Off air: Count Basie appeared on the BBC in 1968, but that’s unlikely to have been allowed at the SABC. Photo: David Redfern/Getty Images
Notes on Cuts is not an easy listen. This book-plus-record project, written and recorded by art historian and scholar John Peffer, researched music censorship by the SABC during apartheid. The record has 20 recordings – 16 short and four long – of these censored vinyl and shellac records.
There is a range of genres: boeremusiek, jazz, marrabena from Mozambique, mbaqanga, country, famo from Lesotho, jive, reggae, choral and Afrorock.
It hurts a record collector to hear these damaged songs. The photographs in the book illustrate Peffer’s explanation that the cutting and marking – Xs, straight lines, wavy lines, thick ones, daisy chains, loops, flowery scribbles across the grooves – “appear as arbitrary as the choices of the records to be censored”.
Peffer’s entertaining sleeve notes come with background info, image analysis of the scratches and other signage, and his researched, insightful and subjective commentary on “the look and feel of censorship”.
Included are two songs by American country singer Jim Reeves, whom Peffer describes as “a treacly baritone with milquetoast phrasing”. He toured apartheid South Africa in 1962 and 1963, was adored by conservative audiences, recorded two albums in Afrikaans, and starred in the local film Kimberley Jim.
Reeves was one of the highest-selling artists in SA, yet censors scratched his album The International Jim Reeves, making the songs Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart and The Old Kalahari unplayable.
“Perhaps the way he mixed languages (German and English, Afrikaans and English) was frowned upon by the apartheid ideologues for whom separateness was everything.”
The Elite Swingsters’ Bophelong is an upbeat instrumental single from 1961. Its enthusiastic scratches “look less like a dance chart and more like characters in a runic alphabet, or chromosomes, or maybe whiplashes”, reckons Peffer.
But why was it scratched? The song is a shoutout to the Vaal township Bophelong (place of life), near Sharpeville and Boipatong. A year before its release, the area was a site of mass protests against passbooks, leading to the Sharpeville massacre.
Peffer speculates: “Perhaps it was deemed ‘too soon’ to even read on air the names of places that had recently been the sites of violence by police?”
Calling the censorship inconsistent is an understatement. One of the longer tracks Peffer included on Notes on Cuts is The Oscar Peterson Trio’s Misty from their LP Eloquence. This jazz standard could have fallen foul of the censor’s sharp object because it was a sad song – that has happened to other sad ones.
“When I asked about songs like this, I was told by a former review-committee member that it ‘depended on the mood’ at the time,” Peffer wrote. “Meaning when the political climate was hot, the committee was more paranoid. It might also mean that someone might be in a sour mood one day and that could affect their judgment. Could even personal things like a love gone wrong mean they’d cut the sad songs?”
But Peffer is an upbeat listener, even though “with their cuts, the censor has taken over the beats. Only at the end is there little respite. The cuts quiet down, the piano opens out like a rainbow, and the cymbals splash like sunshine after a tempest.”
Still, knowing these irreplaceable records were damaged because of the perverse beliefs of apartheid mandarins makes me sad. I was most upset about the last two tracks.
La La and Bayeza are off Assagai’s 1972 release, Zimbabwe. It’s a record I have been eyeing for a long time, but it sells for an eye-watering R5 700 for a near mint used copy on the global vinyl marketplace Discogs.
Assagai were a short-lived jazz-rock group of South African musicians living in exile in the UK: Dudu Pukwana (alto sax), Louis Moholo (drums), Mongezi Feza (trumpet), Bizo Mngqikana (tenor sax), Martha Mdenge (vocals), and Terri Quaye and Smiley de Jonnes (percussion).
The band must have really scared the censors. Peffer writes: “At the SABC Record Library, this record is wrapped like contraband, incognito in only a brown paper sleeve.”
While both the band and title are blacked out, and those two songs defaced, the record was still kept on the shelf. Peffer asks: “Does that mean the other songs could still be played on air, without even mentioning the band’s name?”