[Dixielandjazz] Re: Bahrain Likes Dixieland

[Bill Haesler]

Dear Ivor,
Following your last post (and my reply) I searched for, and found, the Gulf
Daily News "The Voice of Bahrain" site.
No more on Adam Makovicz, but found the following in their
'All that jazz' column in the Entertainment section:  

[Caption to pic of musician, presumably the author of the following]:
"Masckela grew up in South Africa, yearning for destinations as far away as
New York"

Last Thursday, I was at London¹s Barbican performing with musicians from
Ghana, Israel, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Botswana and the UK for a
celebration of musical migration.

Perhaps such an event doesn¹t seem so unusual in 2006. It would have been
unthinkable when I was a child growing up in South Africa, yearning for
destinations as far away as New York. Those dreams had begun for me in 1942,
aged three, hearing recordings from America on our gramophone. Globalisation
might be a catchphrase in the financial and economic corridors of the world
these days, but it¹s been a musical phenomenon for many, many years.
As a child, I used to think Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Nat ³King² Cole,
Johnny Hodges, Frank Sinatra were living inside that gramophone. My uncle
would wind it up and play it to me, and I used to say ³hello² to them all.
By the time I was five, I knew all the songs, and my parents had to get me
piano lessons to lure me away from that gramophone.
I was 13 when I saw Kirk Douglas playing Bix Beiderbecke in the movie Young
Man with a Horn; the great Harry James was playing the trumpet part. That¹s
when I decided to be a trumpeter.
When I went to the US in the 1960s, it wasn¹t as an African musician. I
wanted to be an American bebopper ­ my ambition was to play in Art Blakey¹s
Jazz Messengers. But then Miles Davies and Louis Armstrong and the others
said to me, ³If you play only American jazz, you¹ll just be a statistic. If
you play something of your own music, then we¹ll learn from you as well as
you from us.²
That¹s when I discovered what musical migration meant. It made me realise I
should know more about the traditional music of my country. Singers such as
Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte helped me begin to discover my roots.
So, like many others in the 20th century, I had become a musical migrant.
But musical migration had been influencing the sounds of South Africa long
before I heard those American gramophone records as a three-year-old.
But it was in the 20th century that the most powerful migration in music
came about with the emergence of cinema and 78rpm vinyl records. Films of
singing cowboys Jim Reeves, Tex Ritter, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were shown
in the single-sex mining hostel barracks that housed the black migrant
labourers from South Africa¹s rural hinterlands. They digested these, and
came up with a guitar and vocal style called Maskanda. This music spilled
over into the urban and rural African townships, and today its exponents ­
such as Mfaz¹ Omnyama, Amatshitshi Amhlophe, to name but a few ­ sell
hundreds of thousands of CDs.
Jazz musicals of the 1940s, with their predominantly black casts and
swinging quartets like the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots, spawned
similarly styled orchestras and groups in South Africa, such as Victor
Ndlazilwane¹s Woody Woodpeckers. And vaudeville films featuring barbershop
singing gave birth to local revues as far back as the 1920s that lead all
the way to Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
The list is endless. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley gave birth to Elvis, who
spawned the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, who gave birth to U2, Coldplay,
the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Bee Gees, and so many more. James Brown begat
Fela Kuti. Then there¹s Nat ³King² Cole, who begat Ray Charles, who begat
Elton John, Jamie Cullum and John Legend. 
And out of Africa comes Salif Keita, Oliver Mtukudzi, Miriam Makeba, Fela
Kuti, Youssou N¹dour etc. Western music critics and self-appointed
authorities are too mesmerised to label them African, so they call it ³world
music². 
What poppycock! It goes on and on, this migration.

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