The Blue Notes “Legacy Live in South Africa 1964” (Ogun 1995, reissued in 2022)

If you would listen to fresh improvised or experimental music in 2020 or so, outside of Europe or the United States, you have to go to Mexico. If you would listen to something similar and at the same coordinates, but in 2010, you had to go to Turkey. There, in particular, you would be able to find musicians striving for their freedom of expression issuing new records and setting new collaborations, as the one with european genius saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and US incredible bandleader and multireedist Marshall Allen.

But what if you were searching for a new, exciting sound during the 1960s? Obviosly the answer would be: go to South Africa. There, despite of the apartheid, a bunch of simply brilliant and original musicians, mostly exhibiting through Universities or small clubs, were trying to overcome the barriers dividing people from people using music as a tool, as a device, as a peaceful weapon.

Why are you reading on this blog about this bunch of courageous musicians? Because label Ogun is now reissuing Blue Notes catalogue, and luckily enough last saturday, hanging around into some small record shops, I found out some copies of these records. In this review I will tell you about the live album Legacy – Live in South Afrika 1964, originally released only in 1995 because printing records of mixed bands during their lifetime wasn’t easy in the land of Nelson Mandela for many decades.

Legacy is a record that features the music of a sextet. The performers involved are pianist Chris McGregor, altoist Dudu Pukwana, tenorist Nick Moyake, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo. This line up of The Blue Notes recorded in Durban this session of live music that, according to the first two pieces, Now and Coming Home, is more keen on Thelonious Monk as far as themes and development.

Life was not easy for a racially mixed band in the 1960s in South Africa, and so they moved quickly to London where their influence on both improvised scene and the so-called Canterbury Style was highly praised during the decades, giving the musicians involved the opportunity to become keener on a less non idiomatic and more direct way of expressing themselves through music, or the possibility to expand their palette with one foot into jazz and not only into rock style.

McGregor and his pals gave life to the Brotherhood of Breath when in the UK, but this record from the ‘segregation era’ is vivid, pulsating and interesting. If the first and second tracks are monkian as we have written here above, with I Cover The Waterfront they give life to an intense cover of a classic from the jazz repertoire; in listening to it one wonders what if they would have played it at the Juan-Les-Pins festival the same year. I strongly believed a black panther like Archie Shepp would have approved.

Two for Sandi is an original by Dudu Pukwana reminiscent of the bebop or post bop era, where he gives life to an incendiary performance along with his friends reedists, starting from Feza, after a quick introduction and a tutti-exposed theme. After some rest, with the mid tempos of McGregors’ Vortex Special, where the solos of alto (Pukwana is simply telling a story with all its nuances in there) and trumpet (Feza expresses himself through different colors and shapes here), while the tenor of Moyake plays far beyond the limits of a human voice as this particular saxophone is compared, there’s time for a little hommage to Miles Davis and So What thanks to the piano and reeds, before going back to the main theme of the original composition.

B My Dear and Dorkey House are a couple of themes from Pukwana. The first is a ballad still indebted to Monk, as the title itself can suggest, with an evocative tutti from the three horns which gets a round of applause by the audience, followed by a beautiful piano solo, while the last piece is another hommage to bebop, with flamboyant solos by Pukwana himself, Feza and Moyake. Far from being pure improvised music, this album shows a love for different traditions in the jazz area but with a cooperative more than a conflicting attitude.

In fact, the musicians are proud to expose their style and sound but without fighting for being recognized as the best performer over the others: we can feel yet that cooperative mood that from the following decade will hopefully become the norm in the jazz world. But the importance of this record is that of a hystorical testimony for all those who are interested in how jazz music had an impact on different lands and traditions, and how these new expressions modified the process in the mainstream communities of the free jazz and avant garde era.