BLUE NOTES - Blue Notes For Mongezi

 

(OGD 001/002 - double album)

 

Track listing: Blue Notes For Mongezi: First Movement/Blue Notes For Mongezi: Second Movement/Blue Notes For Mongezi: Third Movement/Blue Notes For Mongezi: Fourth Movement

 

Dudu Pukwana (alto sax, whistle, percussion, vocals); Chris McGregor (piano, percussion); Johnny Dyani (bass, bell, vocals "and most of the words"); Louis Moholo-Moholo (drums, percussion, vocals).

 

Recorded: "in a rehearsal room in London," 23 December 1975. Released: late 1976. Produced by Keith Beal and Chris McGregor. Sleeve design: George Hallett.

 

The death of Mongezi Feza fucked everybody and everything up. Robert Wyatt, who knew him well and frequently worked with him, observed some years later that he saw a parallel between the deaths of Feza and Steve Biko - both South African radicals who lived roughly in the same period of time and whose deaths were brutal and questionable.

 

What appears to have happened is that the trumpeter smashed up a taxi cab after suffering hallucinatory delusions, and/or flashbacks, that he was being taken away by Bureau of State Security authorities to be detained and killed. He was promptly detained in a now long-defunct psychiatric hospital (I know its name and former location, but the elements of confidentiality associated with my day job preclude any further description). There he was lazily and contempuously regarded as the stereotypical Crazy Black Guy and his protestations went largely ignored.

 

Feza developed double pneumonia; it was observed at his later Brotherhood Of Breath stage performances that he was already looking somewhat frail and poorly. The late autumn of 1975 was cold and harsh, as though winter had arrived early, and so were the hospital grounds. But the authorities were not, as it turned out, solely to blame. In his Invisible Jukebox feature in issue 400 of The Wire, published in July 2017, Louis Moholo-Moholo remarked that the trumpeter was often his own worst enemy - he would often jog through the hospital's corridors in the freezing cold, wearing nothing but a vest and shorts, and sometimes even come out to visit his friends at their homes.

 

Inevitably, Feza's double pneumonia worsened, and fatally - and stupidly - the hospital staff opted to give him a sedative, the last thing you should do with a patient in that condition. It allowed the fluid in his lungs to build up and ultimately suffocate him, and he died on 14 December, aged only thirty. It blew a hole in the expatriate South African jazz community - and therefore, by extension, also the plans of Ogun Records - which has never been fully refilled in the intervening half-century. At the time Feza had formed his own group, Bantu Society, which would undoubtedly have recorded for Ogun if they had had the chance. His recorded work throughout that year, which ranged from Robert Wyatt's Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard to Dudu Pukwana's Diamond Express, demonstrated how firmly he was stepping out of the Don Cherry lineage and forming an entirely individual voice on his instrument.

 

But it all turned out to be too late. After Feza's memorial service was held, nine days following his death - funds were raised to send his body back to South Africa to be buried - the four surviving members of the Blue Notes, who really had not met, let alone played together, for some considerable time, proceeded wordlessly to a rehearsal room somewhere in north London. There the musicians set up their instruments, and, still without one prior word, played and played and sang and played for something like three and a half hours without a break. After forty-five minutes or so, somebody remembered to switch on the recording equipment, and what you hear in Blue Notes For Mongezi are the results of the music that was documented.

 

Because of the limitations of the long-playing record, the original double album was necessarily a set of highlights but still made for one of the most harrowing listening experiences I can recall; the passion, the grief, the words, above all Johnny Dyani’s words, seemed almost too painful for public consumption, but as an act of catharsis and reconciliation it was surely needed, and over the course of its four sides the music did seem to reach a point of acknowledgement and resolution.

 

As I say, only about half of what was played that day appeared on the initial double album. That was draining enough listening in itself and the uncommon intensity of the music made a lot of people feel intimidated. This was some of the most rawly and openly emotional music ever recorded, and it proved unnerving to some because it represented traditions of mourning unknown to Western European music, or indeed culture, but which in the history of the Xhosa tribe stretched back centuries.

 

But others were also unnerved by the music - many of the expatriate South African community who knew Feza well could not listen to the record because its contents, and specifically its words, were personally upsetting. Listening to Blue Notes For Mongezi might have been akin to looking in on a process that the average, conditioned Western listener could not hope to understand - whereas, with the Blue Notes themselves, it was immediately instinctive. As a thirteen-year-old, I found the rawness, the rage and the sadness overwhelming and overpowering; yet I recognised its patient and painful journey towards resolution and rebirth.

 

In 2008 the full recording finally became available on the Blue Notes - The Ogun Collection 5-CD box set. Over two CDs, the playing time has effectively doubled in length, and we now have the complete record, or as complete a record as we’re going to get, of everything that was played and taped on that day; according to Keith Beal, the musicians started playing practically the moment they came into the room, while the recording equipment was still being set up, and there is an abrupt but small break in the music between the two CDs which marked the point where the tape reels had to be changed, but otherwise the performance is complete.

 

The completeness also alters the listener’s perspective on the music radically, such that one is effectively listening to a new extended piece of music altogether; the grief is immediately apparent as the music fades in at a point where most records would be expected to climax - Dudu’s alto squealing, Dyani’s bowed bass scribbling, McGregor’s piano an abstracted ghost on the far left, Moholo-Moholo’s drums busy but strangely subdued. The pace is necessarily slower and more organic than on the original L.P. release but the overall picture is critically more detailed; we have Dyani’s urgent ostinatos and parched Xhosa (and occasional English) cries but they are now set in a more complex landscape where there are long periods of straight swing or Coltrane-type waltz passages.

 

In the “Second Movement” Dyani’s bass solo remains poignant to the point of unendurable (in terms of unalloyed, bereaved sorrow), though clearly influenced by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra recording of “Song For Che,” with rattling percussion from all direction accompanying his playing and Dudu’s solemn alto succeeding him in the foreground with an eventual martial feel of defiance in the group’s rhythm. This is then succeeded by Dyani and Dudu’s vocal harmonies and chants, again accompanied only by free percussion.

 

From this point of prayer-filled stasis, the music gradually picks up again on the second CD; Pukwana picks up on “Yellow Rose Of Texas” from nowhere in particular (though in the English vocal sections I not only notice lots of “We love you”s but also Dyani’s ominous “We know your enemies.” Meanwhile, in his hilarious review, Barry McRae, the only writer on Jazz Journal who liked post-Ornette jazz, gets himself into a right tangle attempting to describe the whole album in terms of its music alone, without reference to its societal context; I was reminded of what Constant Lambert said in Music Ho! about Hindemith - unfair in Hindemith's case but I think his words worth repeating here - "He seems to think that some mystic value resides in the mere performance of notes - that the scraping of horsehair over catugut is in itself a health-giving and praiseworthy action, comparable to having a cold bath in the morning or being a Storm Trooper. His view of music would appear to be almost excretory") and turns that too into an ANC-worthy anthem of hopeful triumph, while the band as a whole suddenly swing through a whole series of Blue Notes/Brotherhood standards, most notably a spirited run through Feza’s “Sonia” with a terrific McGregor/Dyani duet section. Ultimately we arrive, after a lengthy and patient set-up, at the lilting major key tribute to Feza which concluded the original album, where the Blue Notes appear to will their own rebirth and “live” once more. Blue Notes For Mongezi is their “Everything’s Gone Green” and just as emotional and complete a listening experience, and the most honest and dignified of musical memorials I can recall.

 

Current availability: although the Blue Notes box set is long out of print, Blue Notes For Mongezi was reissued in its own, full-length right on CD in 2022 and of course is also now obtainable via download.