Capturing the "Spirit of Africa" in the Jazz Singing of South African-Born Sathima Bea Benjamin

For the image [of Africa]--as identification--marks the site of an ambivalence. Its representation is always spatially split--its makes present something that is absent--and temporally deferred: it is the representation of a time that is always elsewhere, a repetition.

--Homi Bhabha, Interrogating Identity 51 (original emphasis)

I think the basis of everything I do is Africa. There's a sense of rhythm that, if you really listen carefully, is there.

--personal communication, Sathima Bea Benjamin, April 1990

In May 1961, one of Drum Magazine's reporters described the Sunday night jazz scene in Cape Town, South Africa. ² The Sunday night gatherings had been initiated by Cape Town-born jazz pianist Dollar Brand. Dollar was not his real name. It was the nickname given to the young Brand to reference his American exchanges. These were the friendships he fostered with African American sailors when their ships arrived in the Cape Town harbor in the 1950s. He would change his name once more when he later converted to Islam. Though some people in Cape Town stubbornly hold onto the more familiar "Dollar Brand," Abdullah Ibrahim is the name by which he is known internationally. In the early 1960s, Dollar was the center of the Cape jazz scene:

The naked light bulb, like the mood, is blue. The only other illumination in the place comes from the glowing ends of cigarettes, or maybe a stray moonbeam filtering down the slopes of Table Mountain and in through a back window.

The chairs are arranged carefully, like pews, and the congregation is as devout as any other Sunday night gathering. In the darkened corner the tall, thin guy with the tight jeans and the size 12 army boots is leading his group through an original composition. The long, bony fingers slide or thump, caress or squeeze the notes out, and the horn, the bass, and the drums, catch the message and pass it on.

Dark as it is, the Dollar is gleaming tonight. This is the real stuff, the pulse beat of the jazz world in the Cape, and Dollar Brand and his group are pumping it out--though this is their night off from six days of cafe-capers with the beatnik gang. ³

From this center of the jazz scene, which is up an iron staircase near where the Cape's trolley buses get their nightly wash and brush-up, the music world stretches far down the Peninsula, and every other month some new guy with a horn or an alto sax or a bass is coming up from the shadows to catch the ear of the people who know their music.

In the past few years, the Cape has taken over as THE place for music, snatching the laurel from the backrooms and cellars a thousand miles north in [Johannesburg]. Dollar was in at the start of the move south, but he doesn't understand how it happened. Anyone who has been around the Cape long enough to know his music remembers the Big Band age just after the war. But they were all African, fifteen or more, beating it out like ebony Dorseys and Goodmans. Maybe it's the changing mood of South Africa that African music-- Cape-wards, anyhow--has faded to no more than a township tin lid. So the Coloreds have taken over, and the mood is softer, sweeter, and more serious.

Dollar and his group are the lone wolves of the Cape Tin Pan Alley, dedicated jazz men all. They play it their way--and if the customers don't like it then that's tough on the customers.[ . . .] "Jazz is the real classics," he says. "It's all here, at the Cape. The place is dripping with talent and I'm not sure I ever want to be anywhere else." (Drum May...