MUSIC THAT PARTS THE CLOUDS FROM MATSULI MUSIC by RICHARD HASLOP

The mainstream South African music industry has often been criticised, and rightly, over the years for not paying enough attention to significant portions of the country’s musical history, especially in the CD era when crate-digging for forgotten and, better still, previously undiscovered gems became something of a cottage industry in other parts. There were exceptions, of course, few and scattered though they were, with a golden Gallo (and, to a lesser extent, Teal) period making use of the extraordinary historical expertise and enthusiasm of archivist Rob Allingham, who it has always seemed has forgotten more local musical history than most of the rest of the industry ever knew … and Allingham doesn’t forget much.

Which is where Matsuli Music comes in. Matsuli is an independent record label run from London by former South African Matt Temple and from Durban by Chris Albertyn and dealing mainly, though more recently by no means exclusively, in beautifully rejigged vinyl reissues of extremely rare South African albums. They call what they do the fight against forgetting, or even more accurately, perhaps, the fight against oblivion, which is no doubt where many, if not all, of their reissues would have ended up without their intervention. The title of their latest of 26 albums currently appearing on their Bandcamp page (https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/) pretty much tells that part of the story. It’s ‘Zulu Guitar Blues: Cowboys, Troubadours and Jilted Lovers 1950-1965’. But more of that later.

The record label grew out of the Electric Jive blogspot (https://electricjive.blogspot.com/), an internet resource where these inveterate collectors of old and dusty South African records and a couple of their mates posted music you basically couldn’t hear anywhere else, along with stories of the people who made it. It hasn’t been operating for a while but is still worth a visit.

Typically, a Matsuli release is a multi-faceted wonder whose vinyl quality, album design and extensive liner notes, particularly on the reissues, compete with the best anywhere. In addition, the rarity of the music, some of which hardly saw daylight at the time of its initial publication, will satisfy even the most fastidious collectors. The label’s choices are the end result of Matsuli’s deep knowledge of and abiding love for what might be seen as the underground history of mainly black South African music, a history that they are unearthing one release at a time.

 

Gideon Nxumalo – Gideon Plays

The Ibrahim Khalil Shihab Quintet featuring Mankunku – Spring 

The Soul Jazzmen – Inhlupeko: Distress

Ndikho Xaba and the Natives – Ndikho Xaba and the Natives

Spirits Rejoice – African Spaces 

There is a view, expressed in the typically splendid notes accompanying ‘Ndikho Xaba and the Natives’, that South Africa has the most fully developed jazz tradition in the world outside of America, so it’s not surprising that Matsuli’s releases have focused on jazz and jazz-related records to the extent that they have. The album itself is strongly political in the spiritual jazz style of the time whose most typically South African piece, the wonderfully titled Zulu Lunchbox, is, ironically enough, a CD bonus track. Made with American musicians and released in 1971 while pianist Xaba was in self-imposed exile in the USA, it was largely overlooked until this well-deserved reissue revealed it to be an absolute keeper.

Though much of the label’s output is by artists whose fame, such as it may once have been, has diminished over time, they have released, for example, a live session recorded in Lesotho by Hugh Masekela with American saxophonist René McLean whose father, Jackie, was a Downbeat Hall of Fame altoist who played with and apparently once nearly stabbed the legendary Charles Mingus with a knife, along with obscurities by a couple of members of the inestimably great ’60s exiles, the Blue Notes. However, notwithstanding the obvious care with which Matsuli releases this music into the world, they don’t always get the permission they need. So, for example, the highly sought-after ‘Underground In Africa’, by Abdullah Ibrahim when he was still Dollar Brand, remains unavailable despite the fine job the label did with his wife Sathima Bea Benjamin’s ‘African Songbird’, on which Ibrahim plays.

Pianist, composer and much-loved jazz radio presenter Gideon Nxumalo recorded the groundbreaking ‘Jazz Fantasia’ at the Wits University Great Hall in 1962 with twin alto saxes by Kippie Moeketsi and Dudu Pukwana and featuring himself on an indigenous African xylophone. The album was reissued during that golden ’90s period mentioned before, but Nxumalo fell into political disfavour in the ’60s and didn’t record again until 1968’s announcement that ‘Gideon Plays’. The album, so rare as to have been almost mythical until Matsuli’s reissue, features Nxumalo and his band in a variety of styles and moods with conspicuous flute and the composer’s keyboards extending to electric piano, most prominently on the lively Rondo, organ and even harpsichord.

1968 was also the year of Coltranesque saxophonist Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi’s monumental ‘Yakhal’ Inkomo’, one of South Africa’s greatest recordings in any style. Just four months later, Mankunku was back in the studio with Cape Town pianist Chris Schilder’s band for a superb album, entitled ‘Spring’, which was commercially rather dwarfed by the success of the earlier record. Then, in 1973, the masters were destroyed in a fire at EMI and the album virtually disappeared until it found itself sharing a 1996 CD reissue of ‘Yakhal’ Inkomo’ where you had to read the booklet notes to discover that the second half of the CD was actually ‘Spring’. Matsuli’s reissue of the album itself has rectified the situation. In the meantime, Schilder had changed his name, hence the seemingly different artist’s name on the record.

The next year saw the release of another landmark record featuring a tenorist significantly influenced by John Coltrane, albeit that the local Coltrane endorsements tended to hark back to his great quartet days and earlier rather than adopting the much freer, more exploratory style he embraced in the years immediately before his death. This was ‘Inhlupeko: Distress’ by the Soul Jazzmen, a highly appropriately named band that featured pianist Tete Mbambisa alongside saxman Duku Makasi. It’s a wonderfully bluesy record with loads of soul that seldom strays too far from a ’60s hard bop base and might, in a slightly different world, have proved as enduringly popular as the Mankunku classic.

By 1977 the landscape had changed radically, both musically and politically, and Makasi’s saxophones (credited here, possibly as a sign of more progressive musical times and the band’s appearance, unusually for a Matsuli reissue, on a major label, to Duke rather than Duku) were now driving the latest incarnation of Spirits Rejoice, which he had put together with drummer Gilbert Mathews. An early version of the group had featured the preternatural pianistic gifts of Bheki Mseleku whose debut album, ‘Celebration’, is also a Matsuli vinyl release. So, while we’re on the subject of South African piano masters, is ‘Genes And Spirits’ by the tragic Moses Taiwa Molelekwa, which now includes an extra track, which was originally on his posthumously released ‘Wa Mpona’.

Anyway, ‘African Spaces’, the first recorded manifestation of Spirits Rejoice, with virtuosic playing everywhere you looked, featured complex electric and electrifying interplay between Mervyn Africa’s Chick Corea-inspired keys and Russel Herman’s guitar, underpinned and yet simultaneously challenged by Sipho Gumede’s outstanding bass playing, while the horn section’s sax and two brass consistently found interesting places to go. Although a couple of the vocal tracks now sound very much a product of their time, and of the fact that the Atlantic label was bankrolling the sessions, the album stands up as something of a local classic.

 

Dudu Pukwana – Dudu Phukwana and the “Spears”

Various Artists – Makgona Tsohle Reggi

Okay Temiz / Johnny Dyani – Witchdoctor’s Son

 In 1968 the renowned American folk-rock producer Joe Boyd, who had also produced jazz albums for exiled Blue Notes offshoots, took alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, on his day one of South Africa’s most brilliant musicians, into a London studio to try out his idea of putting South African township jive together with musicians from other disciplines. He left the results, which he regarded as unfinished and unsatisfactory, with South Africa’s Trutone label in Johannesburg and they gave the record a limited release, even repeating one track but giving it two different names. Struck by the sounds of mbaqanga, which he heard while in the country, Boyd went back to London to try again, this time with Fairport Convention guitarists Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol in tow. He had lent them a mbaqanga compilation to learn from, but for various reasons nothing came of those sessions until Matsuli obtained a copy of some of those later recordings and released this double album, with the artist’s name misspelled just as it had been in 1969. The album, ragged though parts of it may be, could be the most fascinating of Matsuli’s reissues. It received wide international acclaim and Boyd has completely changed his opinion of it.

The mbaqanga compilation that Boyd lent Thompson featured Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens strongly, though under different names, with the fantastic Makgona Tsohle Band. Notably, Thompson attempted, with a degree of success, to copy the trademark Marks Mankwane guitar style virtually note-for-note. It seems that Matsuli doesn’t only release records, it also distributes a few for like-minded friends. ‘Makgona Tsohle Reggi’ is an engaging and often exciting compilation of formative tracks recorded by the Makgona Tsohle guys, sometimes under their own band name and sometimes simply featuring their members. Despite the album title, there’s no instantly recognisable reggae here, though Marks Reggi is pure Jamaican ska, but there are a variety of other styles, including the mbaqanga which they are sometimes claimed to have invented, all of them well worth your time and money. The album can be found here: https://umsakazo.bandcamp.com/album/makgona-tsohle-reggi.

Johnny Dyani and Dudu Pukwana were both members of the Blue Notes who moved to the UK in the mid-1960s, largely because of the difficulties a mixed-race band encountered playing at home. Determinedly modern and exploratory in their approach, they had a significant and galvanising influence on the British jazz scene but Dyani left the others as he believed, so they say, that they were too far under the spell of American free jazz and were becoming disconnected from their roots. The ‘Witchdoctor’s Son’ title can be confusing. Dyani and Pukwana collaborated with Danish saxophonist John Tchicai on a 1978 album with that title, and in 1987 the two South Africans released an album entitled ‘Together’ with others who seemed to constitute a band called Witchdoctor’s Son. This Matsuli reissue, previously only granted a very limited release, and then only in Turkey, predates both of those. Essentially Dyani and Turkish drummer Okay Temiz take a side each, though each appears on the other’s cuts. A heady mix of traditional roots and the avant-garde, and at its best a demonstration of how the latter has fed off the former, the album contains a wonderful example of bass player Dyani’s piano playing and singing on Don Cherry’s Elhamdulillah Marimba.

 

The Brother Moves On – Tolika Mtoliki

Batsumi – Batsumi / Moving Along

Not all Matsuli’s releases are reissues. It seems that Matt Temple once saw contemporary multi-disciplinary collective/jazzish band (let’s call them jazz since there’s no convenient way to label them and, like Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, jazz contains multitudes) The Brother Moves On’s polemical, confrontational and frequently quite brilliant mix of music and spoken word politics cover a song by 1970’s nearly forgotten, almost cultishly semi-legendary Afro-jazz and several points further afield outfit Batsumi. Batsumi’s eponymous debut and second and final album, ‘Moving Along’ had both been reissued by Matsuli.

The resulting connection led to the recording of ‘Tolika Mtoliki’, a fabulous set of reinterpretations of music by iconic South Africans including Batsumi, the Malopoets, the mighty Malombo and Johnny Dyani. You Think You Know Me’s take on another former Blue Note, trumpeter Mongesi Feza’s undeniable classic You Ain’t Gonna Know Me ‘Cos You Think You Know Me is singularly memorable.

If there’s one record that sums up Matsuli’s ethos, it might be that Batsumi debut. Originally released in 1974, it is, at least for its time, a highly distinctive, almost unique, adventure into ideas of freedom, spirituality and, as noted in the new liner notes, Steve Biko’s ideals of Black Consciousness. The fact that the father of one of the group members would later be elected president of the Pan-Africanist Congress while in prison seems both critical information and yet, somehow, less relevant to the music than one might expect.

That music, performed by a fine, percussion-rich septet – one member’s name appears twice in the list of band members on the original back cover – and featuring guitar, flute, organ and tenor sax, creates plenty of space without ever losing its focus. Incantatory vocals are sung in several South African languages, specifically identified on the original sleeve, whose notes are bilingual, as Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and Shangaan, perhaps to encourage as many of the playlisters in the linguistically divided and divisive SABC as possible to air the album. Somehow, the group recorded a follow up, two years later, but the records soon went out of print and that, except for a combination of myth, rumour and the odd lucky collector’s find, was that, until this 2011 reissue.

 

The Anchors – Black Soul

The Beaters – Harari

Harari – Rufaro

The line between instrumental soul music and jazz is often hard to define, and even less clear when the music comes with a township twist, and so it is with Alexandra band the Anchors. Saxophonist Zacks Nkosi was a jazzman through and through, veteran of a couple of famous township swing outfits. His son Jabu, who played organ, was later part of the musically considerably more modern Sakhile. The other sax was by Kid Lex Hendricks who had been a kwela favourite, while trumpeter Banza Kgasoane went on to play with the Beaters and Harari. The music on ‘Black Soul’, the group’s fine but long-forgotten third album, released in 1972, reflects this. Where Givens Boots Part 2 is essentially soul music as played by groups like the Bar-Kays, most of whose original members died in the plane crash that killed Otis Redding, whom they often backed, and Lonnie’s Cup is pitched somewhere between Booker T. & the MG’s from Memphis and the Meters from New Orleans, but with a South African horn section, Manana features vocal chants, On The Spot has a definite township feel with a touch of the laidback early ’70s and Rhodesia sounds uncommonly like kwela.

A visit to Rhodesia – the country now called Zimbabwe rather than the Anchors tune – changed the way the Beaters approached their musical lives. A popular township soul band who loved rock and drew heavily on American music for inspiration, they played a long engagement in Harare, then a part of what was called Salisbury. Rediscovering, as drummer Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse has said, their African-ness, they returned to South Africa, wrote a song for the people of Harari, named their next album after the song, and then changed their band name to Harari for the following one, which they called ‘Rufaro’, meaning happiness. The core band comprised bassist Om Alec Khaoli, who would have a long and successful career as an artist, producer and possibly the first black African owner of a South African recording studio; Mabuse, who would become one of South Africa’s most famous and well-loved recording artists; and guitarist Selby Ntuli, who died before he could accumulate a post-Harari career but whose niece, Thandi Ntuli, is one of South Africa’s leading jazz pianists.

The music changed along with the name. In 1975, the year of the ‘Harari’ album, the rhythm section played on the iconic ‘Tshona!’ album with local jazz heroes Kippie Moeketsi and Pat Matshikiza and the band’s own music began to stretch and to take on a more explicitly African consciousness. ‘Rufaro’ was recorded in 1976, politically a watershed year of course, and the music reflected that as well, while still making people dance. These two records would provide powerful inspiration to the next generation of South African bands.

 

Kyle Shepherd – After The Night, The Day Will Surely Come

Kyle Shepherd Trio – A Dance More Sweetly Played

Derek Gripper – One Night On Earth: Music From The Strings Of Mali

Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper – Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper

 Matsuli has more recently begun to dip its toes into contemporary South African instrumental music that it believes in and that it believes ought to have a high-quality vinyl release. So, ‘After The Night, The Day Will Surely Come’, an elegant, eloquent solo piano record by Cape Town’s Kyle Shepherd that expresses in sound the calm reflection and hopeful anticipation of the album title, was released by the label in 2021 and last year, its successor, ‘A Dance More Sweetly Played’, where Shepherd is joined by the beautifully understated rhythm section of Shane Cooper and Jonno Sweetman, followed. Where the solo album is simply lovely, the trio effort is a masterfully varied collection that includes entirely successful versions of Massive Attack’s Teardrop and, perhaps surprisingly, Journey’s stadium rock anthem Don’t Stop Believin’. That original rendition has been confirmed as the most often digitally downloaded song released in the 20^th century where the downloader has paid, yet Shepherd still finds something new to say. His career as a composer for film is referenced in a couple of the tracks, there are traces of the national anthem in Liberation Movements, and there is also a tribute to the great Wassoulou singer from Mali, Oumou Sangaré.

Derek Gripper is an exceptional fingerstyle guitarist from Cape Town whose 2012 album, ‘One Night On Earth: Music From The Strings Of Mali’, astonished the acoustic guitar world and attracted the attention of the disparate likes of classical guitar legend John Williams and Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté, attention that was close enough for both of them to have performed with Gripper. Matsuli believed that the remarkable album, on which Gripper interprets compositions written for the kora, mainly by Diabaté, as though they had been written for the guitar, deserved a vinyl release, so obtained the necessary licences and attended to it.

In late 2022, Gripper went into a London studio with another of Mali’s undisputed kora greats, Ballaké Sissoko, and, in a matter of three hours, the two produced the largely improvised material for a quite extraordinary album of duets. Although based on the kora tradition, this is anything but a traditional music album. Each of the players has a breathtaking degree of mastery over his instrument – no instrumental mastery is ever quite complete – and a seemingly telepathic understanding of where the other is headed, to go with an enormous range of musical ideas. Sissoko says they tested each other. Well, they passed, spectacularly, and last year Matsuli released the results, just a few months after Diabaté’s unexpected death, on an album that was one of important UK magazine Songlines’ albums of the year.

 

Various Artists – Zulu Guitar Blues: Cowboys, Troubadours and Jilted Lovers 1950-1965

 Matsuli’s latest release is in some ways their most impressive to date. Temple once told an interviewer that the label didn’t do compilations because that involved making choices between tracks and the label preferred to leave the tracks chosen by the artist intact and release the entire work. But what about artists who never released albums, only songs, and often only on pre-vinyl shellac? Zulu Guitar Blues answers that in truly glorious fashion.

The 25 digitally released tracks, of which 18 are available on well-appointed vinyl release, investigate an impressive range of Zulu acoustic guitar playing that often predates the maskanda that is what most people would have associated with the title. In fact, the most obvious example of maskanda here, Dennis Khanyile’s marvellous Thembile, is not even on the record, but only available as a digital download.

The eminent Joe Boyd, so eminent that his character had a small part in A Complete Unkown – the Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan movie for those who’ve been away – has said that listening to this set is like discovering a treasure-trove of unheard Charlie Patton and Blind Willie McTell 78s imbued with the spirit of Mahlathini and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The music itself, strummed, fingerpicked and even incorporating slide guitar on the unstoppable Guga Mzimba by the Nongomo Trio, might not have been recognised as blues down in the pre-war Delta but it’s bluesy for sure, and these guys, Cowboy Superman with his Mbube-styled falsetto cry, the excellent Play Singer, the Mbaqanga Guitar Trio and the rest, certainly had the blues, their travails translated for us in the album’s liner notes, in a way that Mississippi Fred McDowell would have understood.

At one point I thought I heard a little of the Carter Family style with Mother Maybelle, not as improbable as it sounds, nor as impenetrable to the more casual listener – for example, the duo of Thoko and Almon shamelessly appropriate the melody of the Manhattan Brothers’ Qongqothwane, better known to a broader audience as The Click Song – and if you’re wondering about some of those noms du disque, it needs to be remembered that the great Charlie Patton was marketed at one stage as The Masked Marvel. The ragtimey picking of The Blind Man With His Guitar on the hypnotic Uncedo Webantu, though not quite in tune, is a salient reminder that technical perfection never trumps musical heart and soul.

A hugely influential member of the South African jazz pantheon once expressed his distaste to me for the Africa-tinged corporate jazz-lite that was choking the airwaves and other public spaces at the time – and that has never really gone away. He called it Afro-fuzak. You can be sure that you’ll find none of that on a Matsuli record.

Richard Haslop