were in some cases quartered in outhouses and attics attached to the main establishment — our version of the maid’s room, or the cabin in the sky.
Just like the English mews, which used to house stables and serfs, these have now become highly desirable residences in the historic French Quarter. Things have moved along.
So jazz, as Rashid and I concluded (I believe), represents the breaking down of the ramparts and the artificial barriers. It stands for Congo Square finally tumbling out of its unnatural confines and taking up permanent residence in the French Quarter, and changing the world in the process.
It stands for wild Indians and women of easy virtue. It stands, undeniably, for a spirit of self-expression for people who have had their tongues burned out, and yet can still sing.
And above all, it stands for the memory of Africa’s wide rhythms, odours and expanses, the lilt of its voice, and the pounding, shifting meditation of its drumbeat.