Local improvisers journey through South African styles at Jazz at the Bolt
Clarinet master François Houle and friends explore the radical sounds of 1960s Cape Town and Johannesburg, at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts event
The Cellar Music Group, Infidels Jazz, and the City of Burnaby present Jazz at the Bolt at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on February 17 and 18
EARLY ON IN THIS year’s edition of Jazz at the Bolt, the annual Burnaby love fest in which promoter/musicians Cory Weeds and Tim Reinert set aside their differences and present the best in (mostly) local jazz, we’ll get to hear clarinetist François Houle, guitarist and oud player Gordon Grdina, and drummer Kenton Loewen play homage to the great innovators of South African free improvisation.
Now, this might come as a surprise to some of you. Not that Houle, Grdina, and Loewen should be playing together; they’ve been working as a trio for a decade, are also core members of Grdina’s hard-driving avant-Arabic band Haram. But South African jazz?
Sounds exotic, right?
Well, yes and no.
Based on an inspired mixture of fire-music abstraction and African song, the music coming out of Cape Town and Johannesburg in the 1960s was simultaneously some of the sweetest, the most radical, and the most oppressed jazz of its era, and ultimately had a global influence that was completely out of proportion to the number of musicians—a few dozen, at best—involved in the scene. Threatened with jail or worse at home because of their interracial bands, the best of the South African musicians dispersed—mostly to London, some to Amsterdam, and others to Scandinavia—and wherever they went, they served as lodestones for like-minded players.
And they still do, as Houle, Grdina, and Loewen’s project proves.
None of the major South African jazz musicians settled in Vancouver, although our early intercultural-music scene benefited greatly from the presence of percussionist-in-exile Themba Tana. But we did have a significant ambassador for South African jazz in the form of the late Ken Pickering, Vancouver International Jazz Festival co-founder and Black Swan records proprietor. Unsurprisingly, he was the first to get the Montreal-born Houle hooked on South African jazz; as the clarinetist notes from his Vancouver Island home, “I just thought that was an amazing thing, that those musicians were able to relocate and get involved in sort of an avant-garde scene.”
But not just “get involved”. According to Houle’s frequent playing partner, the British pianist Alexander Hawkins, they were integral to the development of European free jazz from the 1960s and beyond. “Coming from the political situation they did, they had a very unique and very pressing perspective on what it means to be free,” Hawkins told me in a 2015 interview. “Whereas in the U.K. there tended to be a doctrinal understanding—we had to be free from harmony, free from metre, free from these kind of bourgeois constructs—I think the South Africans had a conception of freedom which was maybe similar to something that you would see coming out of the [Chicago-based] Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians: this idea of being free to do things, rather than freedom from things.”
With encouragement from Hawkins, who has been the piano player in the seminal South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo’s band for the past several years, Houle started to look deeper into what that kind of freedom might mean. “Alex was telling me that it’s some of the deepest grooves he’s ever had to work with,” the clarinetist explains, “and that it’s just a joy and a pleasure to work in that context, playing that repertoire.
“Then when Tim Reinert approached me to play at Frankie’s in 2022, I wanted to do something completely different than what people would expect,” he continues. “So I talked to Gord and Kenton and said ‘Why don’t we play music from South African composers?’ There was a new book that was published a few years ago that’s basically a South African composers’ fakebook; it includes all the classics from Dudu Pukwana all the way to Louis Moholo-Moholo, et cetera, including a lot of names that I didn’t know at all. So I just started digging around and came up with a number of tunes.”
Don’t expect to hear them as they would have been played in the 1960s, however. Houle asked Hawkins to check in with Moholo-Moholo, the last surviving member of the legendary Blue Notes sextet, to see how the drummer felt about his tunes being interpreted by Canadians, and got both the go-ahead and some useful advice.
“I asked him ‘Is it cool to play this music?’ You know, ‘How does Louis feel about people taking this tradition and playing with it?’ And he said ‘Yeah, it’s fine as long as you make it your own and don’t feel bound to reiterating what’s already been said.’ So Kenton and Gord and I got together and said ‘Let’s just do our thing, but we’re going to do it on these themes and these grooves.’ It became a really wide-open context for us to do what we do.”
Other than the basic melodies and rhythmic constructs that the Blue Notes and their peers defined, Houle and his colleagues also hope to retain the spirit of the original players.
“The one thing that’s evident when you hear those recordings,” Houle stresses, “is that there’s an energy that comes out of that history. It’s another history of oppression, in a big way, and somehow the freedom and energy in the music just emanates that spirit. That’s what I find very attractive. So what we’re doing is not like a tribute, where we’re just playing the repertoire; it’s much more about honouring the spirit of freedom beyond oppression. Of course, being Canadian and growing up in a very privileged society, it might seem a bit of a paradox, trying to explore that,” he adds. “But I think it comes from the desire to connect with and honour this tradition that came out of adverse conditions—and celebrate the joy in it, basically.
“Ultimately, it’s all about community,” Houle concludes. “When I have an opportunity to play with these musicians, I have to make it count, because it feeds everything I do.”
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