Chapter Notes
Chapter 11 Sathima Bea Benjamin's Cape Town
- Sathima Bea Benjamin's parents divorced when she was young and she did not spend much time with her mother after the age of five. She has tried to overcome her mother's absence by making sure her children always have her to care for them and by beginning her performances with the African American spiritual, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.
- Through singing and through listening to music and nature (especially the wind), Benjamin used her imagination to escape the traumas of her childhood.
- She grew up listening to British popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s that Ma Benjamin, her paternal grandmother, hummed or played on the phonograph. Her family frequently assembled around the piano to sing these songs and dance. She has since recorded several of these songs in a jazz style.
- Benjamin also learned Christian missionary songs at Sunday school (as well as at public school under Apartheid), but stopped attending Church due to its segregated seating policy.
- She trained in piano and music theory for a few years, but found singing more enjoyable. She trained briefly in opera performance but preferred her own, more ‘natural’ style of singing to the ‘contrived’ vibrato of opera singers.
- She listened on the radio to American singers such as Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole, and learned their songs by listening repeatedly and writing down the lyrics quickly so that her grandmother did not see her devoting so much time to music.
- Benjamin also followed the choirs, bands, and Minstrel groups that paraded through town on Christmas and New Year's.
- Those who could afford to purchased American jazz albums and attempted to replicate not just the music but the appearance of the original performers.
- Benjamin began listening to the record collection of a wealthy White Cape Town friend in her twenties. The two broke racial segregation laws in order to listen together to the likes of Billie Holiday, whose voice offered Sathima hope that her own singing could find a place in jazz.
- Films shown at the ‘bioscope’ were an important source of jazz and performance by people of color for those musicians such as Benjamin who could not afford to buy seventy-eight disks. The subtitles provided encouraged audiences to sing along with (and learn) popular songs in movies and cartoons. Dance bands adopted songs newly introduced to them in film and performed them for social dances the following week.
- Theaters also often had variety shows in which local performers could participate, and Benjamin first sang in public at the Gaiety bioscope. Her first critical success came at a Talent Contest (which she entered without her grandmother's permission and at which she won first prize) also held at a theater during intermission.
- Dance bands at the time were expected to play a wide variety of music including swing band music. Sathima encountered some jazz tunes for the first time while social dancing to live bands at Cape Town ‘Bob’ parties (named for the ten cent admission price).
- Interaction with jazz musicians abroad during WWII led to the adoption of brass ensembles (in place of the formerly nearly ubiquitous string dance bands) and the creation of the wailing Cape Jazz sound.
- Township jazz and the jazz avant garde were also prominent in Cape Town in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the latter, Abdullah Ibrahim's Jazz Epistles and Chris McGregor's Blue Notes were the most important.
- Listening to African American jazz albums with Abdullah Ibrahim, particularly recordings by Billie Holiday, gave Sathima Bea Benjamin a point of reference for considering her own vocal style worthy at a time when her choir conductor consistently avoided featuring her as a soloist because he felt that she scooped into pitches too much.