Jazz Transatlantic, Volume II: Jazz Derivatives and Developments in Twentieth-Century Africa

Introduction

When I first saw Clint Eastwood’s film Bird* about the life of jazz icon Charlie ’Bird Parker, beautifully acted out by Forest Whitaker, I was in Harare, Zimbabwe. On a cold July 1989 evening, I was taken to a large cinema hall in town by my good friend Mitchel Strumpf, then in charge of the Ethnomusicology Programme at the Zimbabwe College of Music, where he had invited me to give a series of lectures.

The hall was about half full. People represented a broad section of the Harare public; there were many working-class regular cinemagoers, many youngsters, some university students, and some elderly, retired couples. In a place like that, with a modest entry fee to be paid, the most recent American films used to be screened, and this one had only been released a few months ago. The moviegoing local population in Harare, as in other cities of southern Africa, made such imports of English-language, mostly American movies profitable, from James Bond to Westerns, etc.

Bird was one of the rare, full-length jazz films to be seen, but one that stirred intensive interest because of its subject, and the excellent performance by Whitaker as Parker, Diane Venora as Chan, Parker’s wife, Samuel E. Wright as Dizzy Gillespie, and others, with Parker’s original performances isolated electronically from Chan Parker’s private collection of recordings, and new backing musicians added. Whitaker earned the Best Actor award at the 1988 Film Festival in Cannes, and the film also won several other awards.

What can be concluded from this brief glance at jazz awareness in Zimbabwe? Most certainly, there was interest and knowledge of some aspects of jazz history in a broad cross-section of the Harare public. But does it certify the existence of a jazz scene in a place like that or elsewhere in the region?

Much, of course, remains unreported. In 1976 Caesar Fratantoni, a dentist and clarinetist from Argentina, founded with his Zimbabwean family members a traditional New Orleans jazz band, the Neptune Band of Zimbabwe. Sabina Violett Siankope played banjo and sang; Trijwell J. Siankope, cornet; Daniel, trombone; Junio, bass; and Japhet Louis was on drums. The group had international success. In 1981 they played in the Preservation Hall in New Orleans during the Jazz & Heritage Festival. In the same year they obtained a prize at the Breda Festival in the Netherlands; in 1984 they toured Germany and were recorded in jazz club Hannover on November 2. A German LP was released by Jazz Initiative Celle e.V.

There was a continuing jazz scene in Harare at least into the 1990s, when American jazz musician Linda F. Williams (2005) undertook her fieldwork. As a female saxophonist she contributed greatly to dismantling gender stereotypes. She was quickly integrated into the community of Harare jazz musicians playing in bop and post-bop idioms (e.g., ’Round Midnight, John Coltrane’s Mr. P.C., etc.).

Questions about the extent to which jazz was popular in Africa during the years when it proliferated internationally, from the 1940s to the 1970s, have been vexing researchers. With reference to Ethiopia, for example, one could say that Mulatu Astatke of Addis Ababa, founder of Ethio-jazz, was indeed playing jazz. But whether his jazz was popular in his home country and whether it was ever part of any scene is uncertain. In 2014, according to visitors, it did not appear that there was much left of a jazz scene in Addis Ababa, except at a few nostalgic tourist spots. On the other hand, Mulatu’s name has so much charisma these days that he can easily assemble a jazz group for an overseas tour.

The issue behind these observations touches on a larger problem: to what extent jazz musicians in Africa were sustained by local audiences, and whether scenes of like-minded musicians and fans had formed as, for example, at Minton’s Playhouse in New York in the 1940s. These questions can only be addressed case by case, and within certain time periods. The answers may seem to be negative for Addis Ababa in 2014, regarding Mulatu’s Ethio-jazz, but affirmative for the same place in the 1960s with regard to the Imperial Bodyguard Band of Emperor Haile Selassie, a band that played remarkable big band swing. In Dakar and St. Louis, Senegal, there was definitely a jazz scene from the 1940s to the 1960s, and in a sense it has continued, though with modified musical contents. And in a variety of African places there are institutions of music education incorporating jazz classes—the Conservatoire in Dakar, and Johnny Mekoa’s Gauteng Jazz Academy in South Africa, to mention only two such institutions.

No doubt, the most intensive presence of jazz has been in South Africa, particularly from the 1960s to the 1990s, with festivals, clubs, and organizations like the Jazz Appreciation Society in Johannesburg. Even there one would not claim that jazz was part of a popular, mass-dominated musical culture, though on some occasions a stadium in Johannesburg was easily filled. Jazz has always been a bit esoteric, in content and accessibility. In South Africa the popular music of the time was jive, patha-patha, kwela, s’manje-manje, mbaqanga, etc.

But why should popularity of a musical genre be a criterion at all? It is neither a measure of a genre’s historical importance nor of the ingenuity of its composers. How popular was Anton von Webern (1883–1945) in his time? His contribution to twelve-tone atonality is acknowledged in a long biographical entry in The New Encyclopedia Britannica, but I would not try to walk with a questionnaire in hand through the city centers of New York, Vienna, Paris, or London asking people about the man.

In South Africa, and not only during the oppressive years of apartheid, jazz musicians discovered that for their income they could not rely on local popularity; their music had to be export-oriented, by touring Europe and interacting with jazz musicians in the United States. Overseas they would often play in packed concert halls, while at home they would sometimes stay with neighbors who paid no attention.

Lestie Hughes writing on Dudley Tito, veteran member of the Soul Jazzmen of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, has the following to say about popularity and occupation:

Over the years, Dudley’s name has grown synonymous with township jazz in the Port Elizabeth area. It may therefore seem curious that he always needed to supplement his musical career with mundane day-time jobs, either as a factory worker or by doing deliveries. However, whereas life as an underpaid, session musician in a nepotism-ridden Johannesburg did not seem like a feasible option to this father of three, the restrictions imposed by the Group Areas Act and its accompanying Pass Laws reduced exposure to audiences so severely that a professional freelance career proved impossible. (Hughes in Diane Thram, ed., 2013: 23–24)

The issue of jazz’s popularity in Africa raises yet another set of questions, the first being, Which jazz? The answer depends on what kind of definition one subscribes to. In 1989 in Harare, jazz for a while became synonymous with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, etc. In South Africa, at the same time, the jazz scene had long gone a step further, to John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, and Eric Dolphy as the models to identify with.

Rural areas and some townships in southern Africa present yet another, different picture. For youngsters playing homemade guitars and banjos, jazz has been a fashionable word to identify with, one which enhances one’s status as a musician. They would paint it on their instruments, call themselves jazz bands, and their teenage audiences would associate the word not only with the music (whatever it was), but with its social function, the village dance parties in which they would take part, like the word rag in the American Midwest during the 1880s, as an event for dancing in which young people, often in fanciful clothes, would meet and forge relationships.

The word jazz continues to have fluctuating meanings in Africa, particularly among people who have never heard the names or music of Parker, Billie Holiday, etc. But the understanding in the broad population is for the word to refer to music played on imported, factory-manufactured instruments or their homemade imitations, and to be danced to by everyone, dissociated from any ritual or religious contexts. The remote origin of this usage is to be found in the 1920s and 1930s ballroom dancing, from tango to foxtrot to rumba. It was colonial expatriates, long before Panassié’s book on le vrai jazz (the true jazz), who introduced this meaning to Africa, notably to the Congo, displaying their associated life styles in evening garden parties which street kids could watch from trees or from the top of surrounding walls.

Today, popular usage of the word jazz has been further widened. An acquaintance, deeply involved in the study of popular music in Africa, recently said to me that fusion has changed everything: In Africa, the word jazz may now stand for any current popular music.

That may be so in some places, but it also underlines the need for clear delineations, otherwise our subject of study gets inflated beyond control. Popular usage of the term may even be embarrassingly divergent from usage by those who are the actual initiators or original carriers of a tradition. Dizzy Gillespie and others often objected to the use of the word bebop; they simply preferred to call their music modern jazz. And most recently, Diane Thram, in her DVD Jazz Heritage Concert, published 2013 by the International Library of African Music, has painted a clear framework of what the word means among three generations of musicians in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. (See also the exhibition catalogue Generations of Jazz at the Red Location Museum, edited by Diane Thram.)

I therefore opt for downsizing the semantic field of the word jazz in the context of this book. If I were to discuss Franco’s O.K. Jazz, and genres such as soukous, bikutsi, mbalax, kwaito, juju, etc., under the label jazz, this book would become faceless, and I would have to jet around some eighteen additional African countries in search of jazz scenes. There have been excellent studies covering many of the more recent transatlantic exchanges, for example by Donald Otoyo Ondieki on Godfather James Brown’s musical impact on Kenyan pop (Ondieki et al. 2012), or Lara Allen (2004), Boloka (2003), and Steingo (2008) on kwaito in South Africa.

Rather than expanding the subject to boundless dimensions I will therefore take recourse to a more traditional definition, roughly in terms of a consensus reached by jazz historians after World War II, and focus selectively on American musicians who stirred the imagination of a minority of musicians in Africa. Emphasizing that we are dealing with the expressions of a musical minority culture in Africa, our topic falls largely outside the studies of popular music, i.e., music that has been excessively promoted by the mass media for commercial gains, often at the expense of other genres. We focus on innovation that came from a minority of musicians who decided to learn American jazz and carry it forward to new destinations.

There is this image of Atta Annan Mensah’s Jazz—the round trip (1971/72), the imaginary traveler returning to Africa with a load of gifts, the results of developments that occurred on the other side of the Atlantic, now legitimately claimed by the descendants of those who had remained behind. But is this image really applicable? Can the presence of jazz in certain pockets on the African continent be sufficiently explained as a result of processes of diffusion by records, radio, and cinema programs, contacts with friends, some teachings, etc.? Or have contemporaneous tendencies on both sides of the Atlantic simply converged?

A brief side trip into methodology is needed. Innovative processes in a culture may be triggered by stimuli coming from far away, but not necessarily and not entirely. Elsewhere I have talked about instances of intra-African streams of influence (Kubik 1998a). There is the phenomenon of multiple, independent invention of a same thing in different parts of the world, simultaneously or at different times. In connection with this is the phenomenon of parallel developments that seem to converge after some time. With reference to music, independent developments on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean may begin to take similar developmental directions, for example in improvisatory patterns, polyphonic structures, intonation, timbre, or kinemic ideas.

In cultural anthropology, convergence is considered an important process, although it is often difficult to verify. Diffusion is easily observed: the spread of culture traits, commodities, forms of knowledge, etc., from one place to other places. It comes about through contact between people as intermediaries, and nowadays increasingly through the media as carriers of information. This process is detectable and verifiable with research methods of critical examination of historical sources, for example, writings, sound recordings, artifacts, and so on.

Diffusion must not be confused with diffusionism, an ideology that was prevalent among anthropologists in the early twentieth century, giving one-sided explanations of culture contact on the assumption of singularity of inventions and subsequent borrowings.

Convergence, on the other hand, is a term that describes a (possible) result of multiple invention and parallel development. Charles Winick’s dictionary of anthropology (Winick 1977: 131–32) calls it the process by which distinctive culture traits from different areas become similar or merge. Convergence is a possible alternative to choosing between invention and diffusion in explaining similarities between cultures, although it gives only a partial answer to the problem. In another definition (Hirschberg 1988: 261), convergence is called the process by which similar phenomena may emerge in different cultures, and the results of it, without mutual influences between them (my translation from German).

The discovery of processes of convergence originally came from field observations. In the days before the internet and other instant forms of transmission, anthropologists were sometimes startled to discover similar patterns of behavior, comparable institutions, or techniques in cultures remote from each other and often isolated, with no verifiable historical contacts between them. A good example is the similarities, even identities between some of the ideographs called sona among the -Cokwe and tusona among the -Lucazi in eastern Angola (cf. Kubik 2006) and the kolam tradition of drawings in southern India. Are these symbolic points-plus-line abstract figures independent inventions in two different parts of the world, or was there an unknown element of diffusion involved? In the first case we would have to think of convergence, and the explanation would have to be found in innate intellectual pathways among humans across ages leading them to similar solutions, perhaps under comparable social or ecological stimuli.

An example from the field of music for likely independent discoveries leading to analogous results in different places is the tonal systems based on the exploration of the natural harmonic series over a single fundamental. In Africa there was a great variety of partials-based systems, for example, among the Wagogo of central Tanzania, a pentatonic system over a single fundamental, using representations of the harmonic series up to partial 9, sometimes 10. But an identical system we found, far away from Tanzania, in the song repertoire of a !Ko-speaking woman, Dena Pikenien, in tuning, playing and singing to her bow-lute, on a farm near Gobabis in Namibia (video document no. 6, 1991 Archive Kubik/Malamusi). No recent culture-historical connection is detectable between these two regions.

The ease with which South African musicians adopted blues tonality—in contrast, for example, with Congolese musicians of the 1960s who did not—and the fact that blue notes are abundant, not only in South African jazz but also in many examples of popular mbaqanga and other South African genres, is perhaps due to a background of convergence. African American blues tonality is based on a non-Western, partials-derived tonal understanding (Kubik 1999). So was much South African music before the arrival of European music and, a little later, jazz; it was based on a variety of partials-exploring systems. For this reason, blue notes have always been quite natural to South African ears.

In any case, jazz in Africa did not start from a vacuum. There were musical precursors without which the adoption of a jazz culture by young people would perhaps not have come about. One factor was that, even before World War I, youngsters in schools across Africa became acquainted with early forms of African American music, for example, spirituals and ragtime, notably in South Africa. Before the 1920s African American traveling musicians—spiritual singers and minstrel groups—often performed in African coastal cities from Cape Town to Dakar on their world tours. This was especially important in spreading ragtime and spirituals. Reuben Tholakele Caluza’s Ricksha Song has often been mentioned for its ragtime elements (Dauer 1966; Huskission 1969: 23–26). Ragtime also achieved some currency in Liberia and minstrelsy in Sierra Leone. Another factor, almost Africa-wide, was the preeminence of brass bands from the late nineteenth century on. This is not to say that brass bands introduced jazz, but that they were an opportunity for local aspirants to gain practical knowledge of trumpets, trombones, clarinets, marching drums, etc. In many parts of Africa, particularly along the West African coast, in the Ethiopian highlands, in Tanganyika, and elsewhere, brass band music was soon reinterpreted by musicians on the basis of African aesthetic principles and improvisational skills. Some of these adaptations began to swing.

Another crucial pre-jazz import, especially in southern Africa, was the cavaquinho, through Portuguese and other sailors in the 1800s. This is a four-string Portuguese guitar-like instrument with vertical pegs, also known on the island of Madeira and the Azores. It was carried by Portuguese seamen to many parts of the world, including Brazil. In Hawaii it was introduced in 1854 by a Portuguese from Madeira, João Fernandes, giving rise to local developments of the ukulele (Veiga de Oliveira 2000: 181). In the Cape Province of South Africa local youths, often Khoisan speakers, adopted it first as a solo string instrument to be used on journeys. Often it was then locally manufactured. The cavaquinho became known as the ramkie (Rycroft 1980); eventually, during the 1920s and ’30s, it was supplemented in southern Africa by the import of various types of American banjos. The two traditions merged. From this fusion arose a distinctive adolescent musical culture, still vibrant in many rural areas of English-speaking southern and south-central Africa (Malamusi 2011). With the banjo came the infusion of some jazz elements. Therefore, those southern African banjo groups were often the turf for local jazz developments, especially after they took up jive rhythms as in the 1950s, and began to use the one-string bass and pennywhistles. Individual histories of musicians in southern Africa who later became professionals, in popular dance music, jazz, or both, reveal that a majority of them had begun their careers with the homemade banjo.

In this book there is a chapter on African brass bands in West, Central, and East Africa, as a transatlantic counterpart to New Orleans brass bands. These African brass band traditions can be considered parallel developments; they were not under jazz influence, but occasionally ended up with something quite jazzy. They represent an interesting case of convergence. A full chapter is also devoted to the itinerant players of homemade banjos, especially in south-central Africa.

The main part of Jazz Transatlantic II, however, focuses on musicians who adopted a variety of jazz genres, from jive and swing of the 1940s to modern jazz. Here, we look at the individual histories* of musicians and composers within jazz in Africa, their lives and work in the wider social context. As much as possible I draw on my personal encounters and interaction with artists, using my field diaries, as well as on discussions with colleagues and information provided by members of our research team.

* Length: 161 minutes. Distribution: Warner Bros. Released September 30, 1988. Director and producer: Clint Eastwood

* I gratefully acknowledge financial assistance given to our research group based at the Oral Literature Research Programme, Chileka, Malawi, by the Austrian Science Fund, project no. P 26080- G21 on Individual Histories of East African musician-composers, which allowed me to finalize the chapters relating to jazz history in Malawi.

Sources, Concepts, Stimuli

A Transatlantic Loop

It was in the1920s and 1930s that certain forms of African American dance music were first introduced in a number of places in Africa, with records, cinema shows, and local radio broadcasts. Under colonial (or protectorate) rule, especially in British-governed territories, there was also some direct teaching of music by expatriates in religious or other institutions, as on the Gold Coast, e.g., of choir music or brass band instruments. Knowledge of such instruments eventually helped dance-band formation by young people, including the one in which the celebrated E. T. Mensah would start his version of highlife.

By the mid-1920s Trinidadian calypso was popular along the Guinea Coast, sounding from hand-cranked gramophones, and it was taken up by local groups. One top hit was Sly Mongoose, about an animal that had long been a symbol of deceit and cheating in several African cultures and the subject of stories and songs (cf. Malamusi 1990, on the southeast African zither player Chitenje Tambala’s chantefable about nyenga, mongoose).

After World War II Cuban rumba became the craze in both Congos (Belgian Congo and French Congo, then part of Afrique Équatoriale Française). In Kenya soldiers returning from war duties in Burma had become accustomed overseas to ballroom dance music. At home some of them joined a rumba-playing dance orchestra called the Rhino Boys, under the directorship of a certain Jeff Seabrook, who wrote the arrangements (cf. Kavyu 1978; Kubik 1982: 53; Rumba zetu, Rhino Boys, His Masters Voice, Rumba, N. 17102, OMC. 20.227).

In South Africa the feedback was jazz. Swing, jive, and jitterbug dancing was the craze of the mid-1940s, leading to the rise of new forms of jazz-inspired local music. From the late 1950s on there was also a strong presence of bebop in avant-garde circles across South Africa, and subsequently, more forms of modern jazz, notably by John Coltrane, would have a profound impact. Much earlier, of course, at the end of the nineteenth century spirituals had already been heard, for example with touring jubilee and minstrel groups, and also ragtime. A little later, spiritual and minstrel groups, some performing in both genres, came to Cape Town on world tours (Abbott and Seroff 2002: 121). Orpheus McAdoo’s group had the greatest impact. In the 1920s and early 1930s, ballroom dance music invaded most South African dance floors, giving rise to marabi music (Ballantine 1991, 1993).

On a lecture tour to west, central, and southern Africa in 1977, musician-composer Donald Kachamba from Malawi and I met two students in Kinshasa from the Institut National des Arts, Magongo Sanga and Lokwa Pascal (now a celebrated folk guitarist in France, under the name Lokua Kanza), who showed us the remains of their fathers’ collections of 78 r.p.m. records, started in 1946. Besides shellac discs produced locally by the Ngoma Records Company (the Firme Jeronimidis) in Kinshasa, or the label Opika in Brazzaville during the 1950s, there was Xavier Cugat and his Waldorf Astoria Orchestra with Ombo and Ca-Ta-Plun (HMV.31). There was also an old Columbia record with Woody Herman and his Second Herd. Ca-Ta-Plun could have easily passed for an early Congolese rumba record in Kinshasa, so intense was the imitation of Cuban music in the Congo at that period. But no Congolese counterpart to Woody Herman’s First or Second Herd (see also reissues, e.g., of his 1945–47 recordings on CD, CK 85493–4, 2001, Sony Music) could be detected. Characteristically, jazz did not catch on in Kinshasa and in all Congo, due to various reasons. Neither Woody Herman’s variety nor any other jazz form was moving people. Across Central and East Africa and the Portuguese-dominated territories of Moçambique and Angola, the influence of jazz was minimal compared to South Africa, but also compared to selected areas of West Africa and even Ethiopia in the 1960s (Falceto 2002). In large West African cities, notably Dakar and other places in Senegal, jazz would become a stimulating factor to be reprocessed in various ways (Mangin 2004).

South Africa, and to an extent the entire southern African region including Zimbabwe and Malawi, provides the outstanding example of profound jazz impact from the 1940s on, still vibrant today. It is the one large African region that requires an assessment somewhat different from other parts of Africa. Jazz in several stylistic varieties was available in original recordings, and had a lasting effect on local musicians in the townships. From the 1940s to the 1970s, jazz took root across South Africa, from Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban, to Johannesburg and elsewhere, leading to an indigenous jazz scene and the development of original South African jazz derivatives.

In contrast to other African countries, jazz grew to prominence here, however, under social conditions very different from those in Accra, Dakar, or Addis Ababa. Jazz in South Africa can be seen as a subversive response to the circumstances of the apartheid system; and it is not by chance that John Coltrane’s music struck a chord in South African creative artists at a deep level of human experience, symbolized by Duke Makasi’s tenor sax variations over the theme Inhlupeko (meaning distress, suffering, frustrations, whatever translation one prefers). This was recorded in Johannesburg in 1969.

Not only did South African jazz rise under inhuman social conditions, but among people who were also under constant threat by gangs. At the height of apartheid rule, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, townships and their inhabitants were not only cordoned off from city centers by pass laws, but they were left—with connivance by the authorities—to the home rule of gangs, summarized as tsotsi. From a study by Clive Glaser (2000), lecturer of history at the University of Witwatersrand, we learn that by the 1970s and also before, the townships were virtually divided into spheres of influence and domination by different tsotsi groups, demanding protection money from shopkeepers, etc. Township jive, mbaqanga, and jazz emerged and flourished under these combined social conditions of apartheid and tsotsi gang culture, as aptly described in the contemporary literature, e.g., by Bloke Modisane (1963).

In many parts of Africa, however, R&B, funk, and soul music would soon outbid jazz influences, notably after Godfather James Brown’s tours of African countries in the 1970s (Ondieki et al. 2012). Equally influential, about the same time, was Bob Marley, through his music and his appearance. Young people’s tastes for dreadlocks, rasta culture, and reggae became an important, almost continent-wide phenomenon in a male-dominated youth culture. Rastamen are still holding their camp meetings in several places across southern Africa.

In northwestern Zambia, by 1979, even traditional masks were modified under the impact of Rasta culture, to incorporate a character displaying dreadlocks. One such mask was called ciwiki (the wig). Apparently it was inspired by the cover of a locally produced LP, Heavy Metal by Paul Ngozi (ZMPL 29) (Kubik 1993: 129–30). Ever since, and continuing into the twenty-first century, adolescent bands in Zambia and Malawi, often with homemade banjos and guitars, have played their own versions of ilege (reggae) with a notable desire for innovation. In South Africa through the 1980s and 1990s, reggae star Lucky Dube would dominate part of the market. From the 1990s on, with satellite TV and eventually the internet, the so-called popular music has become all-pervasive across Africa, sometimes like a devastating tsunami, wiping out many earlier styles and traditions.

ZONE I: Coastal West Africa

Duro Ladipọ, E. T. Mensah, William Akoli, Agu Norris, and highlife

In some West African coastal cities and towns, from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s, records of popular music became available in bookstores, record shops, and musical instrument stores. Occasionally, American jazz was broadcast on local radio stations. However, this does not mean that musicians and composers in those countries would have suddenly switched to jazz tunes. Jazz was something like a catalyst. Their awareness of a transatlantic cultural alternative was an encouragement for young artists in search of something of their own that would be free from the parental constraints of established local musical genres.

Fig. 1.1. Duro Ladipọ (carrying a basket) and his theatre company on our visit to the farm of one of his actors, Yinka Adeyemi, to collect yams, vegetables, and other farm products. From left to right: Lasisi Gbadamosi (drummer), Rufus Ogundele (painter, graphic artist, and musician), Yinka Adeyemi (actor and batik designer), Tijani Lawal (actor). Twenty years later some of these artists of the Mbari Club, Oshogbo, would become international celebrities. Alatede farm, near Oshogbo, July 31, 1963. Photo: H. Hillegeist (Private Archive Kubik/Malamusi, Vienna)

This was the implicit program of Yoruba traveling theatres in Nigeria, such as Kola Ogunmola’s Theatre Party from Ado-Ekiti with his juju music (Beier 1954) and that of playwright Duro Ladipọ, seeking to find new forms of drama and musical expression. When I was staying with Duro Ladipọ and his family in Oshogbo, Nigeria, for three months from August to October 1960, he often called me downstairs from my room at 4 p.m. to have tea with him. Calling me, he was singing Tea for Two with a great smile on his face, until I had taken a seat.

Such use of a popular tune—almost like a cellphone ringtone nowadays—would not mean that it exerted any effect upon his own compositional practice. In 1960, during my first stay, he was about to start work on his folk opera Ọbà Koso. In his compound which starting in 1961 would accommodate the Mbari Club, Oshogbo’s rising center for the arts, he would willingly host a jazz concert, but would not necessarily experiment with jazz himself. (On Duro Ladipọ’s legacy, see the biographical article by his wife, Abiodun Duro-Ladipọ, 1997.)

In West Africa, jazz arrived through many filters, not always directly through original American recordings or concert tours by jazz musicians. Most of the jazz culture was first absorbed by people within the milieu of ballroom dancing between the two world wars and through expatriate musicians employed on such occasions. It was this culture that would trigger creative adaptations by local musicians who had learned to play European musical instruments, often in brass bands. Jazz rhythms as such, however, were not normally considered satisfactory by Guinea Coast audiences, particularly speakers of I.A.4 (Kwa) languages, who had grown up within an environment of complex polyrhythms. Reaching out for the ballroom dance culture, the straight 4/4 ground-beat of swing was the first that had to go in emerging local bands and be replaced by something closer to home, a little more coastal West African. That was found in Latin American rhythms.

The process can be studied in the history of E. T. Mensah’s Tempo’s Band on the Gold Coast, as it evolved from the earlier ballroom dance culture into highlife. Rhythmic preferences were generally shared by the Accra public across social barriers. Although ballroom dancing was a culture addressing the middle-class and higher-class society in places like Accra or Lagos, such audiences were turned on more quickly by a music with a rhythm less North American, while on the other hand jazz instruments were faithfully retained and played with jazz intonation and phrasings, the trumpet less macho than Louis Armstrong’s or Buck Clayton’s. The person who found an answer balancing his music with public tastes was E. T. Mensah.

Born May 31, 1919, in Accra, Emmanuel Tete Mensah displayed musical talent when he was about twelve years old, and began to take part in school bands. After apprenticeship in pharmacy he was working full-time in a chemist’s shop for the government. He learned to play trumpet and saxophone, and in 1946 he began to join a jam session group formed by European and American soldiers stationed in Accra after World War II. They played at dance parties for the army and in the Accra Club.

John Collins (1986) has written a comprehensive biography of Mensah and also has analyzed jazz feedback in West Africa (1987) and the feedback loop. We are all relying gratefully on his data. As it happened, the Europeans in the jam session group were soon leaving, one by one, either to their home countries or being transferred to other parts of the world. They were replaced by local musicians in Accra. Eventually there were only West Africans in what became E. T. Mensah and His Tempo’s Band. Around 1950 he reorganized his dance band. Two interventions were important. Catering for sundowns and garden party audiences, he increasingly wrote arrangements for songs in local languages, notably Fanti and Gã. The second important change came from his drum player, Guy Warren, ten years younger than him, who brought Afro-Cuban percussion instruments from a visit to London. This allowed Mensah to change the rhythmic basis from a straight 4/4 swing ground beat, as was used in the soldiers’ band (unless they were playing Begin the Beguine), to more complex percussive patterns, to which the local dancers related easily.

Wolfgang Bender (2000: 140) found it puzzling that Mensah had to get conga and bongo drums, claves, etc., from Britain, instead of using the rich West African drum tradition. This question has psychological bearings, but there is an answer. Apart from the dictates of fashions, in the 1950s to use local drums was out of the question because of their association with ritual, tribal institutions. To take such drums to sundown parties would have given the wrong signal; there were still strong taboos. The same would have applied to specific West African rhythm patterns. So Mensah adopted rhythms from calypso and some Latin American genres, with a hint of local West African forms. The parts composed for the horn section in Mensah’s band were easier to handle. Performers of the saxophone set plus Mensah’s trumpet switched to harmonic parallelism as in ancient Asante and