It seemed like it was only yesterday that I reviewed Rogoff ‘Rocky’ Modise’s 10 o’clock Sunday morning ‘Styles of Jazz’ show on Radio Botswana when I retrieved my notes last Wednesday from my saxophone case to write the final chapter on the show.
He banna! The first show was on the first Sunday of 2003. And only twice the man missed the show - once on account of the pranks of some deaf, dumb and blind fool who probably has not the slightest inkling about why Modimo put us on earth!
Rocky, by his own admission was not trained to sit behind the mike or to communicate through the scripts that are routinely required for the production of a radio show. He learnt, driven by the passion to “share with others my appreciation of the genre of music called jazz”.
Initially, the one-hour programme was pre-recorded until it grew to two hours “by public demand”. Rocky “went live” in order to infuse spontaneity into the show that is so much a part of the spirit of jazz.
I am, generally, a night person. Often, I would be playing with Impromptu on Saturday nights and would spend Sunday mornings fine tuning myself psychologically for the omnipresent obligation of playing at Buyani, which had developed a reputation as Gaborone’s “school of jazz”, in the evening.
So, for many years I had lost touch with the “music of all musics”, much in the same way as I missed reading; and a challenging intellectual discussion with the late Dr Jeff Dumo Baqwa with whom I shared many “jazz” moments when he was in political exile in Botswana.
“Styles of Jazz” rekindled not only my appetite for listening to the music, but also my dying sense of the greatness of the history that produced the great people who played the music.
Once more, I was in touch with the autobiography of that great fighter for freedom and son of slaves, Frederick Douglass. I remembered the essays of Marcus Garvey who inspired the Black community worldwide with his “If we must die...It should not be like dogs...and Langston Hugh’s tales of ‘Jesse B. Simple”.
Remember Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and Ameer Amiri Baraka’s (Leroi Jones’s) “Blues People”.
I believe it was Leonard Feather who compiled the Dictionary of Jazz and a host of other authors who placed the music appropriately within the socio-historical experience of black folk surviving in a hateful and racist home away from home.
(Which is probably why I am ready to puke at the idea that white folk and other strangers continue to claim to be the authorities on our history... and some Batswana believe it. The hell with it).
Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane were the human mirrors through whom we experienced - emotionally and intellectually - the 400 year journey of their people, forcefully dislodged from the Motherland and forced to make a home in a new and unfriendly wilderness elsewhere.
Needless to say, ‘Styles of Jazz’ also raised from the dead, that harrowing question in my troubled mind about: “How do Africans relate to jazz?”It has become yet more lucid to me that apartheid - or South Africa’s manifestation of slavery and colonialism - denied the Africans a vocabulary that helped them to explain their situation to others, and so they borrowed words, among them “jazz”.
Franco in Zaire - the land of Rhumba and “Kwasa Kwasa” - added the label “jazz” to the name of his band. That made it respectable. Other Africans of note repeated the exercise all over the continent.
Perhaps the word expressed a certain yearning for connectivity. Perhaps it served to fill a void where one was left after the colonialists took away the words that the Africans used to describe their own music. Or maybe the word expressed the African’s desire to achieve the level of excellence that they found in the music of the Afro Americans.
Whatever the reason may have been, it is just as evident that the word jazz, (which has attracted all sorts of strange definitions in English dictionaries), was also thrust upon this Afro-American folk music by the white writing establishment which had never heard anything like it before, but understood that there was a great deal of emotional and technical wealth in the new art form.
Force of history, I suppose, has legitimised the word to describe Afro-American folk music.
But it also seems that it would be a negation of the African creative genius to succumb to borrowing of labels when the vocabulary of the African languages offers a plentiful resource for words of our own that can be used to describe the various forms of African improvisational music.
Fela, I have previously written, called his music “African Beat” in English and could have called it many other things in Yoruba. Ironically, the twisted mind of the colonised tends to identify the “self” with the “lesser” so that “marabi”, “mbaqanga” and “kwela” take on a meaning equivalent to “primitive” or “ungodly”.
(I am told that Prince Qobo swore that he would never in his life play mbaqanga, and he kept his promise as far as his mind allowed. But when the Metronomes played they did not sound like they grew up in Chicago. To the contrary, there was no mistaking that they were South(ern) Africans).
Others were touched in their individual ways: “Dear RGM. You are bowing out with such grace & such spectacular sublime music - Rogoff’s finest hour, and RBII’s finest two hours ever, if only they had ears”.
Absalom in Gabs City says: “Some of the things we don’t have 2 wait 4 the Queen 2 do 4 us, like honouring us Sir Modise. U r a true jazz pioneer. Keep the spirit up”.
Yet others requested Crosby, Stills and Nash’s ‘Sweet Judy Blue Eyes’ and were welcomed to the “Styles of Jazz” show.
Some were impressed by the side-by side renditions of the Donny Hathaway vocal version of “To be Young, Gifted and Black” and Houston Person’s instrumental treatment. Others were attracted to Grover Washington’s interpretation of Bob Marley’s “We’re Jammin”. And, as Rocky and I reminisced about “The Styles of Jazz” at this rather pleasant cooling off joint at Ngotwane Bar on the eastern end of early Gaborone, Cyril Matsebula called from Swaziland to ask for airplay on the programme.
Another SMS: “My brother, it’s really hurtin to hear that u r leavin, we were used to your style of playing jazz...it’s unique.
May God be with you wherever you go” - DJ PK (Tlokweng) Rocky signs off: “I believe in professionalism. If your job is to photocopy or make tea.
Do it well. I have grown enough in the two and a half years that I have been doing the programme.
It is time for regeneration. I believe in a creative dream.
“If I am given the opportunity to visit Blue Note, Verve to talk to the people who have been closely associated with the music I might consider it.
Otherwise I would not mind a budget to visit CD Warehouse to replenish the music collection at the station. If I were to come back, it must show growth.
