Ndikho Xaba and the Natives - 1971 - Ndikho Xaba and the Natives

Ndikho Xaba and the Natives

1971

Ndikho Xaba and the Natives

01. Shwabada 12:29

02. Freedom 02:41

03. Flight 02:53

04. Nomusa 08:47

05. Makhosi 02:57

06. Big Time (CD bonus track) 02:40

07. Zulu Lunchbag (CD bonus track) 02:21

Ndikho Xaba - piano, percusion, bullhorn, seaweed horn

Plunky - tenor, soprano sax, flute, percussion

Lon Moshe - vibes, percussion

Duru - congas, percussion

Shabalala - bass

Kieta - drums

Matsuli Music presents soul, spirituality and avant-garde jazz from South African political exile Ndikho Xaba. Its rarity has until now served to obscure both its beauty and its historical significance. Making profound links between the struggle against apartheid and the Black Power movement in the USA Ndikho Xaba and the Natives is arguably the most complete and complex South African jazz LP recorded in the USA. It stands out as a critical document in the history of transatlantic black solidarity and in the jazz culture of South African exiles. This reissue from Matsuli Music brings this collectors’ treasure back into print for the first time since 1971.

Ndikho Xaba and the Natives opens a fluid channel of sonic energy that courses between two liberation struggles and two jazz traditions, making them one. It is a critical statement in the history of transatlantic black solidarity, unifying voices stretching from San Francisco to Johannesburg. There is no other recording or group in which the new jazz spirituality of the late 1960s is so fully blent with an African jazz tradition.

The limited edition vinyl edition is presented with re-mastered sound in a gatefold sleeve containing unseen photographs and concert bills from Ndikho Xaba’s personal archive together with a personal recollection from Plunky Branch and extensive sleeve-notes written by Francis Gooding. The CD version reproduces this new content in a 24 page booklet as well including two additional tracks taken from a hard to find single released by Ndikho Xaba’s band African Echoes.

Spiritual sounds and a heck of a lot more – served up by Ndiko Xaba, an expatriate South African musician who was working in Oakland at the time of this record – fusing together the roots of his homeland with some wonderfully free and open American jazz styles! At times, there's a bit of a Dollar Brand vibe in Xaba's piano – long lines, with a really compelling pulse – but other times, the music opens up with the kind of searching freedoms you'd hear on the AACM scene of the time – mixing together righteous styles with inventive musical expression! The great Plunky – of Oneness Of Juju fame – is in the group on tenor, soprano sax, and flute – and the record also features Black Fire labelmate Lon Moshe on vibes and percussion, plus additional percussion, bass, and drums.

Of the many jewels left scattered across the world by South Africa’s jazz diaspora, Ndikho Xaba and the Natives, the single album recorded by Ndikho Xaba in the US, is among the most lucent. A mesmerising blend of heavy spirituality and politicised avant-garde jazz seasoned with gutbucket soul, Ndikho Xaba and the Natives is arguably the most complete and complex South African jazz LP recorded in the US, making profound sonic and ideological links between the struggle against apartheid and the situation of African Americans in the era of Black Power. It is a critical document in the history of transatlantic black solidarity and in the jazz culture of the South African exiles, and until now its rarity has served to obscure both its beauty and its historical significance. With this reissue, Matsuli Music brings it back into print for the first time since its original release in 1971.

Ndikho Douglas Xaba was born in 1934 as the youngest of six boys in the city of Pietermaritzburg. Both his parents were highly educated, and had worked in teaching. His father, the Reverend James George Howard Xaba, had been the founder and fi rst president of the Natal African Teachers Union, before later becoming a Methodist minister. He was also an underground member of the African National Congress, something which was kept from his children until much later. Ndikho’s mother, Emily Selina Dingaan Xaba, played the organ and led her church choir. She too taught and, like Ndikho’s father, she was an adept linguist. (The Xaba family were all skilled with languages - Ndikho’s grandfather had been translator for the last independent Zulu king, Cetshwayo. Much later, while in America, Ndikho himself would teach Zulu). As the youngest born, Ndikho spent much time with his mother, and she was a powerful influence on his life.

Like so many young South Africans at the time, his first instrument was the penny whistle, which he taught himself, playing in a quartet made up of school-friends. Throughout his career, Ndikho would remain self-taught on all his instruments. His father’s ministry meant that the family moved regularly around Natal and the Eastern Cape, and it was in around 1953, while resident in Queenstown, that Ndikho took his fi rst step into professional musicianship, with Lex Mona’s Tympany Slickers. Mona himself did not compose, and the Tympany Slickers’ repertoire was a mixture of South African compositions and jazz standards. The group gigged regularly, and would remain together until a lack of work, amid other pressures, finally caused them to flounder in 1956. By that time, Ndikho had other pressing reasons for moving on. 

The African National Congress and other African political and labour groups had long used music at social and political events, and in Queenstown the local leader of the ANC Youth League asked the Tympany Slickers to become the regular band for political meetings and events. With the Slickers regularly working at ANC gatherings, Ndikho became actively involved with the local movement, which was being monitored by the apartheid state’s security services. Returning one evening from a meeting, Ndikho and the party secretary, who was carrying the meeting minutes, were pursued by officers from the notorious police Special Branch. Ndikho managed to escape, but the authorities eventually caught up with him, and on the 6th March 1956 he was interrogated by Special Branch in his own home. His family were targeted and his brother, who was also active in the ANC, was arrested. With Ndikho’s card marked, it became impossible for him stay safely in Queenstown. Entering a period that he describes as ‘exile within South Africa’, Ndikho left the Eastern Cape for Johannesburg, spending the following years quietly ensconced within the Dorkay House jazz scene. 

To maintain a low profile, Ndikho shuttled between Johannesburg and Durban, all the while looking for a way to escape South Africa. He had explored seeking refuge in Swaziland and Lesotho, but his ticket out would come through Alan Paton’s 1962 theatre production Sponono. With a score by composer, jazz pianist and broadcaster Gideon ‘Mgibe’ Nxumalo, Sponono was a complex moral tale of guilt and forgiveness, set in a Diepkloof boys reformatory. It proved a great success, and after opening in Durban in December 1962, it moved on to Pietermaritzburg, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and other cities, running for almost a year. Ndikho had the part of ‘Imbongi’, a Zulu praise singer, who sang and proclaimed in honour of the eponymous protagonist; he was also in the chorus of ‘Reformatory Boys’.

In 1964 Sponono would become the fi rst African play to run on Broadway, where it played at the Cort Theatre for just under a month. Among those who left South Africa with the production were several actors who had performed in King Kong, and the cast also included musicians Philemon Hou and Caiphus Semenya, both of whom would also remain in the US. In total, half of the play’s cast would choose exile.

New York was then home to Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, who Ndikho had known from his Johannesburg days. Makeba was by this time already an international star, while Masekela’s US career was just beginning. When Sponono closed Ndikho and Semenya were taken under Makeba’s wing. She found them places to live, helped them to organise legitimate residency in the US, and gave them work. They played and sang background on her recordings, contributing arrangements and compositions (the Xaba-penned song ‘Emavungwini’ appeared on Hugh Masekela’s 1966 Grr! album, and later on Miriam’s Makeba! LP). Living in Harlem with Semenya, Ndikho immersed himself in the New York jazz scene, and it was also at this time that he began to teach himself the piano.

By the late 1960s the core New York group of South African exiles had splintered. Miriam Makeba had divorced Hugh Masekela in 1968. Her new marriage to Black Panther leader Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) had made her persona non grata within the US recording industry, and the couple had moved to Sekou Touré’s Guinea. Masekela and Semenya had relocated to LA, where Letta Mbulu’s career was taking off, and where Masekela had set up his own label, Chisa. In 1969, Ndikho too left New York for California. After a short time in Los Angeles with Caiphus, he moved on to San Francisco, centre of the late 1960s counter-culture. There, he quickly became involved in black politics, acting as a cultural worker and African language teacher at the Malcolm X Unity House on Fulton, a centre for community, education and social justice founded by the progressive activist Bill Bradley (now Dr. Oba T’Shaka), chair of the San Francisco arm of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). It was here that he would meet his wife and life-long companion, Nomusa.

Born Patricia Packard, Nomusa Xaba had grown up in Illinois. A fearless and active civil rights campaigner working for CORE, she had helped organise demonstrations and marches in her native Chicago, and at eighteen travelled to Mississippi with CORE to teach literacy in African American communities. She too had arrived in the Bay Area in 1970, and after meeting Ndikho at the Unity House the pair quickly became close, and were married the same year; Patricia’s desire to change her given name was aided by Ndikho, who chose Nomusa (‘the mother of kindness’). It was Nomusa that would introduce Ndikho to saxophonist James ‘Plunky’ Branch, with whom he founded Ndikho and the Natives.

‘The music that they produced was as political as it was intense,’ remembered Nomusa in her memoir, A Long Time Coming. ‘Baba Ndikho held daily South African history lessons for the band and their families, and is the only artist I know of who regularly did South African war chants and battle (Zulu vs English) reenactments musically on stage. He was determined to use music to free South Africa from apartheid’s evil grip and the members of the band and their families, all children of the duplicity of America, were determined to help. The band was like family.’

Early in 1971, they were given a chance to make their first recording backing a story-teller called Cousin Wash. The result, recorded in March 1971 at the Lincoln Intermediate School, Berkeley, was Cousin Wash The Story-teller & Ndikho The Musician, issued on the Berco label. The album consists of four of Wash’s somewhat idiosyncratic folk tales backed by subtle, responsive, but very quietly recorded accompaniment from the Natives. The Cousin Wash album led immediately to the recording of Ndikho Xaba and the Natives. Wash’s brother, O. T. Hunt, had a recording studio set up in his garage in Los Angeles. Soon after the Wash recordings, the band drove down to LA with tapes of various live recordings to add finishing touches and overdubs in Hunt’s garage. The resulting album was released on a shoe-string in a pressing run of only 500 copies, with Nomusa creating the sleeve artwork and Plunky’s then girlfriend, photo-journalist Thulani Davis, contributing sleevenotes. 

Ndhiko Xaba and the Natives is unique among the many recordings made by South Africans exiled in the US, for it is the only recording which emerges from within the complex of politically radical and spiritually energised post-Civil Rights black social movements. As the 1960s shaded into the 1970s, grass-roots black social groups and institutions began to spring up, aimed at spreading self-awareness, economic self-sufficiency and community pride against a background of continued hostility and structural disadvantage.

In jazz, this self-empowerment registers in a decisive turn toward esoteric and sometimes mystical spiritual renewal in the tradition of Coltrane, and a strengthening Afro-centrism which found outlet in the exploration of modal forms and in the Africanising of imagery and language. It is in this era that privately made pressings and artist-owned labels such as Strata East take the foreground, as musicians sought to loosen their links with a record industry that was, in any case, becoming wary of the jazz message. It is also the era of the great self-suffi cient and self-releasing artist-collectives such as Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra, Philip Cohr Artistic Heritage ensemble and the beginnings of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM).

Ndikho Xaba and the Natives is more fully a product of this period than any other album recorded in the US by South African exiles, many of whom found ways to get their messages across while operating within the mainstream recording industry. Its profound significance, and the significance of the band, is that their place was fully within the black counter-cultural zeitgeist of the vigorously radical Bay Area, and that their messages and activism were developed and realised within that sphere. With Ndikho at the helm, they also took into the centre of that political, social and musical world a messenger directly from Africa, who had lived under and fought against the oppression of apartheid. In music and stagecraft, Ndikho and the Natives could thus speak of black oppression in two worlds, with direct experience.

Coming from South Africa, the country with the most fully developed jazz  tradition in the world outside of America, Ndikho was also able to do what all the South African exiles did: re-weave the adopted jazz tradition of South Africa back into the original fabric of American jazz. But with the Natives, Ndikho could forge this weighty creative connection at ground level, at a crucial juncture in the African American fi ght for self-realisation against injustice. Ndikho Xaba and the Natives is pregnant with the drama of this political, musical and spiritual contact, and the music opens a fluid channel of sonic energy that courses between two liberation struggles and two jazz traditions, making of them one. It is thus a critical statement in the history of transatlantic black solidarity - a record which asserts that the continuous and global nature of racist oppression could be met by an equally unified demand for black liberation, one that could call for freedom with proud and unified voices stretching from San Francisco to Johannesburg. There is no other recording or group in which the new jazz spirituality of the late 1960s is so fully blent with an African jazz tradition that could look directly back into African culture for inspiration and power.

But musical groups are made of individuals, and such philosophical factors cannot keep together that which pushes apart: despite their desire to use the record as a way to introduce the group’s music to a wider public, the recording was followed closely by the band’s disintegration. ‘Plunky has a very strong leadership style, and so does Baba Ndikho’, explains Nomusa, ‘and they started to have differences in how we should proceed… They had this discussion, and they couldn’t reach an agreement, and so they all picked up their instruments and they played. They came up with this song that they called ‘Mad Mad’, ’cause everybody was mad, everybody was angry. After that they decided that there was no need to be angry, that they could go their separate ways and still be friends.’

Ndikho and Nomusa would eventually return to New York, where they became deeply involved with the loft scene of the 1970s. Playing together as a duo, with Nomusa adding percussion and reciting poetry, they continued to gig when they could. They also became more closely involved with the ANC’s New York office, whose then chief representative, Johnny Mfanafuthi Makatini, had been in Mkhmubane and Sponono with Ndikho back in South Africa. For bigger gigs Ndikho would put together versions of the Natives, sometimes including Plunky. Ndikho and Nomusa also played regular benefit gigs for the ANC, both as a duo and with expanded line-ups.  In the 1980s, they would become directly active in the freedom struggle, travelling at the request of the ANC to Tanzania where they taught for several years at the ANC’s flagship school for the displaced children of apartheid, the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College. They would later return to the US, spending time in Nomusa’s hometown of Chicago, where they played and interacted with the great Philip Cohran, and other musicians connected to the innovative AACM.

Plunky meanwhile founded Juju, later Oneness of Juju, for a series of influential LPs on the Strata East and Black Fire labels. Playing with Ndikho, he says, ‘had a profound effect on my music, my Afrocentric political and cultural views, and my career for the following 20 years and beyond…Ndikho is a revolutionary musician and an unsung hero.’

Ndikho Xaba eventually returned to South Africa in 1998, where he continued to teach, make instruments and play. Today he lives with Nomusa in Durban, close enough to the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Jazz and Popular Music that they can hear the jazz students rehearsing and renewing the sounds that have linked black South Africa to black America with such deep complexity and sympathy for nearly a century. Both he and Nomusa are gladdened by the knowledge that a new crop of musicians rises within that dual tradition.