There is something Oedipal about reviewing David Coplan’s masterwork. In a sense, he is the patriarch of academic studies into South African urban culture.
The first edition of In Township Tonight, published by Ravan in 1985, was the first academic book to acknowledge that it was a worthwhile field of study, and to begin to do it justice with factually detailed, theoretically nuanced analysis.
As collections such as Christine Lucia’s The World of South African Music demonstrate, it was not the first attempt to assert or seriously debate the subject matter. African music scholars and journalists had begun the enterprise more than a century earlier; white ideologues and folklorists had joined in as the significance of culture for black urban identity formation became (to some, threateningly) clear. Coplan’s book made accessible materials from a dazzlingly diverse range of sources, including these, and gave them context and framing with his careful sociological analysis.
Despite the attractiveness of the subject matter, it was not an easy book to navigate. It embraced everything, and sometimes the sheer weight of information became overwhelming, making it hard to follow any single thematic thread. These characteristics persist in the second edition, but, equally, it is still worth — in the kind of mining metaphor Coplan himself is so fond of — sifting the dense soil for its diamonds.
And diamonds there are: often in the illuminating insights and memories of the practitioners Coplan interviewed, from old timers such as Dan Twala to the new-generation voice of Thandiswa Mazwai.
The second edition, published by Jacana and sub-titled Three Centuries of South African Black City Music and Theatre, adds three new chapters and a new conclusion, bringing the story up to date and providing new analysis that weighs the global as well as local dimensions of urban performance.
Here, again, Coplan demonstrates his skill at building on all the analytical frameworks that have emerged during the past quarter-century, from Paul Gilroy’s Atlantic studies to Louise Meintjies’s groundbreaking account of the construction of commercial Zulu musical identity. (Coplan does her 2003 book Sound of Africa scant justice by summing it up at one point as merely a “eulogy to a bygone genre”.)
As the song says, only hindsight is 20:20 vision, and for Coplan as for the rest of us, the shorter the distance between history and the time of writing, the more problematic interpretation becomes. The final chapters are as studded with riches as the rest of the book and Coplan does particularly well on updating the performance story, taking in the recent rise of spoken-word slams and their links to the uniquely South African hip-hop groups such as Tumi and the Volume, Skwatta Kamp and the theatrical poetics of Kgafela oa Magogodi and Lesego Rampholokeng, as well as various more conventional landmark theatre productions.
His jazz chapter, tellingly titled “Jazz and other (con)fusions” feels more awkward. As a musician himself (there’s a wonderfully evocative photo of his shaggy-headed younger self playing percussion with Phillip Tabane) Coplan engages with substantial players, not just industry-appointed “stars”. So some names that merit much more attention, such as saxophonist Sydney Mnisi, guitarist Louis Mhlanga and the late drummer Lulu Gontsana, are appropriately acknowledged.
But there are also passages that read more like spontaneous grouchiness than measured analysis. He writes of Gloria Bosman, for example: “so caught up in complex, self-conscious attempts at vocal ornamentation that one knows not what to make of her performances. Perhaps it was that scholarship to study opera that distorted her judgement.” That’s highly debatable — and Bosman’s most recent recordings have worried some by their conservatism rather than their risk-taking. He describes Judith Sephuma’s A Cry, A Smile, A Dance as having “American aspirations”, when many listeners find in it an authentically modern evocation of the Sepedi melodic tradition. His comments on contemporary female instrumentalists are distressingly incomplete — although they do have room for a description of Siya Makuzeni as “playing ‘a man’s instrument'”.
There are also a few tiny irritations in the editing: naming the owner of the Melt 2000 label as “Richard” rather than Robert Trunz, for example. And the new cover image, of Hugh Masekela playing in New Delhi — while it may have greater current Brand South Africa recognition and signify the emplacement of our music in the global discourse, it doesn’t have half the guts and punch of the first edition’s Dudu Pukwana. But it is a pleasure to have again on my shelves a version of the book that is not 23 years old, with pages that are not (yet) yellowed and virtually shredded from their folios by constant reference.
Current international music scholarship puts a growing emphasis on giving agency to musicians, acknowledging that they are conscious intellectuals with a pretty clear analysis of what they are playing and why. The pioneer study here was Eric Porter’s 2002 What Is This Thing Called Jazz?. Using Porter’s framework, for example, a music historian would take the question of what on earth Bosman is doing with ornamentation or whether Sephuma’s album aspires to the United States back for answers to those artists themselves.
That approach is not yet entrenched here. Indeed, the problematics of reconstructing our lost musical history are only beginning to be debated; we have not even adequately excavated the content. As all of us in the business know, when a musician dies, a library burns — and the air here is thick with the ash of unrecorded memories. But we are seeing more writers seeking out musicians’ own words. The latest are Devroop and Walton with their short collection of 10 interviews: Unsung: South African Musicians Under Apartheid (Sun Press), edited by Chatradari Devroop and Chris Walton.
While not all the players are quite as “unsung” as the jacket implies, having been interviewed extensively in the media or in works such as Lars Rassmussen’s Jazz People of Cape Town, others — such as trombonist Jasper Cook — have never before been afforded this kind of space. Their stories play a vital role in unmasking the hidden histories and supplementing broad-canvas accounts such as Coplan’s — and the spontaneous humanity and sharp perceptions of the interviewees make for truly joyful reading.