Chapter Notes
Chapter 12 Sathima as Jazz Musician
- When Sathima Bea Benjamin began teaching, she and her sister moved in with their mother, a self-taught ragtime pianist. The three of them began playing together at home and occasionally performed at hotels.
- Initially Sathima performed mostly in talent shows alongside dancers and acrobats as well as other singers (not all of them jazz singers). Those jazz singers who did perform were typically backed by a trio (drums, bass, and piano) and occasionally an additional saxophone.
- Cape Jazz musicians did not record for the most part, so live shows were important for acquiring fan bases and becoming famous. Audiences acted as critics and musicians developed their repertoire and style in response to their jeers, applause, and demands.
- Benjamin began to read about African American experience and listen to jazz recordings at the local library as part of a Jazz Appreciation Club run by Sathima's friend and jazz pianist, the librarian Vincent Kolbe.
- She also performed at a jazz concert at the Glemore Town Hall in Athlone and met many of Cape Town's jazz musicians. She received an invitation to sing at some of the nightclubs and she and her sister began to frequent those establishments.
- Most of the musicians she met at the concert had, like Benjamin, learned to play from listening to records. Due to their carefully copied renditions of these recordings, several became known as the Cape Town version of famous American musicians (e.g. the Cape Town Bing Crosby).
- In 1957 Benjamin joined Arthur Klugman's traveling show ‘Coloured Jazz and Variety’ as a singer where she met saxophonist and big band arranger Jimmy Adams, with whom she later performed in Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique. Jimmy Adams was one of the first coloured musicians to cross over from dance band music to jazz.
- She moonlighted as a singer and worked as a school teacher by day, an illegal combination in the late 1950s, and the school principal became angry upon reading one of her reviews, so she quit her day job to concentrate on jazz performance.
- She began performing with several ensembles and pianists in 1959 in white nightclubs in Cape Town. She also met and first performed with Abdullah Ibrahim around this time, and they began to frequent The Ambassadors, a nightclub in which Ibrahim was free to develop his own style of jazz performance.
- Restrictions on interracial mixing were tightening, and the government began to clamp down on venues where this was likely to occur. This restricted Ibrahim's and Benjamin's ability to play where they were in demand, though they continued to draw large, attentive crowds wherever they performed.
- After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the government declared a state of emergency and restricted performances that catered to mixed crowds even more harshly than before. Ibrahim and Benjamin realized they could not survive as creative artists in South Africa, and in 1961 they decided to leave for Zurich, Switzerland.
- Pianist Harold Jephta also left South Africa in the early 1960s. Famous around Cape Town as a jazz musician in the style of Charlie Parker, Jephta moved to Sweden in order to study the European classical repertory.
- In 1963, Benjamin met Duke Ellington at a concert he gave in Switzerland and he agreed to hear the Dollar Brand Trio. He took an interest in the trio but also in Benjamin's singing, and invited them to record with him and Billy Strayhorn in Paris. Their album Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio launched Ibrahim's (Dollar Brand's) international career.
- Benjamin recorded twelve tracks in Paris that were not released at the time, but survived in secret until the 1990s. In 1996, Benjamin released these tracks on a CD called A Morning in Paris.
- Jazz and popular music allowed Benjamin, Ibrahim, and several other exiled South African musicians to travel to and support themselves in Europe and the United States. Benjamin and Ibrahim used Zurich as a base as they traveled around Europe, to the U.S., and back to South Africa for the birth of their children (upon which Benjamin insisted).
- They were unable to return to South Africa after they publicly supported the then banned African National Congress in the wake of the Soweto uprisings of 1976. Ibrahim's melodies were used in the resistance struggle, and they were no longer welcome in the country. At this point they decided to settle in New York City, a city dear to them in part because Ellington had welcomed them there previously.
- In 1979, Benjamin established her own record label Ekapa with the help of her husband Ibrahim and primarily released her own jazz recordings. Her first album was entirely Ellington songs. She sent copies of the album to jazz critics and was amazed at their positive feedback.
- Benjamin also began to compose songs in New York City, the vast majority of them political (particularly her ‘Liberation Suite’). Between 1979 and 2002 she produced nine LPs or "CDs of her own performance, ranging from her own compositions to Tin Pan Alley songs, show tunes, and jazz standards.
- She has occasionally organized performances of her music on the West Coast, up the East Coast, in Europe, and back to South Africa (since 1990).
- For Benjamin, jazz was a medium for self-expression during a time of oppression. In her opinion, being a jazz singer is about having the freedom to adapt a song to one's own style, and singing and composing were ways to address one’s identity and be political.
- Cape Town Jazz musicians absorbed African American jazz from several periods all at once and combined the new sounds with locally important musical styles. Jazz as a performance category is thus defined differently in the Cape Town perspective, and its history is different. Much of this history involves South African musicians playing jazz while in exile.