By Nils Jacobson

Keyboard player Mike Perry shares the management of Nkomo Records, an independent South African jazz label, with saxophonist Winston Mankunku. The two musicians met in Cape Town in 1976. After gigging together in the early '80s, they joined forces to create Nkomo Records as a means to release independent music without the heavy-handed control of a major label.

This is the story of how Nkomo Records came about, and what it has come to mean for the future of jazz in South Africa. Through decades of experience in South African jazz, Winston Mankunku has proven himself to be a towering figure. In the '60s, his song "Yakhal'inkomo" was a nationwide hit. (The title is Xhosa for "bellowing bull," the sound an animal makes as it is taken to slaughter.) Nkomo Records, whose name is taken from this song, has given Mankunku and Perry (as well as others) an new vehicle for musical self-expression.

Two records released on Nkomo have met special success: Jika and Molo Africa. Seven records down the road, the label continues to branch out to include new musicians and styles. We spoke with Perry by phone from Cape Town on February 28, 2002; some of the text shown here also reflects an email followup.

__________________________________

AAJ: What were the dynamics of censorship before 1994, and how did that affect the musicians? What was the influence of the record labels?

Mike Perry: Media control and censorship was pretty heavy right up to the 90's. Radio stations were almost all state controlled. Ibrahim with Sun records was probably one of the first independent labels producing jazz. Of course, the majors released commercial jazz in quantity, and the vaults at Gallo records are full. A lot of it was recorded under bad conditions when exploitation was the norm. [Winston] Mankunku himself was ripped off in the 60's as a young man when his famous recording "Yakhal'inkomo" became known nationwide.

AAJ: What made you start Nkomo Records?

MP: Our motivation in starting Nkomo Records was mainly to protect the compositions we had been working on. We decided on this in the mid 80's. The political situation looked very bad and we simply could not allow ourselves to be exploited again. The changes in the early '90s enabled us to broaden our scope, and besides doing Dudula and Molo Africa, ("Hello Africa") Nkomo was also able to record four more albums including Sonesta by Errol Dyers and Wesley Street by Alvin Dyers. Our expansion to include other artists was fairly successful, but our two best sellers (and by a long way) were Jika and Molo Africa.

The market here is limited due to a number of factors. Economic factors play a big part. Local content has only recently been made compulsory on local radio stations. Overseas product gets more of a push.

Yes, we need all the influences we can get, but not at the expense of what is uniquely ours, especially in the light of the recent great political event of 1994.

AAJ: What is your goal with the label? How do you operate as an independent record label with respect to major labels?

MP: Our goal with Nkomo has been simply to get the music out there in as many ways as possible. Initially we targeted South African audiences and indeed Jika could be seen as a protest album. Ten years later Molo Africa reaches out to a wider audience but always from an African perspective. We have licenced it to Sheer Sound (Jo'burg) in order to obtain more effective distribution and radio air time. Sheer Sound (M.D. Damon Forbes) are a large independent but even they have to piggy back on top of the majors in order to stream-line their distribution. Sheer's budget for recording new material also seems quite limited at the moment, it's the old story of high production costs and a long turnaround time to get the money back, let alone make a profit.

AAJ: To what extent do you think South African jazz musicians are recognized, both within South Africa and abroad? What is the audience for this music?

MP: In my opinion, today's jazz artists are not recognised nearly enough. It is when jazz crosses over and is marketed really energetically that enough market penetration is achieved. Judging by TV airtime, big names like George Benson or Herbie Hancock get about the same amount of exposure as Masekela or Makeba. Smooth jazz was very popular here a few years ago. Sheer Sound of Jo'burg exploited this quite successfully. I would like to add that the majors have persistently promoted easy to sell "big names" like Elton John and Celine Dion despite the fact that the Black market is actually very sophisticated.

Jazz was the tool of the liberation movement in South Africa, and LP's by e.g. Jazz Crusaiders, Miles Davis, John Coltrane etc. were treasured and shared. We have had contact even recently with jazz fan clubs who buy CD's regularly and listen to them together.

AAJ: How did the politics of the '60s affect Winston Mankunku's output? And how did that lead to the creation of Nkomo? You've had critical success, and people recognize the man and the music. But it seems like that has not translated into financial success.

MP: If the deal had been done right in the late '60s, he would have been a millionaire. They chose to rip him off on his publishing, and that's why we got started with Nkomo. With business people to work with keep on going forward with production, which is tough. And he's 58 now, so we're concentrating really on keeping our publishing going--getting a bit of financial security so we can be comfortable--and getting somebody else to pay for the next production. It's a long story, isn't it.

(A bit of the story is on the internet. There's also an extensive bio inside Molo Africa.)

As far as success goes... It's not been unqualified financial success. It's been a living and not much more than that. In South Africa an album like Jika, our first one, done in London, and Molo Africa, do between 5000 and 7000 units. Which is not a lot. And overseas licensing deals haven't been particularly successful. We were released in the States on Intersound, a label based in Georgia, so we made a few bob there.

But you're up against the majors, ultimately. And we tend to start distributing through them now, but we couldn't get big enough quickly enough. Publishing--the fact that Winston controls his own publishing now--is good for the future. But it hasn't been an unqualified success. It's very tough for an independent. We're proud of ourselves, and certainly of our critical press and the degree to which the music has got out there, which was the purpose of becoming independent. It's simply that the majors weren't playing our stuff, so we thought, "fuck this!" and went to London to record it, and came back with some material which managed to make it through the very rigid censorship system at the time.

And um, yeah, we've also been lucky. We've been able to produce Errol Dyers' two albums, and Alvin Dyers, the great guitarist. And Winston's collaborated on others. So I think we've been there as a minor but significant player. But Cape Town of course is really dominated by Jo'burg in the music industry here. We were rebellious. In '85, the scenario was pretty doomsday. We really had to get the music out there. We really had to form our own label and company. To a certain extent it has succeeded, because there are eight products out there which normally wouldn't have seen the light of day.

AAJ: What was involved in getting through censorship?

MP: Well, we wanted to work with banned musicians, guys that had offended the apartheid system and were working in London. Guys like Claude Deppa, Russell Herman, and Bheki Mseleku. And then also we had to be very careful with our lyrics, because we were saying stuff like "stop exploiting us," and that caught offense. So we had to couch that in idiom which people would understand. But the censor board, which was very powerful in those days, used to sit up in Pretoria and find a Communist under any bush. And really, they were pretty heavy. But that's not there now, so it's very free now. But in those days it wasn't, and you'd get into a lot of trouble..

AAJ: So it was the musicians and the words that they objected to?

MP: They didn't get a chance to object, because we worked with the musicians secretly in London. Brought the master tapes back, released here. But in order to release here, we had it to submit it to the lyrical content in Pretoria. And because Winston was quite clever with the lyrical content, he used idioms. Which sensible English speakers would not have understood. But everybody who counted would have understood. So that was released in '87. Recorded in '86 in London.

AAJ: Did the audience understand the message?

MP: Very much so. Jika was licensed three times overseas as well. Well it was the first time he had recorded for nearly 20 years, since "Yakhal'inkomo," which he didn't get a cent on. He's corrected that to a certain extent now, but a lot of it is water under the bridge and we just have to forget about it and keep moving forward. And then there was a long gap when we had to pay Jika off, and money came back but not as quickly as it had gone out. I went to Switzerland for a while, and Winston hung in. And then I got back after Freedom Day ('94) and we got together again and did a couple of potboiler type albums. And then produced other guys. And then Winston produced Molo Africa four years ago, which won a SAMA award... which is kind of belated recognition from the South African music industry. The equivalent of a small Grammy or something.

We haven't produced anything since the year before last. We've done a couple of compilations and a couple of licensing things, but studio time is so damn expensive, man, and there's nobody on any kind of empowerment trip here. All the studios are into advertising.

AAJ: So you're talking about major vs. minor labels here?

MP: Yeah, to a certain extent. But I think we'll take a different track now. We'll start playing their game a bit and trying to infiltrate. Hang on to the publishing as much as we can. And make some of the phone calls and distribute.

AAJ: So everything changed overnight in '94?

MP: Well, it required a paradigm shift. Yes, everything did change. Although the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. There is still this this huge economic backlog, and apartheid has indeed taken, what does that leave us now. So it's a continuous process. But at least in '94 democracy was achieved here. What democracy actually means to people on the bread line and stuff, that's a different thing. And that's the thing that has to be played out now...

AAJ: Was there a shift in the audience? Who listens to this music?

MP: Winston's always had a very secure and committed fan base here in Cape Town and nationally, due to a song called "Yakhal'inkomo," which is in fact where we took the name of our label from. So audience reaction has never been a problem. He was invited to play in the North Sea Jazz Festival here, and in Holland. But it's very difficult at 59 or so to maintain your momentum. Basically having it tough for a lot of years.

So Winston tends not to play as much as he should, I would say. Yeah, it's a difficult little time we're going through. He should be in the studio every day, you know what I mean? And we haven't been able to supply them with him yet. We're in negotiations with some people from Jo'burg who are pretty nice, Sheer Sound. I spoke with them yesterday. Yes, there's opportunity there, but it's limited opportunity and... well, mind you, we're all dissatisfied, aren't we? If we weren't, we wouldn't go forward. I don't usually complain. We're just dealing with the naive frustrations of musicians here.

AAJ: In my experience the most brilliant musicians are often a little nuts. And that's what makes their music interesting.

MP: And difficult bastards as well. It's so difficult for us to butter our bread, you know. Company bosses, agents... by the time the cake is lifted, there are only a few crumbs left.

AAJ: I guess that's the idea behind setting up your own shop. People do that here, and it is hard. When you're supported by a huge record label, they do marketing and promotion. They find you a spot in the market. But it's hard for the little guys.

MP: We were lucky because Winston had already run across a lot of people already by the time we got started. So the marketing was already to some extent built in. But the difference is between 5000 and 50,000 sold. At 50,000 sold, which is what a major can do pretty easily (in this country), then you have then got production budget for a video.

AAJ: In this country an indie label is lucky to sell 10,000.

MP: And consider how many times bigger your overall market is compared to ours. Now a CD is becoming, economically speaking, a very difficult thing for a black person to afford. And that's tough. It's 120 Rand, $12. A cut out of your monthly wages, a big cut. With the CD market weakening in general and kids downloading things from the internet, it becomes even tougher.

AAJ: The demographics must be influenced by those factors. It's interesting because jazz in South Africa has always traditionally been a black form.

MP: Yes. A music of empowerment too. You got kids in the late '60s. We would have heard of the Jazz Crusaders, just to take an example, whereas a white kid wouldn't have. American music. And Coltrane was a household word in the townships. Winston could access maybe 6 or 8 Coltrane albums that his uncle might have had, you know. Where that would have been not known by the white burgeioisie, for lack of a better phrase.

AAJ: As the situation has changed, that must have skewed the dynamics. As South African jazz evolved came out...

AAJ: Mbaqanga is like raw blues, John Lee Hooker style, but with a different three-chord format. The changes are different. Now that can be built on in the same way blues developed into bebop or swing or whatever. Our structures...

We go back quite strongly to Xhosa choral music and mbube, and the marabi beats of Jo'burg come from there, and there's kwela, there's a whole lot of stuff. I think South Africa is very rich in terms of what it can draw from. And the fact that a large proportion of South Africans got educated in jazz very early on makes us a strong country, with comparison, say to Australia, for example. We're very lucky to have Abdullah (Dollar Brand) and Masekela and those guys.

AAJ: As jazz has become a commodity, it has to have shifted its audience. If a CD costs $12, certain people will buy it and certain people will not. And that's probably divided on racial lines.

MP: Yes. Although now we're getting a exciting kind of crossover. At the same time that jazz is losing some of its revolutionary impact, Sheer (Sound) has done a lot of smooth stuff, you know. I'm not complaining. And a lot of our stuff has gone suspiciously R&B. But I think... look, music is such a melting pot. Cross-fertilization is a beautiful thing, and cross-fertilization is a useful thing. I think it'll make some of our better stuff, like Jimmy Dludlu, break into internationally, and then others will follow. That will make our market bigger, and that's what I'm hoping for. We can't afford to be xenophobically South African about our sound. Because that can be a pitfall as well as a strength.

AAJ: That's why we're involved here. One is, I think the people here don't appreciate the meaning of Freedom Day. And the other is that there really is a vibrant jazz community in South Africa, and people don't know that.

MP: I hear what you're saying. And what validates a lot of the sounds coming out of here is the transformation process: what has happened here. It has been amazing. A peaceful revolution in which the ruling class sort of semi-voluntarily gave away its power is quite unique in history. But what people went through... you know, the emotional ups and downs of the last 20 years, has left quite a lot to make music about. Music reflects changes in society.

AAJ: That certainly happened in this country. The right to vote came about here in the late 19th century, but only by the 1960's were whites and blacks sharing bathrooms and riding the same buses. There was a big upheaval then. And I think that was reflected in the music. I think Coltrane and a lot of the avant garde American jazz players of the '60s were responding to the upheaval.

MP: Albert Ayler, yes.

AAJ: It's also something to bear in mind when considering your own situation. If it took us a hundred years, you've got some time ahead of you.

MP: In fact, I'm just thinking about guys like Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler. They were well-known in South Africa in the '60s. Black people could identify with the (arguably) alienated songs. At times, they used to sound very emotive. I mean, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Inflated Tear. That was a very popular album here, although he never toured. None of these guys toured. We didn't have the opportunity to see them live. And yet people knew of them. So they must have been saying something that struck a chord. Even for an American, now, a name like Eric Dolphy... unless you were educated in jazz, would be very obscure.

AAJ Where do you think the future lies with South African jazz? Who are the names to watch?

MP: Jazz I think is well placed for growth in South Africa. A few emerging artists: Errol Dyers, Alvin Dyers, Moosa Manzini (bass), Mark Fransmin (piano), Feya Faku (trumpet), Herbie Tsoali (bass), Andile Yanana (piano), Marcus Wyatt (trumpet), Buddy Wells (tenor), Vusi Khumalo (drums), and David Mayekane (vocals and guitar).

These are just few on the top of my head. Optimistically I foresee a very open musical culture here building on strong African roots (Mbaqanga, Mbube, Marabi and Kwaito - Xhosa/ Zulu, Choral tradition) plus Cape Goema, Quasi Latin, European jazz, rock, and American funk and jazz...

[Child cooing in the background.]

MP: The voice of Africa, by the way. [To child: Say, "America!"]

Child: America!

__________________________________

NKOMO RECORDS

Established by Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi and Mike Perry in 1988
Nkomo Records on the web: http://www.nkomorecords.co.za

Discography:

Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi & Mike Perry: Jika (1988)
(Winston Mankunku Ngozi, Mike Perry, Richard Pickett, Mike Campbell, Bheki Mseleku, Russell Herman, Claude Deppa, Lucky Ranku)

Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi & Mike Perry: Dudula (1996)
(Mike Perry, Winston Mankunku Ngozi, Spencer Mbadu, Richard Pickett, Errol Dyers, Charles Lazar, Buddy Wells, Marcus Wyatt, Graham Beyer, The Merton Barrow String Quintet.)

Errol Dyers: Sonesta (1997)

Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi: Molo Africa (1998)
(Winston Mankunku Ngozi, Feya Faku, Tete Mbambisa, Spencer Mbadu, Vince Pavitt, Vusi Khumalo, Graham Beyer, Sylvia Mdunyelwa, Jack Van Poll, Lucien Lewin, Errol Dyers, Basil Moses, Bongiwe Gcabe, George Werner, Octavia Tengeni, Themba Fassie, Boytjie Philiso, Lionel Beukes, Soi-Soi Gqeza, Blackie Thempi, Denver Furness, Sipho Yhintsa, Nopinkie Ngxengane, Mzwandile Ngxengane.)

Mike Perry: Siyamemeza (1999)
(Mike Perry, Charles Lazar, Bruce Cassidy, Vince Pavitt, Graham Beyer, Robbie Jansen, Tom Fox, Spencer Mbadu, Gloria Sodede, Portia Nkwatene, Terri Cohen, Kevin Gibson, Nik Hazel, Yelena J. Revishin, Natasha Roth, Ivan Bell, Trevor Cranfield, Richard Pickett.)

Alvin Dyers: Wesley Street (1999)
(Alvin Dyers, Camillo Lombard, Eddie Jooste, Denver Furness, Ezra Nckucana, Moreira Chonguica.)

Various Artists: It (2000)
(Koos Turenhout, Simon Ratcliffe, Sonya Wellmann, Ash Read, Ben Amato, Tim Parr, Jorge' Carlos, Kerstin Olivier, Ernistine Deane, Denver Turner, Craig Damster, Brain De Goede, Douglas Armstrong, Dubmaster China, Speedy D, Farrel Adams, Sebastian Voigt, James Reynard, Grenville Williams, Jerome Reynard, Nic Hazel, David Maclean, Sven McAlpine, Christiaan van der Vver, Mike Perry, Charles Lazar, Vince Pavitt, Alex Bozas, Brydon Bolton, Ross Campbell, David Mayekane, Winston 'Mankunku' Ngozi, Soi -Soi Gqeza, Blackie Thempi,Victor Kula, Boytjie Philiso, Felix Laband, Allistair Douglas, Dave Henderson, Alex Van Heerden, Brydon Bolton, De Wet Van der Spuy, Thin Shoes.)

Visit the Nkomo Records Web Site.