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TODD MATSHIKIZA |
| Todd Matshikiza is the first major exponent of jazz criticism in South African cultural history. As a member of the Sophiatown Renaissance, the last intellectual generation of the New African Movement, he represented a new departure and a new musical sensibility in that the previous three intellectual generations of the Movement, symbolically represented by Solomon T. Plaatje, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Jordan Kush Ngubane, were uniformly hostile to jazz. Since these three brilliant and towering intellectuals, and other members of the earlier periods of the Movement such as R. V. Selope Thema or R. R. R. Dhlomo had no firm grasp on musical matters, their judgements and evaluation of music, especially concerning jazz, can be easily dismissed. But that is not the case with Mark S. Radebe who largely agreed with the hostility of his peers towards jazz. This is because Radebe, as his music criticism in Umteteli wa Bantu in the late 1920s and the 1930s makes clear, had a formidable knowledge of musical matters. Radebe hostility to jazz was based on his belief that it did not possess the harmonic complexity of European classical music. To him it was incomprehensible and a cultural disaster that the the mass of New African proletariat in the major cities in the 1920s and in the 1930s were clamoring for jazz as a cultural form that would facilitate their utmost entrance into modernity. In this hostility Mark S. Radebe saw himself as representing the cultural tradition of John Knox Bokwe which had from the late nineteenth-century had embraced Negro spirituals as the best achievement of the New Negroes in modernity. Many of the Xhosa intellectuals who gravitated around John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu newspaper in the 1890s, such as Elijah Makiwane, Isaac Wauchope, Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba, Walter Rubusana, S. E. K. Mqhayi, as well as the Zulu intellectuals aligned with John Langalibalele Dube’s Ilanga lase Natal newspaper in the 1900s and in the 1920s, such as Josiah Mapumulo, A. H. Ngidi, R. R. R. Dhlomo, Ngazana Luthuli, all believed that the Negro spirituals possessed the ethical system that was appropriate for moral sensibility of Christianized New Africans who were grappling with the complexities of modernity. These intellectuals saw the Negro spirituals as spiritually related to the Christian hymns which the European missionaries had infused in their consciousness. Mark S. Radebe, coming after these intellectuals and political leaders, saw himself as defending, continuing and honoring a venerable tradition. A line he draw between himself and his senior intellectual predecessors and cohorts is that whereas he saw them defending the tradition on spiritual terms, he himself attempted to defend it on musical terms, which was the terrain on which jazz must be struggled against. Radebe was supported in this project by two New African intellectual colleagues in the 1940s, Walter Nhlapo in his column of musical appreciations in the Bantu World newspaper and H. I. E. Dhlomo in his various columns in the Ilanga lase Natal newspaper. In praising jazz as well as theorizing it as an artistic form on the pages of Drum magazine as well as those of the Golden City Post Sunday newspaper, Todd Matshikiza was fundamentally transforming a whole tradition of musical sensibility within the cultural history of the New African Movement. In this sense Matshikiza created an intellectual revolution without wishing to be revolutionary. A fascinating paradox. An important thing to note here is that despite their dispute as to which musical form of New Negro modernity to appropriate for the historical needs of New African modernity, whether Negro spirituals (perceived as music for the soul) or jazz (perceived as music for the body), both Mark S. Radebe and Todd Matshikiza were in agreement in recognizing the indissolubility of the unity between New Negroism and New Africanism. What aided the triumph of Matshikiza’s championing of jazz as the essential musical form for transforming the consciousness and sensibility of New Africans (be they middle class or proletarian) into an organic relationship with modernity was marabi music. In fact one of the central theses of Matshikiza’s astonishing brilliance is that not only marabi music facilitated the appropriation of jazz by the newly urbanized New Africans, it also enabled them to transform classic American jazz into Township jazz which expressed a modern African sensibility. This deeply insightful understanding of our cultural history is formulated by him as he attempted to trace one of the origins of South African jazz in our great jazz pianist of the 1920s named GASHE (Todd Matshikiza, “Stars of Jazz”, Drum, June 1957). One unquestionable and singular achievement of Todd Matshikiza is that he was our pre-eminent theoretician, critic and historian of South African jazz. This is apparent in the many articles he wrote in the three music columns he wrote in the 1950s: Music for Moderns and Disc-ussing in Drum magazine and Nite-Life in the weekly Golden City Post Sunday newspaper. As brilliant and riveting form of cultural history, these columns in many ways continue the tradition established by H. I. E. Dhlomo in his Weekly Review and Commentary column of the 1940s and the 1950s in Ilanga lase Natal. Besides being a serious historian of South African jazz, however incomplete his construction, Matshikiza was a perceptive critic of American jazz. Just to name a few examples of his appreciation of this great New Negro music in Drum magazine: “Art Tatum: The Blind Wizard of the Piano”, Masterpiece in Bronze, April 1953; “Louis Armstrong: The King of Jazz”, Masterpiece in Bronze, January 1953. Perhaps what made it possible for Todd Matshikiza to write so perceptively about jazz was his serious craft as a jazz pianist as well as a jazz composer. The great altoist Kippie Moeketsi recalls the days of his performing with Todd Matshikiza: “After the band [The Band In Blues] broke I joined the Harlem Swingsters in 1949. We had chaps like Gwigwi Mrwebi, Skip Phahlane, Ntemi Piliso, Randolph Tai Shomang, Norman Martin (if I’m not wrong) and Todd Matshikiza. Sadly, the majority of the guys are all dead. Those olden days, you wouldn’t play in a band if you could not read music. Unlike today, where you just play. That’s why I don’t like today’s music. I don’t say I’m condemning it. I dono’t say it is backward. In fact, some of today’s musicians are good. The trouble with them is that they are too commercial. The talent scout tells them, ‘Don’t play jazz because the audience dobn’t like it.’ You understand what I’m trying to say? A year after I had joined the Harlem Swingsters, the band broke up. Really, there were no reasons, except for financial difficulties. In those days, big bands didn’t make sufficient money. Yet, those were the days of the best big bands in the country---Jazz Maniacs, Swingsters, Merry Blackbirds, Rhythm Clouds and African Hellenics” (“Kippie’s Memories”, Staffrider, November 1981). As a composer, today Todd Matshikiza is remembered for composing the “King Kong” musical show in the late 1950s, and landed on the London stage in the early 1960s. Given this extraordinary encounter between Todd Matshikiza and the construction of jazz criticism in South Africa, it is profoundly disheartening and bitterly disappointing that when he wrote and published his autobiography in exile, Chocolates For My Wife (1961), he hardly mentions music in any form even in a single sentence. This is totally incomprehensible. Perhaps the reason for the absence of any reference to jazz as a musical form, let alone its analysis, is that, as Ezekiel perceptively postulates in his review of the autobiography in Transition, Matshikiza attempted to realize and approximate jazz rhythmic forms in the prose of the text: “This is what happened to Todd Matshikiza one night when he was waiting for a bus after a King Kong rehearsal---the stage show for which he composed the music. . . Todd Matshikiza is at his best when he relates anecdotes from his South African experience. His writing then shows something of what we were used to seeing in his journalism in South Africa: jazzy staccato, the sound of whip-cracks and a characteristic, sudden and outrageous twist of prose to suit his needs. All these are produced by the cross currents of jazz, the literature of jazz, Negro literature and the South African experience that run in the writer’s veins” (“Chocolates for the Police”, vol. 2 no. 5, July 30---August 29, 1962). Perhaps only a fellow member of the Sophiatown Renaissance could have made such an acute observation. It only remains to conclude this consideration of Todd Matshikiza with an obituary note when he died in 1968 by another Drum writer, Casey Motsisi: “He used to harness his words with a subtle simplicity which marked him out as a man of talent. Can Themba referred to his style as ‘Matshikeze.’ It was inimitable in its ungrammatical experimentations. It was a melody. The kind od melody that Todd poured into the play “King Kong” which was a hit here and abroad and which also gave Miriam Makeba her first big break into the firmament world of stage and film. . . Todd wrote a book Chocolates for my Wife dedicated to Esme [his wife]. It was typical of Todd. Typical too for our republic that the powers that be banned the book which was written in exile in London. He was also ‘silenced’ in exile. Todd died in Zambia. Reading between the lines of the reports about his death I felt that Todd gave up the struggle for life with the feeling that his efforts to make it the beauty that the Almighty planned it to be was beyond his powers. Yet he had the powers. Powers brilliant in their simplicity. In a nutshell his philosophy read: “We art brethren.” But somehow we are not mature enough to accept this fact” (“Todd Matshikiza”, Classic, vol. 3 no. 1, 1968). The powers Todd Matshikiza had in assisting to make jazz a fundamental part of South African culture in the twentieth-century were extraordinary by any measure. The aesthetic duel between Todd Matshikiza and Mark S. Radebe, similar to that between H. I. E. Dhlomo and Benedict Banbatha Vilakazi in the 1920s, and the political duel between Elijah Makiwane and Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba in the 1880s, has become part of our climate. | |