The New African Diaspora, the Built

Environment and the Past in Jazz

Carol A. Muller
Dedicated to Cape Town musicians Jimmy Adams
(d. August 2005) and Henry February (d. October 2005)
This paper examines the past in music metaphorized as the spirit within you in the
jazz composition and performance of Cape Town-born, New York-based jazz singer,
Sathima Bea Benjamin. This spirit within you encompasses a particular approach to
jazz that invokes both a personal past and collective memory of bygone eras of popular
music and jazz performance that are freshly conceived by a woman living in the new
African diaspora. The spirit contained in, and then emerging from, the body suggests
that the past in music is relevant for the present, invoking the idea of living history, a
usable past that continues into the present through reiteration in contemporary jazz
performance. This view is contrasted with the idea of the past conceptualized in the older
African diaspora as cultural memory and the past in jazz as contained on the recorded
object, and the conventional ways in which jazz history has been narrated. With these
contrasts in mind, I compare jazz performance as a particular kind of lived experience, or
walking in the city (de Certeau), with jazz historiography, considered as a panoptical
view of the city/jazz from above. I argue that representations of the past in jazz might
benefit from greater dialogue between these two perspectives by introducing the notion of
a usable past or living history / a way of thinking about jazz performance that
characterizes a new African diasporic sensibility in jazz performance.
Keywords: Sathima Bea Benjamin; New African Diaspora; Jazz Historiography; Living
History; South African Jazz; The City
Carol Muller is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on two
new books, Musical Echoes (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and Musically Connected: An Introduction to
World Music (Oxford, forthcoming). Her previous publications include Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of
Desire (University of Chicago Press 2006[1999]), South African Music: A Century of Traditions in Transformation
(ABC-Clio), and articles and reviews in a range of journals. She is also a gumboot dancer. Correspondence to:
Carol A. Muller, Dept. of Music, University of Pennsylvania, 201 South 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6313,
USA. Email: camuller@sas.upenn.edu
ISSN 1741-1912 (print)/ISSN 1741-1920 (online) # 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17411910600634270
Ethnomusicology Forum
Vol. 15, No. 1, June 2006, pp. 63/86
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Introduction
Music is the spirit within you
Deep within you
Find your sound and let it flow
Free and easy and out
A simple song text by South African-born and New York-based jazz singer Sathima
Bea Benjamin, Music is the spirit within you (from her 1988 album Lovelight )
encompasses a particular approach to jazz that invokes a personal response to
individual and collective memory of bygone eras of popular music and jazz
performance in other places, which are freshly conceived by a woman living in the
new African diaspora. Benjamins image of the spirit within you embodies a
complex set of ideas about the uses to which the past is put in her engagement with
and performance of jazz. Diaspora is an important location because the diasporic
defined here speaks to a way of being in the world that inhabits two or more places
simultaneously / the first is the physical environment you currently live in, the other
references vivid memories of places you have been to previously, which are
imaginatively invoked through musical iteration. The new African description
pertains to streams of African immigrants and exiles whose diasporic narratives
diverge significantly from those of the older, more familiar histories of the African
diaspora that brought African slaves from the west and central parts of the continent
into the New World. In contrast to older notions, the new African diaspora
articulates a more recent, often modern, urbanized, cosmopolitan African past that is
continually animated in the present, rather than the less specific forms of cultural
memory or signs of pre-colonial musical style valued as sacred in some
contemporary African American communities and scholarship (Floyd 1996; Ramsey
2003; Turino 2000). It speaks of a less stable definition of African-ness that
incorporates a range of immigrants, passers-by, refugees and colonists, of European,
African, Asian and mixed heritage. In this way of being in the world, the human
body is constituted as a kind of archive of personal and musical memories and of
transnational connections that, in this case, (South) African musicians like Ms
Benjamin who are living in the new diaspora regularly reference and draw upon as
they perform jazz differently in Europe and the United States.
I begin this paper by reflecting on the nature of music as the spirit within the
bodily archive, discussing material recuperated from numerous interviews and
conversations I have had with Sathima Bea Benjamin over the last 15 years. Coupled
with Ms Benjamins more recent idea of music as a home within, I suggest that the
spirit within you is an apt image for the new African diaspora because it sustains the
play of presence and absence, animation of the past-in-the-present, as well as
materiality versus the non-material, all of which characterize a dialectics of diasporic
experiences over time (Muller 2000). Having established the parameters of the spirit
within, I move on in the second part of the paper to consider ways in which Ms
64 C. A. Muller
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Benjamin incorporates herself into New York City and its jazz community by drawing
on the spirit within, where spirit concerns a particular use and transformation of
past experiences to fit present practices and contexts through dreams, new
technologies and in a process she calls meditation in motion. In the third part, I
reflect on Ms Benjamins narratives about the production of more objective and
permanent imprints of jazz performance inside the recording studio, a discourse that
juxtaposes the moment of inscription as simultaneously a moment of complete
spontaneity. The conclusion has two parts. In the first I draw together Ms Benjamins
idea of the spirit within as a vehicle for reformulating our understanding of African
diasporic experience, history and social theory. In the second I examine the dialectic
between the non-material and the material / between the city and the poetic
strategies employed by ordinary people to humanize the built environment; between
live jazz performance over the record of past jazz performances / to suggest that jazz
performed live and, by extension, jazz as a way of being-in-the-world parallels what
Michel de Certeau (1984) describes as walking in the city, while the record of the
past in jazz is like viewing the city from the top of its tallest buildings. Walking in the
city is the poetic, imaginative, spectral perspective, which bears traces of past
performances much like a palimpsest, while surveying the city from above enables a
panoptical view, a feeling of distance rather than participation, and surely a greater
sense of control over form and process, and is manifest in the chronological
representation of the past in conventional jazz historiography. I suggest that we might
re-evaluate the life of jazz in the future in ways that parallel those of Ms Benjamin, by
thinking of its past as a more flexible and usable archive or as a living history.
1
In
this vein, we imagine new possibilities for the (re-)writing of jazz history by making it
into a narrative shaped by a freshly conceived diasporic sensibility: a sensibility that
continually inserts the spirits of other times, people and places into future
representations of the past in jazz, disrupting what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the
useful but empty and homogeneous chronology of historicism (2000, 239).
Jazz as the Spirit Within and the Body as Archive
Guthrie Ramsey introduces his book Race Music (2003) with a personal narrative
about the musical memories of his childhood and young adult life in his home in
Chicago and with his extended family. Ramsey tells us that he reflects on his own past
so that we, his readers, can understand the questions he strives to address in the book,
though there is surely a larger issue: the reality that many of us remain ignorant about
the kinds of musical experiences that might characterize those of African American
families in the mid-20th century.
2
His past is not as self-evident as one might
presume, and it is this absence of a more broadly known archive of musical
experience that propels Ramsey to insert his personal memories into a more
generalized narrative. Looking back on that musical past in Chicago from his place in
the north-eastern region of the United States in the 1990s, Ramsey implies a
fundamental difference in upbringing between himself and others in the American
Ethnomusicology Forum 65
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academy. In a parallel vein, Music is the spirit within you is Ms Benjamins response
to the sense she has had when she has sung the jazz repertory in Europe and the
United States that few of those she sings to, or performs with, have any knowledge of
her own musical past, a past formed in the cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg
from the 1940s through the early 1960s and a past fundamentally shaped out of an
interaction of local style and personalities with music from England and the United
States heard on radio, on records and in the movies, and performed live by South
African jazz and dance band musicians, amateur performers in variety concerts and
so forth. Rather than understanding the 20th-century history of the African
continent, its selective embrace of global modernity and the differences between its
southern regions and the rest of Africa, those who had listened to her singing had
struggled to place her. She simply did not fit their stereotype of someone of African
heritage from the old diaspora / not physiologically, linguistically or in the fact that
she sang jazz, albeit in a style shaped by its beginnings in the southernmost part of the
African continent.
When we consider the words for Music we need to read with the understanding
that not everything represented by the text is evident in what appears on the page or
in performance: a short poem is an economy of words in a way a book or chapter
never is. As Leroy Vail and Landeg White (1991) remind us in their analysis of a
Mozambiquan song, a few simple lines of text are often the conveyors of dense
layers of collective memory and experience, which with ethnographic and archival
labour may reveal a deep trajectory of cultural and historical knowledge not
immediately accessible to those living outside the lives of the producers of these texts.
What follows then is a meditation on several manifestations of the spirit within you,
a meditation that draws on numerous conversations between Ms Benjamin and
myself, together with archival and other oral history research with South Africans and
African American musicians who have worked with her over the past 50 years. Like
Ramseys this is a meditation that implicates memories of prior musical, family and
community experiences, memories which shaped who Ms Benjamin is as a singer,
what repertory she selects to sing, and how the style and repertory reflect both a
transnational and a local sound in jazz singing. Where Benjamins story veers off in a
different direction from Ramseys, however, is in the issue of diasporic experience:
Sathima Bea Benjamin spent close to two decades of her life on the road in a state
of what I call jazz migrancy, moving from place to place in order to secure live
performances, all of which, from 1962 when she left Cape Town, occurred a long,
long way from her childhood home in South Africa.
How then is the past manifest musically as the spirit within? I am going to
discuss five manifestations, the first four in this section and the fifth in my discussion
of the recording studio. They are as follows: the spirit within as personal and
musical character; spirit as breath or wind; the spirit within as human presence
seen in dreams or visions; spirit within as conveyed in radio airwaves and newer
technologies; and spirit within tied to the creative/compositional process emerging
in the modern dream space of the recording studio. In possibly its most
66 C. A. Muller
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conventional use, the spirit within you is a reference to individual character / the
kind of person you are in relation to other people in the present that is formed out of
the substance of your individual past from a combination of genetic inheritance and
childhood experience. Personal character matters to Ms Benjamin. I have sat with her
after live performances where she has taken note of whom she might like to work
with in the future: her choices depend on the personal and musical demeanour of a
musician on and off the stage. She has aestheticized the high value she places on good
character in a musical approach she calls the southern touch in jazz performance
(see Muller 1996, forthcoming). This acoustical touch is concerned with the manner
in which the musicians (herself included) approach the music, with reverence and
care, caressing melodies with subtlety and nuance, honouring the wishes of the
lyricist, and retaining a respect for the composers intentions while impressing on the
music something of their own personal sound. Such qualities one finds among
musicians who have, in her words, paid their dues in life and consequently know
how to work co-operatively without always seeking the spotlight. These are musicians
who easily perform in a more democratic musical environment: a space of mutual
reciprocity and co-creation between singer and instrumentalists. In song composi-
tion, Ms Benjamin creates a connection between the spirit within and the physical
environment / a theme that continues in later discussion of her embrace of the built
environment of the city. In the song Windsong (also the name of her ensemble in
the 1980s), she connects the idea of spirit within you as good character by creating
an analogy between spirit and wind. A piece dedicated to the spirit within
South Africas women and children of colour in their daily struggles against the forces
of apartheid, Windsong simultaneously registers memories of the physical
environment of Cape Town, a city characterized by the dramatic force of the Cape
south-easterly winds, winds that have instilled fear in sailors travelling around the tip
of the African continent for centuries.
The spirit within manifests itself in the spiritual presence in dreams and visions
of significant musicians and family members that Ms Benjamin senses when she is
about to perform live or undertake a recording project. Both Duke Ellington (her
spiritual and musical mentor) and her biological mother (a self-taught ragtime
pianist) regularly come to her as she starts a live performance in one of New York
Citys clubs or churches. For a long period of time, Ms Benjamin would begin her
performances with an unaccompanied vocal rendition of the old spiritual, Some-
times I feel like a motherless child. Because she would go out onto the stage without
a pianist, she would rely on Duke Ellington to give her the right key to sing in, a
process that required her to surrender completely to forces outside herself. On other
occasions, when she has been about to embark on a recording project, she has found
reminders of Duke Ellington all around her, serving to reassure her that he remains a
musical force in her life.
3
In this reading of the spirit within you there is often a close connection between
memories of long forgotten tunes and new technologies which make available past
repertories, like the replay of old show and movie tunes on the channels of digital
Ethnomusicology Forum 67
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television in the last decade or the reissue of popular tunes in new media. Fragments
of these tunes and their times emerge, quite suddenly, into conscious awareness.
Some come bearing the inflections of the voices of people she remembers singing
those tunes / they were the signature tunes of childhood friends. Others retain a
more general place in her memory box. In Ms Benjamins experience, the spirit
within you parallels the voices heard streaming out of the radio: in the 1940s and
1950s in South Africa, the radio was the archive out of which flowed the melodies
that Ms Benjamin now reinvents as specifically jazz tunes / straight melodies
reinterpreted through temporal displacement. As I argue elsewhere (Muller forth-
coming), these technologies fundamentally shape how particular repertories are
received in certain communities, and often the ways in which one repertory has come
to be defined over another. So, for example, because radio was the primary medium
through which Ms Benjamin recalls absorbing the repertory that she now sings, there
is a remarkable correspondence between the individual memories of prior radio
listening experiences and the ways in which she defines jazz. Unlike repeated listening
to personally owned records where a consumer could decide what to listen to, how
often to repeat what had just been heard and so forth, what one heard on radio (other
than request shows) was far less likely to be something the listener could control / it
was the disc jockey and, increasingly, formatted playlists that determined what, when
and on which station. Consequently, Ms Benjamin stresses the spontaneity and
unpredictability in jazz performance over other qualities of the genre.
Finally / and this is the theme of the next section / the spirit within you, what
you pull from deep inside, is what animates your arrival in new places. In
transforming the alienation of a large metropolitan area like New York City, London
or Paris, Ms Benjamin harnesses the past / or the spirit within / to breathe life
into the built environment. She draws on memories of past communities, places and
experiences to personalize the city. She inhabits the city in the way in which she
summons the past in the present. She combines the elements in a process akin to de
Certeaus notion of walking in the city / articulating a modern but, I argue,
diasporic sensibility where the built environment is overlaid with qualities of
playfulness, surprise and memories of things and people who used to inhabit ones
life. The city, for de Certeau, is always a memory of something no longer available, a
space haunted by stories of the past that serve to humanize and particularize the
vastness of the city. These are the stories that personalize the neighbourhood one
inhabits in the city (De Certeau 1984).
The City for Sathima: Meditation in Motion
New York, New York, a place so wonderful they named it twice. It was with this
humorous comment / a rhetorical turn typical of the community in which she was
raised / that Ms Benjamin began her conversation with me on 8 December 2000 in a
diner in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. This was the same diner in which (as a
graduate student at New York University) I had met Ms Benjamin in 1990 to conduct
68 C. A. Muller
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the first of many interviews about her life as a South African jazz musician living in
exile in New York.
Sathima Bea Benjamin initially visited New York in 1965, en route to the Newport
Jazz Festival to perform with Duke Ellington and her husband, Abdullah Ibrahim
(formerly known as Dollar Brand). She returned and sang in the city again with
Ellington in 1972. When Ellington died in 1974, Sathima was visiting Cape Town,
South Africa. This meant that when, in 1977, she finally went to live permanently in
Manhattans Chelsea Hotel, Duke Ellington was no longer present in person. A sense
of his spirit mapping her experience of New York City, however, mirrored her early
sense of his presence in Cape Town through recordings, long before she had met him
in person.
It was Duke Ellington, then, who initially brought Sathima and Abdullah to New
York after giving them each the opportunity to record on Frank Sinatras Reprise label
in Paris in 1963, and it was Ellington who later organized their immigration papers.
When these two South Africans made public their opposition to the apartheid
government and had their South African citizenship revoked in 1977, the path to US
citizenship was relatively easy because of the way it had been cleared by Ellington and
by a letter written in support of the application to immigrate by Harlem Renaissance
writer Langston Hughes a decade earlier. When they first arrived in the city, Ellington
asked his sister Ruth to find them an apartment, and he advised these two young
South Africans to find their places artistically in this environment and to work out
how to survive as the kinds of jazz musicians they were coming from South Africa.
Sathimas sense of the city, then, is inextricably tied to her memories of Duke. His
continued presence is regularly experienced by her through visions, dreams, in
bookstores, on television and, of course, on recordings as his music is aired on jazz
radio stations and through the replays of old jazz standards on the audio channels of
Digital Television. The imageless sounds also evoke memories for her of the intimacy
and warmth projected by radio broadcasts of English and American music in her
childhood home in Cape Town.
In many ways, Sathimas continuing relationship with jazz legend Duke Ellington
and with the transnational jazz community is not that different in the early 21st
century from when she was a young woman living in Cape Town in the 1940s and
1950s. For Sathima, as for many of South Africas artists and musicians, New York
City has long sparked the imagination and the desire to travel, if not to New York
City itself, then at least to London and Paris, both geographically closer than the
United States to South Africa. And jazz was the medium of travel. This was
particularly true for those like Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Johnny Dyani,
Kippie Moeketsi, Letta Mbulu, Caiphus Semenya, Chris McGregor, Lewis Nkosi,
Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim and Sathima, who left South Africa and went into
cultural and political exile in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fuelled by wartime
experiences with, and in support of, the Allied troops up north (i.e. in North
Africa) in the entertainment corps, a small contingency of South Africans later
returned home, enthralled by the possibilities of Anglo-American popular music and
Ethnomusicology Forum 69
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big band jazz performance and of the potential of this music to act as a universal
language (Vincent Kolbe, interview September 1996). These experiences were
interwoven with the popularity of Hollywood movies and the occasional locally
produced films among people of mixed race and African descent in urban areas like
Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, Durban and Cape Town. In the post-war era, many in
South Africas urban areas had grown up with the music of these faraway places in the
intimacy of their own homes and communities, and those who read the local press
were inundated with biographical details of the musicians, political reporting and
reviews of performances.
South Africans remember the 1950s / referred to nostalgically as the Fabulous
Decade (Nkosi 1983) / as a period that began so full of hope for a racially
integrated, democratic future for South Africa and all her peoples. This was the
decade of live dance bands, township jazz, gangsters and habitual movie attendance.
South Africans saw the likes of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Harry Belafonte,
Dorothy Dandridge and Louis Armstrong performing urban sophistication and
playing high society in the darkness and magic of the cinematic image. These mass
mediated, globally distributed products of the Anglo-American entertainment
industry provided images for imaginative travel to the sites where it was believed
African Americans, of pale and darker hue, were beginning to negotiate a place for
people of colour in white society (Coplan 1985; Ballantine 1993; Davis 1996).
For those South Africans who had migrated to the cities in the first half of the 20th
century, jazz had been the quintessential sound and style for navigating and defining
urban space. The optimism for a better future was articulated in the sounds of jazz
itself. In its local manifestations, jazz was the medium through which people of
colour remade the modern-sounding African rhythms they heard in imported jazz to
coalesce with local sensibilities (Coplan 1985; Ballantine 1993; Allen 1997).
Performed live, the sounds of jazz enabled people to create a more cosmopolitan
Africa, on the one hand, and to imagine a place for themselves in the global
community of jazz musicians, on the other. Jazz was the quintessential musical
language for individual expression and emotional articulation. At the same time,
local newspapers and magazines aimed at African readers reported on the civil rights
movement in the US and on the US State Department ambassadorial jazz tours led by
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others in the name of freedom and democracy
(von Eschen 1997, 2004). These media simultaneously narrated stories of Africas
move towards liberation from the forces of colonial power.
The nostalgia for the glorious years of the 1950s for people of colour in South
Africa stands in stark contrast to the period from the early 1960s through 1990. 1960
marked the implementation of the underbelly of the fabulous decade: the
legislation for separate development or apartheid. While many in the townships
were relishing urban living, the scaffolding of the Afrikaner Nationalist regime was
systematically put in place from 1950, and 1960 began the era of high apartheid:
the regime characterized by mass removals, severe harassment, deportation and the
implementation of a series of acts legislated in the 1950s: the Group Areas Act, the
70 C. A. Muller
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Population Registration Act, the Mixed Marriages Act and the Separate Amenities
Act, all of which would ultimately restrict the racial and musical mixing that jazz
performance in South Africa had initiated. 1960 marked drastic changes in South
Africa, instigated by the Sharpeville massacre in March and the scattering of South
Africas vibrant urban communities.
For several of those who left South Africa in the early 1960s, jazz performance was
the only real passport to membership of an international community, even if they did
not consider themselves jazz musicians. Miriam Makeba recalls, for example, that
when Harry Belafonte brought her to New York in 1959 she was given a four-week gig
at the Village Vanguard, even though she was not a jazz singer (Makeba 1987). South
African literary critic Lewis Nkosi writes that, on a visit to New York in the mid-
1960s, he engaged with the coldness and alienation of the city by seeking out the
warmth and kinship of the jazz clubs in Harlem and the Village (Nkosi 1983). For
Abdullah and Sathima, who spent 15 years in a state of jazz migrancy, moving
between Europe and Africa in search of work before coming to New York, jazz
performance was, and continues to be, a truly transnational connection sensed by
South Africans towards African American musicians: jazz provided a way to maintain
an inner sense of belonging to a home while on the move. Knowing its repertory
and performing it in their style provided people like Ibrahim and Benjamin with a
structure within which to improvise: a mechanism for transcending the limitations of
the local.
In South Africa, jazz performance had been an artistic space for the practice of
musical and personal freedom. It provided a medium for doing the unconventional,
for breaking out of the increasing restrictions on social mobility and racial mixing
imposed by the State on the one hand and by the strict adherence to tradition and
religious practices of the local community on the other. But the community of
performers was small, and with increasing state surveillance it ultimately became
impossible to survive as a jazz artist in South Africa. In Europe, the language of jazz
gave South Africans a chance to engage with audiences when the foreignness of
spoken language inhibited communication. But Europe was too cold, too alienating.
Sathima recalls that it was in the sound of language that she sensed her distance from
Europeans as a people. She realized that she would probably feel more at home as a
jazz musician in New York City, which is where she has lived since 1977.
What, then, is the nature of Sathimas relationship to New York City? She calls it
the New York embrace. The embrace is a reciprocal relationship: Sathima
embracing and being embraced by the utter humanness of the city and its peoples.
There is something that the city gives you that no other city gives you. It is a kind of
vibrancy that is in the air / polluted air, for Gods sakes. I mean I have lived here for
24 years and the city is my beloved New York now (interview, December 2000).
There are several dimensions to the embrace. First, New York City represents the
ultimate in opportunity and community for an artist, and especially a jazz musician.
Second, for a jazz musician it provides a sense of home, in the sense of feeling well
placed, a sense of feeling that you can function: home as a place where you can be
Ethnomusicology Forum 71
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yourself without having to conform. New York is a place of caring and of
neighbourhood, though, as Sathima remarks, the neighbourhood is one in which
people may get to know you or you might wish to remain anonymous.
4
Third, New
York City is surely considered the spiritual home of jazz and its musicians. In this
sense, the city nurtures jazz as a quintessentially urban rhetorical and musical
practice. This relates to my earlier suggestion that jazz is as aspect of what de Certeau
calls walking in the city. It is the musical embodiment of the experience of
inhabiting the city as a walker. Both jazz and the city are spaces filled with surprises,
requiring improvisatory skills to survive. A jazz performance in this frame is a
discourse of musical travel: each individual on her own path, sometimes connecting,
at other times just going it alone, but operating always within the larger map of the
city/performance.
In this regard, Sathima embraces the city through a process she calls meditation
in motion. The meditation part is thinking upon life itself, practising selflessness to
those around her. But there is also a spiritual dimension. Its about me talking to
God. Sometimes I actually talk to God, I walk in the street and I just talk to God. And
its OK because everyone in New York talks to themselves. It doesnt matter. People
dont think you are nuts. I mean, really, people are talking to themselves all the time
(interview, December 2000). The motion refers to the fact that she is literally always
on the move. This she learnt from her grandmother in Cape Town, who never
allowed anyone to just sit / and, for example, listen to the radio, which Sathima
loved to do. If she were caught sitting and listening, her grandmother would
reprimand her: Why dont you just get right inside that thing, the big old radio?
There was no possibility of sitting down to listen more closely to the radio. Sathima
elaborates:
Basically I am very happy when I am keeping busy and moving. And that really
means walking: I walk and I walk. I wouldnt go to church, I wouldnt feel right: I
would feel fenced in, in a box, so I prefer to go to church walking in the street with
everybody. There are lots of distractions on your walk, sometimes they are good
and sometimes they are bad. Thats the real way to meditate. You have to see and
experience everything. I mean I cant be a Buddha; I cant sit on a mat and
meditate. (Interview, December 2000)
Sathimas embrace is peculiarly South African. It is one inhabited by the ancestors,
by mythic moments, where spaces are opened up through dreams and visions. She
has told me, for example, that when she and her husband Abdullah Ibrahim and their
two young children returned to New York in 1977, she was not pleased about moving
downtown into the Chelsea Hotel. Her neighbourhood was uptown, the Riverside
Drive area north of 96th Street. Abdullah, however, had met Don Cherry
unexpectedly on the street when he was looking for a home and Cherry had guided
Abdullah to the Chelsea Hotel, where the proprietor Stanley Bard was reputed to
understand the struggles of living as a jazz musician: he did not require several
months worth of security deposits. Sathima was reluctant at first, but then she had a
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dream in which the ancestors / the spirits / gave her the authority to inhabit the
space.
I will never forget. I was in . . . a big canyon, but it was cone shaped. And I was at
the bottom. I felt very frightened. I heard a sound. It sounded like the wind and all
of a sudden I was spiralled up. I came up. All the different tribes of Native
Americans, they were making that sound. They were making that sound and the
sound spiralled me up and out of that hole. I just knew then that it was okay for me
to be here. It was an okay for me. That was it. (Interview, December 2000)
Years later, when Sathima was reading about the Chelsea Hotel she discovered that
23rd Street had once been a trail for Native Americans travelling from the waterfront
along Broadway to Brooklyn. Like the transnationalism of jazz as construed by Ms
Benjamin (and the entertainment industry in the 20th century), the dream world
takes on an almost Jungian notion of a collective unconscious / where it is the first
peoples of the Americas who grant her permission to find her place in this most
modern of all cities.
But the embrace is more than ancestral presence. The embrace also comes from the
jazz community itself. This community of true jazz artists in New York City is not
large relative to the total population of the city; it is more like a big extended family.
The idea of the true jazz musician is not peculiar to Ms Benjamin but seems to be
quite common among an older generation of musicians who sense the gap between
those who played jazz as a vocation, for the sake of the art, in some spiritual sense and
the younger generation of musicians who strive after financial gain.
5
Family members
have an uneasy relationship with one another, everyone competing for work,
everyone struggling to survive. They come together for specific ritual occasions, with
the family to celebrate, in jazz to fashion familial reunion creatively in the very
structures of improvised performance. Ultimately, however, the history of the
extended jazz family is an integral dimension of the citys own history / Billie
Holiday, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Sarah Vaughan, the grand ancestors of the
tradition all honed their craft and made their mark in New York City. There is thus a
deep sense of identification with New Yorks jazz community for someone like
Sathima, even if it is only as a distant cousin.
Sathima in the Studio
Sathima and her family came to New York City in 1977 because, she recalls, she knew
that New York City was the one place outside South Africa that offered the potential
for creating a sense of home. Realizing that she could not travel or perform live in
ways she had done before the birth of her children, she used the sojourn in the great
city of jazz to reinvent herself as a recording artist rather than through live
performance. She and Abdullah created an independent record label, Ekapa, which is
Zulu/Xhosa for at, from the Cape, reinforcing the relationship between music and a
feeling of home. Through this label Sathima produced several of Abdullahs
Ethnomusicology Forum 73
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recordings, and Abdullah similarly assisted Sathima by both financing new recordings
and producing a few of the early projects. With Ekapa established Ms Benjamin
could, in her own words, let her records do a little travelling for her, in much the
same way that American musicians had sent their music to South Africa from the
1920s onwards (Ballantine 1993; Coplan 1985; Muller 2000, 2004).
The process of personal reinvention is significant in this essay because it reasserts
the core tension introduced earlier between the ephemeral live performance and
greater lifespan of the audio recording. While it is commonly understood these days
that recorded performance is the first step to new opportunities in jazz, there are
many musicians, and jazz singers in particular, who never go inside a recording
studio. Here I suggest several possible explanations for Ms Benjamins move from
being satisfied with music as spirit within you whose sound is nurtured and
released in live performance / with the human body as living, but terminal archive /
to constituting a more durable legacy of musical engagement through sound
recordings of her own performances and compositions. In this context, I am
reminded of Derridas discussion of a similar binary in the life of Sigmund Freud: on
the one hand, the private archive of psychoanalytic data derived from the younger
mans relationship with his father, posthumously revealed in his letters and diaries,
and, on the other, the public archive Freud left as legacy of his psychoanalytic theory
and analysis (see Muller 2002).
In the early 1970s, Sathima had come to realize that she had poetry, bass lines and
melodies inside her that needed to be externalized by herself and a trio of jazz
musicians. Music, African songbird and Africa were among the first signs that
this woman was developing a compositional voice of her own in the field of jazz
singing. It would be several years before she laid down the tracks of these songs in the
studio, but there was a growing awareness inside that she had something emerging
out of her experiences as a South African that she could contribute to the world of
jazz. Because Sathima has refused to learn how to write her music down, moving
from orality to secondary orality (i.e. modern technologies of aural transmission like
radio and sound recordings; see Ong 1982) without going first to musical literacy, she
relies on her (male) musicians to put the music into a more permanent form for her
/ first by writing out the bass line and other compositional elements, and then by
recording the music with her voice woven into the musical fabric.
Deeply traumatized by the events of 1976 / known internationally as the Soweto
uprisings / when black South African children, who were protesting against being
taught in Afrikaans rather than their mother-tongue, were gunned down by white
South African security forces, Sathima had urged Abdullah to leave the country and
the couple had publicly declared their opposition to the apartheid regime. As a result,
they lost their South African citizenship and this placed them firmly in the
international community of South African political and cultural exiles. Along with
Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Walter Sizulu and others who were imprisoned in
South Africa, those in exile outside the country often felt the urge to use their time in
exile/imprisoned productively, and to create records/artefacts of their activities away
74 C. A. Muller
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from South Africa for such a time when they might be permitted to return to their
country of birth (Coombes 2003). Out of these political moments Sathima was to
compose her Liberation Suite, a suite of three songs likened to the Abbey Lincoln-
Max Roach Freedom Suite but with a South African narrative, and the Song for
Winnie (Mandela) / a total of four overtly political musical invocations she
recorded on two separate albums, Memories and Dreams (1983) and Lovelight (1987).
It is significant, too, that Sathima decided to constitute a durable legacy of her
music after her children were born / she has often told me that her catalogue of
recordings is all she will have to pass on to her children when she dies / because, as I
wrote almost a decade ago, Sathimas discourse on compositional process draws on
metaphors of birthing (Muller 1996). Her move into the recording studio happened
at a time when she had to spend most of her waking hours in her home, raising
children while Abdullah travelled the world performing. The bi-annual foray into the
recording studio is what has sustained her musical imagination and kept the spirit
within alive.
Between 1979 and 2004, Sathima produced ten long-playing records or compact
discs of her music. Initially recording in studios in Manhattan, she ultimately moved
over to the Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, studios of master engineer Rudy van Gelder.
She has worked with a range of outstanding American musicians, from the late Billy
Higgins to Buster Williams, Kenny Barron and Onaje Allen Gumbs, though her two
most recent compact discs, Cape Town Love (1999) and Musical Echoes (2003), were
recorded in Cape Town, South Africa. In the first, she performed with pianist Henry
February, her musical mentor from the late 1950s, bass player Basil Moses and
drummer Vincent Pavitt. The second combined the musical skills of African
American pianist Steven Scott, South African drummer Lulu Gontsana and bass
player Basil Moses with the South African American Sathima Bea Benjamin.
There are several ways in which the spirit within you is manifest in these
recording sessions: in terms of repertory, musicians selected, aesthetic of performance
and, finally, in the parallel we might make between traditional dreaming and the
recording studio formulated as a kind of modern dream space. Each of these aspects
of composing and recording combines to create for Sathima a musical experience that
is greater than the sum of its parts. For, more so than in everyday life, it is in the
hermetically sealed space of the studio that she is in control. It is in these all too rare
moments that the technology is calibrated to support her voice, there is no audience
or crowd to distract the other musicians, no need for anyone to outdo another in the
group. Cleared of all extraneous distractions, empowered by a trio of carefully
selected male musicians and a highly skilled and sensitive engineer, Sathimas vision
of the ideal recording event is shaped out of the bodily archive of prior performances
transformed into a new musical texture inside the studio.
When Sathima arrived in New York City in 1977, she made her debut on the citys
jazz scene as a singer of jazz with a recording of Ellingtonia. Sathima Sings Ellington
(1979) was her way of claiming an authentic membership of the jazz community by
rendering her own interpretations of the songs written by one of the jazz
Ethnomusicology Forum 75
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communitys finest composers. Her trio comprised African American musicians, a
selection which further inserted her into the US-centred world of jazz performance.
6
But the songs of Ellington are about as far as she goes in terms of singing the
American songbook, canonized by singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan in
the middle decades of the 20th century. The next album, Dedications, recorded in
New York in January 1982 and nominated for a Grammy Award, comprises two of
her own compositions, a song by Cole Porter and one by Eubie Blake and Andy Razaf,
with the remainder consisting of a mix of old Hollywood film favourites, operetta and
British music hall tunes sung in a jazz style. These were songs Sathima had pulled out
of the archive of her Cape Town childhood: while they definitely were not indigenous
to South Africa, they were the songs she recalls hearing while growing up in her
grandmothers home / in the movie theatre, during family gatherings around the
piano, rendered repeatedly on her grandmothers radio or wind-up Victrola or later
played by her own mother accompanying one of the young girls friends performing
in a local hotel or variety show. It is in this sense that the repertory she performs
might be defined as a peculiarly South African songbook. While the tunes may have
come from Britain or the United States originally, because of the rapidly changing
fashions of musical style in cities like New York, London or Chicago Sathima has
consistently found herself having to teach the American musicians the tunes: they
then put sophisticated chord changes under the melodies she sings with a jazz
rhythmic and melodic sensibility. These old songs are as unfamiliar to the musicians
as her own compositions, often making it seem as if she is their composer.
As mentioned earlier, since returning to the United States in 1977 Sathima has
selected her musicians with great care: agreeing to play with her means they first have
to work with her on a largely unknown repertory, in the manner described above.
This in itself may be the reason they end up agreeing to perform with her a second
and third time. It is commonly understood that most jazz musicians are reluctant to
perform with singers / because they tend to recede into the background as mere
accompaniment. With Sathima, the situation is different for several reasons. First,
there is new repertory to be learnt /sometimes there are lead sheets, sometimes these
have to be created in the studio before the musicians record. Second, while she does
not insist on being the diva out front, this singer requires the musicians to work hard
alongside her as she pulls her own compositions and the older repertory from inside
her without the aid of musical notation or a technical vocabulary. Third, while she
insists that they listen closely to her musical desires, she also provides ample time for
each to take his solo, to find his sound in her musical textures / textures that are
light, with plenty of space and breath / and to let that sound flow, free, and easy,
and out, as the words for Music articulate.
What I have just described, drawn from my early conversations with Ms Benjamin,
refers to a particular moment in her musical life / the period between 1977 and the
early 1990s, when the only musicians she had available to her were those living in the
United States. Prior to 1977, she had performed extensively with her own husband,
Abdullah Ibrahim, with the trio he formed in Switzerland in 1962, comprising South
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Africans Johnny Gertze and Makhaya Ntshoko. She had recorded with Duke
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in 1963, and prior to that performed with musicians
in her home community in Cape Town. Pianist Henry February was her primary
musical mentor in the late 1950s in Cape Town, having invited her to join his Nat
King Cole Trio in Cape Town as the groups singer, though Sathima had also
performed with Cape Town saxophonist Jimmy Adams in a variety of venues in Cape
Town and touring Zimbabwe, Mozambique and other parts of South Africa in the
late 1950s. In 1999, Sathima travelled back to Cape Town to record with a trio of
Cape Town jazz musicians, pianist Henry February, bass player Basil Moses and
drummer Vincent Pavitt, producing a recording she titled Cape Town Love, paying
tribute, once again, to those who had nurtured her love for jazz in her early 20s, and
invoking memories of the Cape Town jazz and popular scene that formed in the post-
war years in Cape Town and disintegrated under pressure from the apartheid State in
the early 1960s. Cape Town Love was a new experience in inspired improvisation for
Henry February; this was also the first and last time the veteran pianist had been
recorded / he died in October 2005.
This insistence upon spontaneity in the recording studio is the element of the
southern touch in musical engagement that Sathima Bea Benjamin prioritizes. In
the present context of writing about jazz as a process characterized as thinking in
jazz (Berliner 1993), an effort to give jazz a rational rather than instinctive, of-the-
moment shape, I realize that spontaneity is not what jazz scholars necessarily want
to hear about. In Ms Benjamins aesthetic, however, spontaneity is clearly not about
having a head or heart empty of prior performances or musical techniques: rather, it
is a clear statement about what she perceives to be an overly processed, too many
takes style of recording the music. As the producer of the recording, when Sathima
walks into the studio with her musicians she wants them to take musical risks, to go
acoustically into places they have never ventured before / to the past and to other
places / and to imagine where they might travel to in the future. But she has no need
for them to venture out alone: as she selects musicians who have the right spirit
within, who can perform with a southern touch, she is handpicking men who have
the capacity to listen carefully to what she requires but also to listen closely to each
other; she insists that they create a supportive musical texture that provides the space
necessary for her voice to find a place in the musical fabric equal to their own. And
she wants them to sound as if they know their place in the world, where they have
come from, where they are and where they might be going to. In a quite
extraordinary manner, Sathima constitutes herself as the living witness to a past in
music that few of these musicians remember themselves / it is a past that comes from
the southernmost part of the African continent, which, nevertheless, was saturated
with another kind of musical past from England and the United States. This is a past
that travelled the world over, and it constitutes another layer of music history that
these musicians struggle to recall.
The spontaneity that Ms Benjamin demands in the studio allows for a certain kind
of freedom from constraint: the freedom to imagine a world in which the love for the
Ethnomusicology Forum 77
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music and for each other, regardless of race, creed, gender, class or colour / which is
how she remembers the late 1950s jazz community in Cape Town / might return. As
she bears witness to a series of musical pasts, she lays down a vision of the future: this
is what Robin Kelley (2002) terms a freedom dream and Graham Lock (1999)
describes as blutopia. In this blutopian mode there are the two impulses that mark
the creative and inspired in the sounds of jazz / the utopian, which is manifest in the
imaginary creation of past and future places through performance; and the urge to
bear witness, to remember a particular kind or series of past(s) that one invokes in
forming a vision of the future.
A Diasporic Vision for Re-presenting the Past in Jazz
In this paper, I have considered the past in jazz in a variety of ways. I have argued that
this past in (jazz) music or the spirit within you, the non-material dimension of the
past, exists in dialectical tension with a complementary notion of materiality: the
creation of concrete and durable documents of particular musical performances in
the recording studio. These are two distinct ways of thinking about jazz, which in one
instance privileges the immediacy and ephemerality of the present moment in the
infinite art of improvisation (Berliner 1993) / the newly made in each
performance / and in another constitutes a durable past for itself through the
immutable material object / the sound recording. This dialectic has largely been
naturalized in jazz historiography: performers carry inside them archives of prior
performances that bear the traces of other performances, much like a palimpsest,
while jazz historians constitute a historical narrative through the analysis of a series of
sound recordings grouped into self-contained eras or stylistic periods.
The tension between the material and non-material emerges again in thinking
about the past in jazz from the perspective of living musicians from Africa. I began
this paper by arguing for a new way of defining African diasporic experience for those
who have travelled from Africa to Europe and the United States in the 20th century.
In contrast to the ideas about the African diaspora generated by those who were sold
into slavery and crossed the Atlantic in boats from the 17th century on, I have
presented a fresh perspective for historical reasons: the past in 17th-century West and
Central Africa and the memories carried in the bodies of African slaves and their
progeny that are almost impossible to trace in the 21st century are simply different
from the living memory of the more recent past that African immigrants, exiles and
other members of the new African diaspora recalled as they moved to Europe and the
United States in the last century. Nineteenth-century colonialism and 20
th
-century
post-colonialism have reshaped the African continent, its peoples and their music,
meaning that ideas about dispersion and travel of peoples from Africa elsewhere in
the more recent past must shift accordingly.
Out of sheer necessity, the musical past for diasporic musicians like Ms Benjamin
has become what she has called a home within, an apt metaphor for those who
spent decades in a state of jazz migrancy (Muller 2000, forthcoming).
7
This is because
78 C. A. Muller
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Ms Benjamins memories of home in Cape Town, South Africa and the music that
generated them were contained inside her for decades: they did not begin to be
deposited in sound recordings until the late 1970s when she finally settled in New
York City and established her own label.
8
There are few photographs or other visual
reminders of this period.
9
Apartheid South Africa offered almost no opportunity to
record for people of colour who sang in the English language / it was cheaper simply
to import British and American products. And historical accounts of South African
music rarely paid heed to people of colour, other than as the bearers of native or
tribal traditions. Increasingly from the 1960s to the 1990s the archives of what had
been recorded were destroyed or sealed by the State, and many of the musicians who
had performed together in the late 1950s left South Africa, most only returning with
the changed political environment of the early 1990s.
These extended periods of movement without a fixed sense of home should help us
to understand why Ms Benjamin conceptualizes the past first as spirit rather than
substantive text and second as spirit within you because there have been very few
external objects that have carried signs of past musical experience / most she has
retrieved from bodily memory alone. Third, we capture the significance of the body
as the singular archive or container of musical fragments bearing witness to a
particular kind of musical past / initially in South Africa and increasingly in a host of
other places. It is in the human body that sediments of sound from multiple sites of
performance and mediation were archived. Much like the musical score that
smoothes over the ruptures of visual edits in film, in Sathima Bea Benjamins life
it is the spirit / music from the past enlivened by the human voice specifically /
that habitually creates the sense of continuity between past and present. It is music as
the spirit within you that enlivens repertories long forgotten or silenced by forces of
innovation or State suppression. Music as spirit is a recyclable resource for present
performance: it sets the past in motion and acts as a reminder of prior relationships.
In other words, rather like Ms Benjamins own diasporic sense of home and its
musical past, South African music history in that period was by definition dispersed
into multiple sites around the world. Reintegrating its scattered fragments represents
a significant challenge to those striving to rewrite a more unified narrative of South
Africas musical past in a post-apartheid frame of mind.
It is not only South African music historians that are challenged by Ms Benjamins
reformulation of African diasporic experience, of jazz music as the spirit within.
Rather, in bringing this essay to conclusion, I wish to address the conventions and
practices of jazz historians more generally by returning, once again, to the idea of the
jazz dialectic / the seeming incommensurability and lack of congruency between
permanence and effervescence that jazz engenders among its performers and
generates for its consumers, critics and historians / to suggest that the contradictory
demands provide clues to innovative ways of rethinking jazz historiography, from the
evolutionary paradigm of musical periodization that marks the march of musical
progress into the future / which individual recordings of past performances sustain
/ to a more visceral or spirited connection between past and present (de Veaux
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1991). I am suggesting that we think of the past in three dimensions: as a palimpsest
as well as a chronology, that we view it in its verticality at least as much as we do its
horizontal movement from point A to point B; and then we give it the third
dimension through the idea of living history, the spirit of the past carried forth in
human memory. This depth of perception should provide a mechanism for
reinvigorating jazz history by making it into a narrative shaped by a freshly conceived
diasporic sensibility, a sensibility that continually inserts other times and places into
present moments and spaces.
To illustrate my point, let me return to the relationship between jazz performance
and the city introduced in my earlier discussion of Ms Benjamins relationship to New
York City and to Cape Town, the place of her childhood prior to that, by asking you
to picture in your mind a series of images of a city skyline.
10
First, think of yourself at
a considerable distance from the skyline, positioned on the other side of a river, for
example. With the image clear in your minds eye, move the eye slowly from left to
right across the skyline / and, as you do, imagine that each building represents an era
in jazz history, or at least a different moment in the chronological mapping of jazz
history as you know it. Imagine now what you might be able to deduce about the
building/historical moment from what you are able to make out from your place
across the river. What you see on the outside might be as much as there is to know
from where you are standing. Perhaps, if you have some knowledge of architectural
history, you will identify the name of the buildings architect by the size, shape and
character of its construction, but it is unlikely from your position that you will be
able to glean much more knowledge than the surface information projected by the
building to the outside world. One certainly cannot capture the sound of each place
at such a distance or any sense of the people who inhabit the city. This is a two-
dimensional perspective on the past in jazz as is its representation in the written
narrative / it lacks a sense of hearing.
Now, get a slightly different feel for the city by positioning yourself inside its
skyline and at the top of one of its buildings. To help you into this imagined space,
read Michel de Certeaus description of what it is like to view the Manhattan skyline
from the perspective of Windows on the World, the restaurant that used to be at the
top of one of the World Trade Centers Twin Towers. He writes:
Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the
haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up
the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the
crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into
the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. . . . To be lifted to the summit of
the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the citys grasp. Ones body is no
longer clasped by the streets . . . nor is it possessed . . . by the rumble of so many
differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. (de Certeau 1984, 91)
Elegaic in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the USA, this excerpt is particularly
powerful in the image it produces of the topography of verticality that characterized
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this view of New York City. De Certeau refers to the god-like sense one gained from
being at the top of the building. It invoked the city as stationary, a fixed but user-
friendly set of landmarks easily recognized from a celestial vantage point. As we read
the description and bring to mind prior experiences of viewing the city from the Twin
Towers, or a similar place like the midtown perspective of the Empire State Building,
the minds eye moves over the changing contours of the citys skyline in a way that
makes us almost able to feel the motion in our bodies. Positioned within the
boundaries of the city, we nevertheless remain beyond the liveness generated by the
sounds and experiences of the city / we have a sense only of what it looks like from
above. By way of analogy, this is the view we have of the past in jazz as we survey the
progression of style through the medium of sound recordings and jazz history books
in the 21st century. We can feel the motion and garner some knowledge of the past
neatly packaged into specific buildings/periods, but we remain aloof, never really
feeling humanly connected. Each period of the past in jazz remains sealed off from
the next / each a building unto itself, even if the total spectacle coheres as a single
entity: a skyline or history.
Now, take the elevator down from the buildings and reintegrate into the life of the
city on the ground through the words, again of de Certeau, but also of Jean
Baudrillard. De Certeau describes those on the street as walkers, creating a grounded
citizenry defined by movement through the city: The ordinary practitioners of the
city live down below, . . . They walk / an elementary form of this experience of the
city; they are walkers (de Certeau 1984, 91/3). From Jean Baudrillard we capture a
greater sense of the city as performative; he conveys the drama of the city for ordinary
walkers and, finally, what it sounds like.
Nothing could be more intense, electrifying, turbulent, and vital than the streets of
New York. They are filled with crowds, bustle, and advertisements, each by turn
aggressive or casual. There are millions of people in the streets, wandering, carefree,
violent, as if they had nothing better to do . . . than produce the continuous
scenario of the city. There is music everywhere. (Baudrillard 1989, 16)
As discussed earlier, in de Certeaus analysis those who walk in the city are always
moving, passing by, without ever seeming to arrive. The contrast between the first
image / of the two-dimensional skyline, the second / the three-dimensional
panoptical view, and the third / the embodied sense of being in time and on the
streets / is striking, almost unnerving. The first is clearly mapped, stationary, without
human connection; the second brings one a little closer to the action, but retains a
panoptical power and distance; while the third / the more humanly engaged / is
always in process. All are ways of knowing the city, and to extend the metaphor to
jazz, ways of knowing the past and present in jazz / from the distant, objective
narrative of the past, to the liveliness of new performance in the present. There is a
fourth and final vantage point*/this is the perspective that brings us into much
closer contact with our city walkers and the relationship they imagine with the built
environment of the city, which invokes for us a desire to connect to the past through
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the built environment or jazz performance. From a perspective far less exaggerated
and more personal than Baudrillards, Ms Benjamins describes her relationship to
New York City: New York affords you much . . . I actually use the busy streets as a
place to ponder and reflect. I call it meditation in motion. Being amongst its diverse
peoples everyday, I feel at home (Benjamin 2000, 71).
A similar but more historically self-conscious position is described by Haitian
historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his writing on silences in historical accounts of
the Haitian Revolution. This excerpt comes from a chapter on his visit to the Palace
of Sans Souci, approaching the grave of Henry Christophe, King of Haiti:
I walked in silence between the old walls, trying to guess at the stories they would
never dare tell. I had been in the fort since daybreak. I had lost my companions on
purpose: I wanted to tiptoe through the remains of history. Here and there, I
touched a stone, a piece of iron hanging from the mortar, overlooked or left by
unknown hands for unknown reasons. . . . I stepped across my dreams up to the
pile of concrete. . . . I knew the man. I had read about him in my history books as
do all Haitian schoolchildren; but that was not why I felt close to him. I wanted to
be closer. More than a hero, he was a friend of the family. My father and uncle
talked about him by the hours when I was still a child. (Trouillot 1995, 31/2)
Tiptoe[ing] through the remains of history is a delightful metaphor for what
both the historian and the singer struggle to achieve in their engagement with
remnants of the past. Trouillots narrative works in parallel to the ways in which I
have argued Ms Benjamin has engaged the past in jazz as a medium for contemporary
renditions in the present and the future. Jazz performance for Ms Benjamin embodies
a similar relationship to the relics/objects and people in/from the past as Sans Souci
does for Trouillot. Both strive to connect to the past by animating memories of earlier
times in the present; both represent jazz/past lives as not shut off from the present in
closed containers of historical periods that are over and done with by weaving their
personal pasts into the larger historical narrative. Both engage in a continuous
process of re-evaluating the life of jazz/history in the future by thinking of its past as
an archive of living history that musicians/historians are continually involved with
recuperating, reinterpreting and envisioning new possibilities for in their presenta-
tion/representations. In this vein, historiography and jazz performance shift from
being narratives of innovation and rupture to ones in which there is greater
continuity in transformations from one form or period to another, and a far stronger
connection between living people and their pasts. In this more spirited and certainly
poetic mode of being in the world of jazz, jazz history is not solely a thing of the past,
objectified and fixed as a series of great but forever lost moments, but is shaped out of
a past always newly imagined and recreated in live performance, inserting a certain
agency to those still living.
I am suggesting then, a fundamentally different way of thinking about ones
relationship to the past and to notions of jazz history. And it is, I believe, a distinctive
contribution ethnomusicologists can make to larger questions about the relationship
between anthropology and history / because it addresses the differences between a
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written and an oral/aural past and its connection to human memory. Sound matters
to human memory, and the medium of transmission shapes its message. This is
perhaps best illustrated in a pattern I have noticed in the telling of the past in jazz in
the United States on public radio and in written texts. On radio, particularly public
stations broadcast from historically black universities and colleges, programme
content relies heavily on the memories of particular musicians and oral testimony,
while official written narratives of jazz history draw far less on the perspectives of
cultural insiders themselves, focusing more on seminal moments contained in sound
recordings and the authority of the critic or scholar. Of course, there are notable
exceptions to this, but in general the medium of radio, for example, lends itself to the
actual voices of musicians and witnesses / the sound of the voice of a living musician
reminiscing about prior performances and communities / better than writing does.
Such a perspective on the past in jazz is quintessentially a way of imagining oneself
present in an ever-expanding sense of a living history: a history of absent voices
invigorated and enlivened through the presence of voices themselves from other times
and places. Furthermore, in its stress upon the new African diaspora there is an
ethical injunction that requires us to incorporate new vocabularies for older models
and to allow for new sounds and standards of judgement. Not only are we to rethink
our assumptions about the African diaspora; it also urges ethnomusicologists to lead
the way in opening the boundaries of jazz performance to a worldwide palette of
possibilities, allowing for multiple narrations in the writing of official histories, and
to invite in multiple sources of origin, forms of memory and musical overlay.
Acknowledgements
Funding for the research and writing of this paper was provided by the University of
Pennsylvania in several ways. First, I am deeply indebted to the Associate Dean of the
School of Arts and Sciences, Joe Farrell, and Music Department Chair Jeff Kallberg for
academic leave (Fall 2005) and the Weiler Faculty Research Fellowship (Fall 2006).
Second, I am most grateful for research funding from the Penn Research Foundation
(2001/2) and a Junior Faculty Research grant from the Department of Music at the
University of Pennsylvania (1998/2000). In addition, a National Endowment for the
Humanities-sponsored fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North
Carolina (1999/2000) made me realize that the research for this project could be
transformed into a monograph. Views expressed in this article do not necessarily
reect those of the institutions who sponsored the work. Earlier versions of this paper
were presented at the Millennium Conference at CUNY Graduate Center in New York
City, hosted by CUNY, NYU and the Smithsonian Institution (October 2001), the
Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting at Estes Park, Colorado (November
2001) and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology conference in Bangor, Wales (May
2003). The paper was also submitted to the World of the Spirits Conference in
Brussels (October 2001). A different version of this material forms a chapter in my
forthcoming book, Musical Echoes.
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Notes
[1] The idea of an archive of living history is taken from Gwen Ansell (2004) and derives from
a South African oral history project with the same name. It presented itself as a tting
expression for ideas of living history I had earlier been playing with.
[2] Ramseys reexivity and explanation parallel my own reections on the relationship between
lived experience and intellectual inquiry (see Muller 1999, ch. 1).
[3] Recently, she told me that she unexpectedly heard his speaking voice on radio, in one of
those rare moments when someone had recorded him talking rather than conducting his
band or playing himself. This was a couple of days before she was scheduled to perform at
Sweet Rhythm in New York City.
[4] See Donalds argument that the cost of freedom in the city is that physical closeness is offset
by mental distance (1999, 11).
[5] At a recent memorial service in St Peters Church in Manhattan for one of the older
musicians, it was striking how the musicians paid tribute to similar qualities in the musician
being honoured.
[6] The trio comprised Onaje Allan Gumbs on piano, Vishnu Wood on bass and John Betsch on
drums, with Claude Latief on three of the tracks playing congas (Rasmussen 2000, 93).
[7] I draw a distinction here between the historical record, a record constituted out of the
combination of oral history and archival records, Ms Benjamins part in that narrative, i.e.
what she carries around as her home within, and the more individualized notion of the
spirit within. In the last decade Ms Benjamin has started to talk about music as her home
within, while the song Music as spirit within came much earlier. I have come to read this
distinction as an important stage in her development as a musician living in diaspora. The
spirit within is about how she comes to the American jazz scene, what she artistically and
personally brings to jazz performance, while the home within references a larger music
history tied to her early years in Cape Town, South Africa, and specically to memories she
has of music in her grandmothers home, of music in the wider community and, as she has
spent years on the move, of home increasingly existing only in her memory. The sense of
home that jazz performance created for her in South Africa is hard to nd in New York City
/ it emerges in the rare moments inside the recording studio and very occasionally in live
performance. But it is a sensibility she cherishes and keeps alive in her memory of past times
in jazz performance.
[8] There are three exceptions to this: see Rasmussen (2000) for a full listing of all prior
recordings.
[9] For a rare collection of photographs, see Rasmussen (2001).
[10] I am not the rst to posit a relationship between the New York City skyline and jazz
performance. See, for example, Kouwenhouvens article Whats American about America?,
originally written in 1954 and published in 1955 in the Colorado Quarterly but revised for
OMeally (1998, 125/8); and Wynton Marsaliss comments in his interview with OMeally
on Duke Ellingtons music about the New York skyline, skyscrapers, jazz and Ellingtons
music (OMeally 1998, 145).
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