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The National Centre for Early Music

Friday 26 February 2010

The Music of Chris McGregor
and the Brotherhood of Breath

For this concert we are delighted to present music written by Chris McGregor for his seminal group The Brotherhood of Breath. This band famously combined exiled South Africans and European based musicians and became hugely influential to a generation of younger players.

The guest artists for this performance - Julian Argüelles (saxophone) and Chris Batchelor (trumpet) - both played with McGregor in The Brotherhood of Breath.

Performance materials for this concert have been reconstructed from original parts, where they exist, and from various recordings.

7.30pm National Centre for Early Music
St. Margaret's Church, Walmgate, York. YO1 9TL
Tickets: £13 (concessions £11); students £3

Image of Chris McGregor courtsey of Jürgen Schadeberg

http://www.jurgenschadeberg.com/

Poster design: Dave Smyth

Programme Notes

I’d like to begin by relating a short story. Perhaps being so short it doesn’t even qualify as a story. However it was told to me, in good humour, when I first began talking to jazz musicians in South Africa about their music. It goes something like this… When a prominent UK jazz musician visited South Africa shortly after the first democratic elections in 1994, they were greatly disappointed to find that there weren’t bands of the ‘Chris McGregor type’ playing in every available bar and club. I’m unsure of the urban myth to vérité ratio of this anecdote, but it does highlight some interesting points about the music in tonight’s concert.

Perhaps the first thing to say is that Chris McGregor’s music is exactly that; Chris McGregor’s music. It provides us with an insight into a highly individual musician’s view of how things could be. Of course McGregor’s view is not born of isolation, and in this sense the aforementioned prominent UK jazz musician may have had a more enlightening time had they looked to the myriad musical places that Chris McGregor looked.

McGregor was born in Somerset West (about 45km south east of Cape Town) in 1936, but before he was one year old his father began teaching at missionary schools and the family moved to what is now the Eastern Cape (at the time this was known as the Transkei which was one of the apartheid government’s designated ‘tribal homelands’). When his father joined the Navy in 1942 McGregor and his mother went back to the Western Cape to live in Cape Town, where he had his first piano lessons. After the end of the Second World War the family moved back to the Eastern Cape and Chris McGregor began attending school in Mthatha. Here he carried on his classical music training but ‘was becoming more interested in Ravel, Debussy and Bartok than in Schumann, Beethoven and Bach’. At this time he also began listening to local urban black music – kwela and mbaqanga – as well as music from America such as the Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots, Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington. There was also, of course, religious music from the mission school as well as the ‘traditional’ music of the amaXhosa people. (Maxine McGregor, 1995) For a variety of reasons – social, political, economic, and geographical – this musical mix would by no means have been available to all South Africans at the time, and this may go some way towards explaining the uniqueness of McGregor’s own creative output. But perhaps the influence that resonates most with tonight’s concert is the one Chris McGregor described in a 1972 interview with Jean-Pierre Cosse:

McGregor doesn’t say which bands but one thing is certain, the documentation of this music is indeed poor. In ‘Jazz People of Cape Town’ Lars Rasmussen interviews several musicians who reflect on the career of Tem Hawker who ran a couple of influential early big bands – the Ballyhooligans, and the Merry Macs (not to be confused with the U.S. close harmony vocal group). M’Brooks Mlomo recalls that the Merry Macs tour of 1948 included Mthatha so it is probable in a modestly sized town that Chris McGregor would have at least been aware of their visit.

To my knowledge there are no surviving recordings of the Merry Macs, if any were ever made. But we can get an idea of the type of big band sound McGregor might have been referring to by listening to reissues of the Havana Swingsters tracks found on Township Swing Jazz! Vol.1 (Gallo African Classics) or by searching the excellent South African Music Archive Project for artists such as Ben ‘Zacks’ Mawela and His Flying Home Orchestra, Gwigwi and his Gwigzas, or Reggie’s Singing Swinging Band. Elements of these old big band styles also live on in recent recordings by veteran bands such as The Elite Swingsters and The African Jazz Pioneers, as well as in live events such as Cups Nkanuka’s Big Band appearance in Artscape Theatre’s 2008 Living Heritage Jazz Festival.

The resonances of all the above musics can be found in the compositions Chris McGregor wrote for the Brotherhood of Breath that feature in tonight’s concert, but it is by no means the whole story. McGregor left an increasingly repressive South Africa in 1964 together with bassist Johnny Dyani, saxophonists Dudu Pukwana and Nik Moyake, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, and drummer Louis Moholo. This group had a rapidly growing musical reputation in South Africa, but as a multi-racial group also attracted unwanted attention from the apartheid authorities. An invitation to perform at the Antibes Jazz Festival provided a way out, and a stepping-stone to exile in London. McGregor was to spend the rest of his life in the UK and, later, France.

By all accounts the Blue Notes arrived to a rather staid London jazz scene, but managed to make connections with a more experimental younger generation of musicians – amongst others, saxophonists Evan Parker, Mike Osbourne and John Surman, trumpeters Harry Beckett and Mark Charig, and trombonist Malcolm Griffiths – and over time the Brotherhood of Breath was born out of this mix of expatriate South Africans and London based musicians.

It was always going to be a logistical struggle to keep a big band like the Brotherhood of Breath in constant work but the band ran for nearly twenty years in various guises, latterly including tonight’s guest soloists Julian Argüelles and Chris Batchelor. A measure of the impact that McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath had on the current UK jazz scene is that it is almost impossible to think of the celebrated band Loose Tubes without the precedent set by Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath.

The music for tonight’s concert is mainly taken from the penultimate album that McGregor made with the Brotherhood of Breath. Country Cooking was recorded in 1988, only two years before McGregor’s death and is described by Tony McGregor on his blog as ‘possibly the greatest Brotherhood album’. It certainly has a different feel to some of the earlier Brotherhood recordings, especially live albums such as Live at Willisau (1974) and Procession (1977) where there is greater emphasis on collective and free improvisation. Other compositions presented tonight were written for a live recording with Archie Shepp in 1989, released as En Concert a Banlieues Bleues.

The performance materials we are using were created from original archived parts, where available, whilst missing parts were transcribed either from Country Cooking or a Brotherhood of Breath session recorded after McGregor’s death for BBC Radio 3’s ‘Jazz On 3’. Where there were discrepancies between written and recorded sources the recorded source was generally preferred.

I began by talking of the sonic melting pot that was Chris McGregor’s musical world. Hopefully we’ll do the music justice and bring out the evident joy that McGregor found in these diverse musics. Listen out for the Ellingtonian orchestration in ‘Maxine’, perhaps something not so evident in McGregor’s recorded output since his first big band album Jazz the African Sound. ‘Sweet As Honey’ – according to the BBC announcer introducing a quartet concert McGregor gave as part of the 1986 Bracknell Festival – is dedicated to Thelonious Monk, and this is certainly reflected in the music. But there is also a South African approach to the swing feel here, perhaps a remnant of those Mthatha big band styles? ‘Amasi’, ‘Mandisa’ and ‘Sea Breeze’ explore the interlocking motifs of mbaqanga, not so much the Mahlathini variety – think more Zakes Nkosi – and the rhythmic cycles of amaXhosa music give ‘Bakwetha’ its distinctive feel.

Enjoy.

Jonathan Eato.

Running Order

You and Me (Sejui)

Amasi

Sweet As Honey

Mayibuye

Big G

Country Cooking

Maxine

Sea Breeze

Bakwetha

Mandisa

All compositions were creditied to Chris McGregor except You and Me (Sejui) (Chris McGregor and Peter Tholo Segona) and Big G (George Lee and Chris McGregor), but the contribution of Ernest Mothle a long standing musical collaborator with McGregor shouldn’t be underestimated.

Guest Soloists

Julian Argüelles (saxophone), Chris Batchelor (trumpet)

University of York Jazz Orchestra

Joe Murgatroyd (alto saxophone, bass clarinet) Naomi Townsend (alto saxophone, clarinet, flute) Tom English (tenor saxophone) Louise Ford (tenor saxophone, clarinet, flute) Leo Plunkett (baritone saxophone) Richard Blake (trumpet, flugelhorn) Matt Postle (trumpet, flugelhorn) Katie MacKay (trumpet) Noah Noutch (trombone) David Sims (trombone) Tom Cameron (piano, tuba) Chris Gough (piano) Vanessa McWilliam (bass) Dave Smyth (drums)

Acknowledgements

Very many thanks to Maxine McGregor, Frank Williams and Denis-Constant Martin for their help in getting us to the point where we could present this wonderful music. Thanks also to Jürgen Schadeberg for allowing us to use his image of Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath in our publicity, (www.jurgenschadeberg.com) and to Dave Smyth for creating the poster. Finally Gareth Taitt and Dave Smyth for their help in creating performance materials.

Further Information

Maxine McGregor’s book ‘Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath: My Life with a South African Jazz Pioneer’ was published in 1995 by Bamberger Books.

Lars Rasmussen’s ‘Jazz People of Cape Town’ (2003) is available from The Booktrader in København (www.booktrader.dk).

More information on the Blue Notes can be found on Mike Fowler’s excellent online resource (www.mfowler.myzen.co.uk).

The South African Music Archive Project (SAMAP) features the Chris Ballantine Collection and is hosted by Digital Innovation South Africa (DISA) at the University of KwaZulu Natal. (www.disa.ukzn.ac.za/samap)

Country Cooking was re-released in 2001 on the French label Great Winds/Musea.

In Africa there’s a whole school of big bands that’s perhaps not very well recorded but when I was coming up there were many big bands operating. I started arranging in that style – for Saturday night dance music. So I’m very much influenced by a whole school that is still not very well known. (Quoted in McGregor, 1995)