Our next set of shows in Durban, a two-hour train ride to the coast, were poorly attended, so we canceled the final gig, packed our gear, and headed home two days before Christmas. As the train pulled into the station, I suddenly realized that some of us would never see each other again. Some of the guys had graduated from St. Peter’s and would soon be off to university. Others, like me, would be attending another high school after the first of the year. Though St. Peter’s had closed, we vowed to keep the band together not only as a tribute to Huddleston, but also to earn some money.
One Saturday afternoon in early January 1956, I was standing near the entrance of the Bantu Men’s Social Center with Jonas, Monty, George, and Chips, admiring Miriam Makeba, Mary Rabotapi, and Johanna Radebe, then known as the Skylarks, who were standing some short distance away. They were the country’s top female singing group at the time, and were absolutely stunning in their six-inch spike heels and tight tapered skirts with slits in the back which allowed for a titillating view of the lower thigh, just enough to make one breathless. With their high-fashion suits and shoulder bags and closely cropped hair, they were a sight to kill for. I caught Miriam’s eyes stealing mine a few times and knew they were whispering and giggling about us, just as we were busy flipping over them. I boasted to the guys that I could walk over to the three ladies and begin a conversation. The fellows nearly keeled over—who the fuck did I think I was to dare go over and form my lips to say something to Miriam Makeba? Asking Chips Molopyane to watch my trumpet case, I slowly walked over to the Skylarks, who looked happily surprised that I was approaching them, their faces sparkling with the widest smiles as if to say, “This kid has some fucking spunk to be approaching us, the hypnotizing Skylarks!” Strangely enough, I was not even slightly scared, which was an exhilarating change from my normal terror around attractive women. I usually couldn’t come up with anything to say when the time came to make my decisive verbal salvo, but this time I walked nonchalantly, with a little bounce to my lazy strut, and instead of my usual panic, I found myself chuckling softly. I stopped right in front of Miriam and said to her in Zulu, “Sawbuona Sisi Miriam, u za ngi xolela kodwa be si khuluma ngawe lapha na leya genge ukuthi u cula ka mnandi njani and futhi ukuthi a ma Skylarks a hlabela ka mnandi njani no Kuthi ni bahle njani, ni si bulala blind man.” (Hello, Sister Miriam, please forgive my forwardness but the fellows and I over there were talking about you and how beautifully you sing and also how incredibly beautiful the Skylarks sound. Mostly, we were remarking about how stunningly beautiful the three of you are, and I have to confess without any reservation, that you all are really killing us.)
They burst out laughing. I continued, “Sa ku bona kuqala e Donaldson nga leya mini kwa ku ne reception Ka Jake Ntuli, wawu cula na ma Cuban Brothers Amadoda a yi seventy-two Sa cula leyo ngoma u ku suka e Donaldson sa ze sa yo ngena e St. Peter’s, si phikisana ukuthi u nga thanda bani phakathi Kwethu Sonke.” (We first saw you at Donaldson Center during Jake Ntuli’s reception, when you sang with the Cuban Brothers on “Nomalizo had seventy-two lovers.” We sang that song all the way back to St. Peter’s, arguing among ourselves about who you would choose if you had to pick somebody out of the fourteen of us.) More laughter. “Anyway, I am crazy about music and new in the business, maybe you can give me a little advice and teach me a few things.” Still more giggles. Miriam looked deep into my eyes and said, “Go and fetch your trumpet. I want you to come somewhere with me.” I was hypnotized. The fellows were dumbfounded when I waved good-bye to them as Miriam Makeba and I strutted slowly down Eloff Street. They couldn’t believe their eyes. Neither could I.
As we walked down Eloff Street, people who knew Miriam probably assumed that I was just escorting her somewhere to carry her parcels, since I was practically unknown at the time and too young to be her lover. “Where are we going?” I asked. Miriam said, “I know you love jazz. I am taking you to a friend of mine in Hillbrow who has one of the greatest jazz collections in the world. He’s from Switzerland and you will really like him. His name is Paul Meyer.” I was elated. Here I was, walking down Johannesburg’s main avenue with South Africa’s greatest singer on my way to listen to great records that I could never dream of getting my hands on. On top of that, I was about to meet a great record collector from Switzerland at a time when Africans did not get the opportunity to meet white people, especially from abroad.
Paul was from Basel, a short, blond, blue-eyed man with a film star’s looks. He was extremely friendly and spoke with a strong German accent. He fixed some marinated herring and German pumpernickel bread sandwiches for the three of us, and I drank beer with him, which was illegal for Africans at the time. In fact Miriam and I had no business being with Paul at all, because it was illegal to socialize with whites and, with an African woman in the room, we were actually “conspiring to contravene” the Immorality Act. But I didn’t care. I was in music heaven. Paul Meyer had every record ever made by Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Kid Ory, Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Chick Webb, Jack Teagarden, Count Basie, Sy Oliver, Duke Ellington, and more. I noticed that Meyer did not have any records by white jazz artists. He explained that he knew deep down in his heart that jazz was the music of black folks, and regardless of how much they excelled, white people could never in their wildest dreams capture the true essence of jazz. Paul Meyer’s analysis of white people’s jazz capabilities really surprised me. I had never heard this angle before. My music colleagues and I had never discussed American or South African music from the perspective of race. We had equally admired Glenn Miller and Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey and Louis Jordan, Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney, the Four Freshmen and the Mills Brothers, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers, Clifford Brown and Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden—it made no difference to us. We were especially fascinated by the fact that Benny Goodman had included Billie Holiday and Lionel Hampton in his band at a time when racial prejudice was very strong in America. Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, with all those white jazz musicians, Gerry Mulligan, Bobby Brookmeyer, and Zoot Sims, was even more intriguing to us. If anything, we were encouraged that music was being used as a weapon for eradicating racial stereotyping. Paul Meyer’s comment burst my little bubble of hope.
It was almost sundown when I let Miriam know that I had better be going back to Alexandra. She wanted me to escort her to Johannesburg Park Station so she could catch a train to her home in Mofolo Township in Soweto. I agreed, and went to take a leak in the bathroom. When I returned, Miriam and Paul were in a huddle, eyes closed and kissing each other deeply. I was shocked at first, then angry. I didn’t know what to do. I went outside and waited on the porch. Miriam came out flustered and apologetic. “Come Sunday” was still playing on the turntable, with Mahalia Jackson singing her heart out in front of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
I didn’t say a word as we walked from Paul’s place to the train station. I honestly didn’t know where to start. I was hurt and confused. I thought how my friends back at the Bantu Men’s Social Center would laugh if I told them what really went down. “What’s the matter, Papa?” Miriam said. “Why are you so quiet?” “I don’t like being used,” I said curtly. “Oh, how can you say I’m using you?” she asked. I said, “You are using me, sister. You knew that it was dangerous for you to go and visit Paul Meyer alone. You wanted to see him badly. You had no one to cover for you because we are not allowed to make love to whites without getting arrested for contravening the Immorality Act. You saw me standing there, all googoo-eyed over you. You figured here was a young sucker you could use to cover your back. So you invited me, knowing I would be excited over Paul’s record collection, and I’d just feel privileged to be in your company and that of a foreign white man. Well, my sister, I wasn’t born yesterday and I am not impressed, Mama. Don’t ever think that you can use me for your little tricks. You better find yourself another fool next time you want to visit your Paul Meyer.”
“I’m so
rry,” she said, wiping tears from her cheeks with a white handkerchief she pulled from her handbag. “I’m sorry, Oupa.” (“Granddad,” Miriam’s nickname for me to this day.)
In January 1956, I began my final year of high school at Holy Cross in Alexandra, but I had lost all interest in my studies. Over my break, I had been dividing my time between our group and the Merry Makers in Springs. The Merry Makers had a huge following. They filled the dance halls more than did most groups in and around Johannesburg. Elijah, the band’s leader, seemed to take to me, so we started hanging out a lot. He exposed me to more sophisticated liquor and older, more experienced women. I was finished with homemade brews and schoolgirls. Back at school I was going insane thinking and daydreaming about Elijah, Ntemi Piliso, Kippie Moeketsi, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Dorothy Masuka, and Miriam Makeba. I remember sitting at my desk covered with books and notepads, but my mind was recycling chords to the new songs of Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and Max Roach.
Pinocchio, South Africa’s biggest jazz collector and concert promoter, found me listening to a Dizzy Gillespie album one day at the Coliseum record store in downtown Johannesburg—that’s where all the African jazz aficionados hung out and bought their records. He told me, “Don’t listen to that man. If you want to listen to some trumpet, you gotta hear Clifford Brown.” He said Brown, whose father bought him his first horn at thirteen, was one of the baddest trumpet players on the American jazz scene. My father had just helped me buy a wind-up, long-playing record phonograph. I bought Brown’s album, The Clifford Brown Max Roach Quintet, and damn near played it to death, memorizing every single note on the album, including all of Max Roach’s mind-blowing drum solos. Known as “Brownie,” Clifford tragically died in an auto accident a few months later, on June 26, 1956. He was only twenty-five. The newspaper said that Brown, his pianist Richie Powell, and Powell’s wife were on their way to meet Max Roach for a gig in Chicago when Powell’s car, driven by his wife, skidded off the wet Pennsylvania Turnpike. Brown and his wife, LaRue, had an infant son, Clifford junior, who had not yet turned one.
By March 1956, I had bought everything that I could find and afford by Clifford Brown and Miles Davis. I was also getting into so-called West Coast jazz as a result of my cousin Chips, whose brother Kappie was working at the Coliseum. Chips’s brother-in-law, Gwigwi Mrwebi, was also the alto-saxophone player with the Harlem Swingsters and an avid collector of West Coast jazz. When I would visit Chips in Sophiatown, Gwigwi would bombard us with recordings by Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, Shorty Rogers, Bob Cooper, Bud Shank, and others. I loved all that jazz, but I remained loyal to Clifford, Max, Miles, Dizzy, Sonny Rollins, and other African-American jazz giants. The West Coast jazz had a much softer style both instrumentally and vocally. Its foremost players, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Bob Cooper, and Zoot Sims, and singers, June Christy, Anita O’Day, and Chris Connor, all had extremely gentle approaches to their arrangements, dynamics, and phrases. The music hardly ever had any loud passages. They were also more colorful in their tropical California dress styles, a quality highly attractive to us clotheshorses. However, the East Coast jazz musicians were all African-Americans who had virtually pioneered bebop. Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderly, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Mingus, and Max Roach were the leaders of the school of hard bop. They played powerful, driving, loud, and usually very fast tempo music. Their technical dexterity and outstanding wizardry on their instruments was way ahead of the West Coast players. They were the tastemakers of the new music and had a very heavy influence on my playing.
My phonograph helped ease my burning desire to be like my idols. After school I would try to do my homework while the music was playing. The music always won my attention. When the teacher called on me the next day, I was completely oblivious of the question, but daydreaming about music energized me and gave me hope. My trumpet became my personal choice of weapon.
Huddleston was still in South Africa, but about to leave the country for good. He had scheduled a side trip to the United States at the invitation of the South African writer Alan Paton, who was teaching at the Kent School in Connecticut, before returning to England. His order, the Community of the Resurrection, also had a few missions in America. I was very sad, not knowing if I was ever going to see my friend again. I asked if he could help secure me a scholarship to further my music studies, because I knew that if I stayed in South Africa, my career would be doomed. With escalating repression by the apartheid government, and with resistance against it growing every day, I could envision myself being swept away by the powerful currents of radical activism and—given my big mouth and general fearlessness around authority figures—my chances of living very long were rather slim. To progress in my musical career, I would have to get out of South Africa.
“Creature, I’ll see what I can do,” Huddleston said.
Huddleston visited several American cities. He contacted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and discussed the brewing South African situation with the Baptist preacher and fledgling civil rights leader. One night when he was in Rochester, New York, Huddleston managed to see Louis Armstrong backstage before his performance at the Civic Auditorium. Still trying to get us more instruments, Huddleston explained to Satchmo that he had a group of boys in South Africa who were trying to properly learn music. The Star reported that Armstrong said, “I figured they’d rather have a horn I’ve been drawin’ a few of those notes on than a new one.”
Armstrong’s wife, Lucille, a former Cotton Club chorus line dancer, mailed one of her husband’s used trumpets to South Africa. The package arrived on April 11, 1956. The whole band gathered that night at the Polly Street Community Center. Press photographers were everywhere. All the band members got a chance to handle Satchmo’s horn. The following day the Star ran the story in both editions:
LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S TRUMPET ARRIVES—AND A JAZZ SESSION STARTS
HUGH CANNOT BELIEVE HIS LUCK—A TRUMPET FROM THE “KING” HIMSELF
When I opened the package and handled the horn, I was overjoyed. I was seventeen, and for the first time I felt something like a spiritual connection with Satchmo and those musicians back in the states that I idolized to my core. This horn was my connection not just to Armstrong, but to a long, powerful tradition that had crisscrossed the Atlantic from Africa to America and back. It was a sign my direction in life was cemented.
Music was now my everything. A few months later the African newspapers reported that Louis Armstrong was in Accra, Ghana, where ten thousand people had met him at the airport and another fifty thousand had attended his open-air concert. All I could do was close my eyes and imagine I was there shaking his hand, thanking him for sending me his trumpet. I imagined taking out my trumpet and playing a few phrases to let him know that his kindness had been put to good use. Four years later, Armstrong returned to Africa and toured Ghana, Nigeria, the Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast. He wanted to visit South Africa, but the minister of foreign affairs said, “It’s not in the country’s best interest, at the present time, to authorize a visit by Armstrong.” When the apartheid government refused Louis Armstrong entry into South Africa, it only deepened my disgust with my country’s regime, who were now depriving us of access to our musical icon.
Schoolwork was no longer on my radar screen. Every morning and evening I would help my grandmother, Johanna, with her Fish and Chips shop in Alexandra. On the days I skipped school, I’d play on recordings or rehearse for upcoming weekend gigs with the older musicians like Kippie, Zakes, and Ntemi, who were teaching me more and more. When I wasn’t playing gigs with them or the Huddleston band, I was getting steady work with other groups, playing township gigs on what was known as the blood-and-guts circuit—so called because we played in concert halls where fights often broke out. I saw more people stabbed with long-bladed knives than I care to remember. Despite the Paul Meyer incident, a romance bega
n to blossom between Miriam and me. She had a number of lovers, including, for a short time, my cousin Kappie, but we never hid our feelings for each other. After a movie or an afternoon rehearsal at the Bantu Men’s Social Center, we would ease between the tall buildings and smooch during our sunset strolls.
It was hard for me to get too angry with Miriam and her other lovers. After all, she was older than I, more experienced sexually, and the darling of the newspapers. I was a relatively unknown teenager of seventeen, and even though our relationship was never portrayed by the media as a scandal, there were obviously adult considerations that I was unable to fulfill for her. And I had many younger girlfriends that I was not about to cut loose. Miriam didn’t mind if girls my age flirted with me, but once gossip surfaced that a singer from a rival female group and I were seeing each other, she told me, “If I hear you were with that whore again, or anyone of her kind, I’ll kill them.” That’s how Miriam was. She could unsheath a vicious temper, sharper than an ice pick.
Still Grazing Page 11
