‘Imagine a kid let loose in a roomful of toys — it’s heaven!” For reedman Khaya Mahlangu, the nirvana he’s describing is his current role as director of the Gauteng Jazz Orchestra — the first time in a four-decade career he has been able to tap such wide resources for composing and arranging.
On Saturday night, he returns to his other (and perhaps better known) identity as soloist and leader to play the final concert in the Joburg Theatre summer jazz series. He will be working with his regular quartet: trumpeter Sydney Mavundla, pianist Mongezi Conjwa, bassist Lucas Senyatso and drummer Bernice Boikanyo.
But the two roles complement each another. ‘I’ll definitely be presenting new material — some written recently to expand our repertoire; some lying around as sketches that I’d never previously thought of finishing and opening up for orchestra.
‘And I find that playing is what keeps my writing chops sharp. When you write a theme, the soloist must be able to execute it. And the first test is to ask myself: could I play it? Would I want to?”
The studious role of orchestral director and arranger isn’t necessarily where Mahlangu’s fans thought he would end up. He was co-founder (with the late bassist Sipho Gumede) of innovative Afro-fusion outfit Sakhile, and 1980s media coverage of the two focused on charismatic performances and alleged backstage leadership tussles and egoism. Both argued the media got the story wrong. Fans, they said, wanted the band to stay together and needed to allocate blame whenever it fractured. But Gumede and Mahlangu both found Sakhile a creative straitjacket — they needed the breaks.
‘Because we played mostly by ear, Sakhile almost put my sight-reading skills to sleep. Then you’d get a shock — on another gig, they’d put a score in front of you. Not nice! I realised I had to maintain a studious approach.”
Take a longer perspective on the reedman’s career, with Sakhile as just one episode, and it seems designed to bring him, at 56, to precisely this place: ‘There’s this student in me who refuses to die. I have to keep looking for challenges that will make me learn.”
Mahlangu started as a bugler in the Boy Scouts and moved on to play trumpet in a township youth music programme. An uncle gave him a saxophone in 1974. Another, Selby Ntuli, offered him the sax chair in his newly founded group, Harari. By 1976, the 22-year-old Aubrey Mahlangu (‘Ah, yes — that was before I was liberated”) had been invited by saxophonist Teaspoon Ndlelu and trumpeter Stompie Manana to join the house band of Lucky Michaels’s pioneering Orlando nightclub, the Pelican.
‘Those two were off touring with Richard Jon Smith and I really couldn’t play jazz as such, then. I’d just had two years on sax. Other guys in the band complained, ‘This guy can’t play’. But I’ll always be grateful to two people. Drummer Dick Khoza, who led the band, used to say, ‘Leave the kid alone. Listen! He’s got a nice sound.’ And then guitarist Baba Mokoena, whenever he wasn’t touring, would make time to show me chords, progressions.”
Mahlangu’s parents had hoped for another profession for their son. ‘They weren’t encouraging. I’d have to do all my household chores before I could do any music, so I spent a lot of time practising at the club when it was closed.”
In 1977, he enrolled to study under Professor Khabi Mngoma at the University of Zululand. After that, he played with a roll-call of ground-breaking South African jazz outfits — The Drive, the Jazz Ministers, Spirits Rejoice and more — before Sakhile was born in 1981.
And he has always composed. Some material was recorded by Sakhile and on his own three albums as leader: To You My Dear (1981), Streams (1998) and Khululeka (2006). ‘But it was very frustrating not having access to an orchestra, which is why a lot of my tunes lay around as sketches.”
Larger group work with Victor Ntoni at the SABC in the 1990s, as music director on other artists’ albums, and on the TV music series, Bejazzled, suggested tantalising possibilities. So when his long-time colleague in Jonas Gwangwa’s band, trumpeter (and director of the Jazz Academy of Gauteng) Johnny Mekoa, offered him the orchestra post, ‘I knew this was my chance. I had to take it.
‘Lots of things inspire me now. I have this big group of amazing young soloists I can score for.
And I compose every day. I recently worked on a project about the late Gideon Nxumalo and it struck me it was over 30 years since he died — and yet he still lived, in those scores in his beautiful handwriting.”
For the first time in our interview, Mahlangu is stumped when I ask him to pick his favourite discoveries from mining South Africa’s historic repertoire. ‘That’s impossible. There’s so much.” Pressed, he cites Gwangwa’s Kgomo di Tsile (‘It’s an amazing work when you simply colour it with more instrumental voices”), a ‘completely
reharmonised, funkier” version of Allen Silinga’s Ntyilo Ntyilo, material from Mankunku’s Jika album, and ‘just about anything of Kippie Moeketsi’s”.
He checks out new tunes too — Saturday’s concert will include one from Conjwa. ‘We have to wake up. Much as we identify with the American standards, there’s great jazz composition here and, if we don’t celebrate and play it, we’ll lose it.”
Khaya Mahlangu plays at the Joburg Theatre at 8pm on Saturday December 11. Tickets are R120 from Computicket or at the desk