Yakhal' Inkomo: A South African Masterpiece at Fifty

AAJ: We've raised this idea of the impact of the album, and this raises a two-part question. The first is that in 1968, Mankunku actually records two brilliant albums: first Yakhal' Inkomo, but then later in the year he records Spring with pianist Chris Schilder. We now hear that second session, because of the Gallo CD reissue of Yakhal' Inkomo which includes the tracks from Spring. Prior to that, it seems Spring was almost forgotten. Why is that?

The second question is broader, and regards Yakhal' Inkomo itself: why is an album that ranks as one of, if not the, most important South African Jazz albums of all time virtually unknown outside of South Africa?

KD: The Spring album! Chris Schilder was an absolutely incredible player, and to me those tracks are on par with the tracks that were done with Lionel Pillay earlier in the year. On the tune "Spring," Winston's modal playing doesn't deviate from the scale once. This is not easy to do when you're a chromatic player like Winston, to just restrict yourself to one scale for the entire duration. And the strange thing about that is that it feels centered in D-flat major, but he's playing a Mixolydian mode and it's pulling into G-flat major. But the G-flat major always sounds like IV; it never sounds like I. So there's something quite magical about that tune, and that solo of Winston's, that's the last word in modality. It is pure stream of consciousness from beginning to end. You can see how he has a natural feel to sometimes extrapolate something, and sometimes to actually react against his previous idea.

So I really love the Spring album. I think it's been short-changed because Yakhal' Inkomo was so strong and had a strength beyond just its title, capturing the whole movement in the 1960s. But I really love the Spring album and his playing on the ballad right at the end, "You Don't Know What Love Is." There's nothing like that. That is world-class playing, just too incredible. You can compare that to anything Dexter Gordon has done. So, Spring wasn't as famous, but fortunately they come as one release now. So you get the tracks with Lionel, and you get the tracks with Chris.

SW: It's an incredible album, and stands up to time. Beautiful writing. You know, there are people who say Coltrane's album Crescent was a more fully realized version of what the quartet was after than A Love Supreme was. But it doesn't compare to the iconic status of A Love Supreme. And this is why books like Mabandu's book are so important, because he explains that it's not just the music. The music has to be at that level and have that message, but it's ultimately based on many aspects, and so some things become iconic for a set of reasons, not just one reason.

As to why Yakhal' Inkomo is not as well known as, say Mannenberg is because Mankunku stayed in South Africa. Abdullah Ibrahim had returned to South Africa to do Mannenberg after he had already been to New York. So when people talk about South Africa, they talk about Abdullah, they talk about Hugh Masekela, they talk about Miriam Makeba. Some of them talk about the Brotherhood of Breath, or of Johnny Dyani. These are the people who left. Those who didn't leave, Ezra, Mankunku, these people are not the icons in the world that they should be. This has nothing to do with the music, as their music is not somehow "less than." But, the things that have to come together, the forces that have to come together to make something iconic, didn't come for the people who couldn't leave South Africa during apartheid.

AAJ: Can we talk about Mankunku's decision not to leave South Africa? There are a number of apocryphal stories of him being offered gigs that would have enabled him to do so. But he remained. Can we talk about that?

SW: When I first came to South Africa and conducted interviews, I was struck by that term "ran away." So many people wouldn't say "went into exile." That phrase "ran away" kept popping up. I remain surprised by that.

KD: You know, Winston had his life in Cape Town. I mean, great players like Jack Van Poll would come over, and they were desperate to introduce Europe to Winston Mankunku. But somehow, he just kind of liked having his Friday night gig with Mike Perry, and I don't know, there was a part of him that was so part of Cape Town. I knew him in the period of the 1980s. Also, I think he was an incredibly humble man. We're talking about him now like he's a giant, but in his lifetime he never saw himself that way. He was always apologizing. He was always, I don't know, he was always a really, really nice guy, a really natural guy. I don't think this pull that the other exiles must have felt, I don't know if that was inside him innately. That's the feeling I got from him. Even though we were living in this horror of apartheid where we were forced to be separate from each other. But to me it comes back to that musicians are a tribe, and that was the feeling that we had at the time. Apartheid was something that we refused to acknowledge. When we were together it was chasing music, chasing Coltrane.

But I don't want to detract anything from Winston, or his incredible anger at being pushed into the system. It's just that somehow, I think he knew that system and he had found a way of working in that system. I think that basically he wanted to play his horn, you know. That's the guy that I knew, and I miss him terribly.

SW: When I was talking to him, he said to me "Do you like Avant-Garde Jazz?" I said that I did. And he said "I do too, but I can't play that way, because I couldn't make a living." That's what he told me! You know, I went in search to pay homage to Mankunku, and I went to Cape Town. But he wasn't playing in the festival. He didn't get bitter, but when I asked him about it, he said he wasn't getting a lot of work. Everybody was telling me how brilliant he was and how much they loved him, but I asked how I could get in touch with him, and those people who told me how much they loved him also couldn't tell me how to get in touch with him. So, Kevin was talking about the eighties, but by the 2000s, maybe it had changed somewhat. I wonder about that, because he didn't get the kind of money and fanfare that his contributions should have caused to happen. We love people more when they're dead than when they're alive!

PM: Even while writing the book it was very difficult for me to get a kind of network that would introduce me to the family. It was very important to me to not just write it at a distance, but to find a way to sit at the feet of the family and let it be known that I'm working on this thing. You know, to situate myself in that spirit. It was very difficult, and I think it took three years of going back to Cape Town during festival time when you would assume there are enough musicians in Cape Town who would have a kind of access to the family. It was difficult; I ultimately found Mfana, the youngest of the Ngcukana brothers, who managed to get me there. But it was after years of trying. And I think that's telling.

AAJ: To that end, let's actually talk about this later legacy of Mankunku and the work. There's a second act to the piece's story, specifically around 1990 when Thembi Mtshali sets lyrics to the piece. We then hear Sibongile Khumalo sing it in her Market Theatre recording, and the piece ultimately takes on new character as a vocal piece. Can we speak about that?

PM: Before we get to Thembi Mtshali's lyrics, there were first lyrics that have also become apocryphal that were written by playwright Ndaba Mhlongo. Thembi Mtshali speaks about hearing his version first, and then by the time she was ready to record her own album, he was not available to give her his version of the lyrics. I think he was on tour somewhere. So she wrote lyrics around her own interpretation. I know Mankunku's response to those lyrics, that they go somewhere else from where he saw the song going. And I suppose that opens us to the idea of the artwork once it gains its own life, and how much of the originator stays with it. You know, I've been thinking about this quite a lot, and I haven't arrived at a more satisfactory moment in my thinking when I think about Mankunku's response to where this song went with the lyrical version. We know he wasn't happy with how it kind of waters down the meaning, the power that he wanted to invoke.

AAJ: Earlier, you talked about the different receptions to the piece and the idea that the reception says a lot about the listener. The instrumental piece leaves more capacity for interpretation. The lyrics set down a specific meaning.

PM: Yeah, it kind of locks you. Lyrics can be useful—depending on how they've been used—because we recognize the words already, they're locked in a particular specific meaning they carry. I think they tend to not allow us as much opportunity to go where we might need to go emotionally and intellectually when we're listening.

AAJ: To that end of representing the music, Kevin you're in the process of putting out a book of the transcriptions of Mankunku's playing on the album.

KD: This is something I've struggled with for a while now. I wrote it about five years ago. It's completely finished. It's just that the people that were trying to publish it ran into a whole lot of technical difficulties, because I transcribed every single note that Winston played on the album. In other words, if he's playing "Doodlin'" or "Bessie's Blues," the way he's playing the head of each is also transcribed, not just the solos.

I've done harmonic analysis of his choruses. I've got it in B-flat and in concert as well, but only looking at what Winston was doing. In other words, no transcription of piano solos or anything like that. So I've just run into such a dead end that I've given up, but the whole book is written and ready to go, and I did it because I want the world to see the genius of Winston. For me, the fact that we are having this conversation right now is fantastic, because it's keeping him around. The rest of humanity should have some access to him, because I feel that he was absolutely unique. The way he tugs your heart with his playing, there are very few players that do that. He can destroy you in three notes where it would take other people three hundred.

NM: I like the phrase you're using, "keep him around." I've also been thinking a lot about how we can keep other people around. Bab'uJohn Mbiti for instance speaks a lot about ways of remembering ancestors, and a lot of people have written about reciting an ancestor's name as a way of keeping that ancestor alive. But I also am trying to think about something that I want to call "Sonic Citations." How do we remember people like Bab'uMankunku through certain musical gestures that he quotes in his playing. If you think about someone like Linda Sikhakhane, he maybe has not necessarily transcribed Bab'uMankunku or Bab'uDuke Makasi, but when I play certain grooves or certain chords, that pushes him to respond in a certain way that requires him to draw from these sources.

So I think the idea of keeping these people around is also an idea that speaks to the thinking behind African traditions: the ancestors can only be alive for as long as you recite their names. And I think there's something interesting that happens in the music that can evoke certain feelings about certain musicians. For instance, I don't have to necessarily play a Bheki Mseleku transcription, but there is a way in which I can remember Mseleku in terms of how I'm playing. I think a lot of it has to do with the future of this music. If you think about literature, if I'm using Bab'uWashington's notion, I have to cite it and reference it. And sometimes I wonder about what that would sound like in music. It would be such an interesting thing to listen through people's solos and be thinking about who is being cited at which moment. What are some ways of acknowledging that we are actually borrowing ideas from these people and moving them forward?

I look at young tenor players, and many of them are not really aware of these things. Instead, they come straight from, interestingly enough, Joshua Redman. Even when you think about the US, they don't think as far as Trane, Archie Shepp, and those people. So there is something really urgent and important that has to be done in terms of how we remember these musicians in our articulations of the music. How we keep them alive in the ancestry realm. That is quite important in the kind of work that I'm personally interested in.

We spoke earlier about Spring, and when we were talking about that I was reminded of a song called "Mr. Day," that has a similar thing that Bab'uMcCoy Tyner does. And on how "Spring" is drawing from the Trane Quartet, in a particular way. Players like Bab'uMbambisa also use those type of grooves a lot. I wonder if it was borrowed. Someone said something interesting earlier that Bab'uMankunku also located Trane in the Xhosa tribe, and I think it has to do with rhythmic aspects of the music. So sometimes I'm thinking, "Wow, they were really like following the Coltrane Quartet!" But, when I listen to some of our traditional music, I think about what was being said earlier about Trane wanting to come to Africa. Maybe in Africa, as people like Bab'uRandy Weston puts it, Jazz was even alive thousands and thousands of years before the slave trade took it to new places. It's quite interesting for me to see these parallels and how they manifest in music. I get caught up between thinking it was because they were listening to these records, or maybe because they were dancing in this kind of way, because we sing in this kind of way. So there's something there, when you think about Spring, that I feel is very much linked to some of our music at home. And I think there's something special about that moment, the sixties. It took me a while to actually understand or get to know that there were two different groups that were playing [on the CD reissue], because the music blends so beautifully together! But in terms of the language that was being spoken at the time and the moment, there was a sound that belongs to that particular moment, as opposed to individual musicians. But there was a sort of a common source they were all drawing from.

PM: I want to talk about the band itself. When we speak about Classic Coltrane Quartet, you listen to the guys talking about how being in that band represented the coming together of all the things they'd been thinking about musically. Elvin Jones said it felt as though all the lessons he had been going through musically throughout his life finally made sense when he entered that band. I'm just thinking about how unlikely the Yakhal' Inkomo Quartet was. This rhythm section is a couple of cats from Durban, with a guy from Cape Town, and it's happening in Johannesburg. Word is that it was actually suggested by the producer Ray Nkwe, and the guys got together for that project and it worked. The following year, of course, the drummer Early Mabuza passes away. I'm not sure if these guys ever played together again after the recording in that format. So there is a kind of converging of forces to make this work, to bring this thing together. They really locked into each other, they make this work, and they were never to play together again. That's something for me that's very interesting to think about.

AAJ: We haven't yet discussed bassist Agrippa Magwaza, who doesn't seem to get much discussion. Can we discuss his work?

PM: At some point, Agrippa stopped playing music for awhile. I imagine he felt the same pain that Winston felt whenever he played the song, and of course the difficulty writ large of being a musician at that time. He became a rep for SAB, doing a regular job, going in and out of music. Winston also stopped playing for awhile. They paid the bills. I think there's something about that and maybe that's a chapter in my book or a section that I need to go relocate, the way in which this band came together and sort of dispersed as well. It is known that they got together specifically for this work, and were never together again.

AAJ: Weren't they supposed to play a festival together?

PM: Yeah, that's part of the joke of apartheid. It's Mankunku's concert, and he gets held up at Jan Smuts Airport [now O.R. Tambo airport in Johannesburg]. I was actually finding it very interesting that he actually flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg because during those days, people just drove, especially musicians. So the world was their oyster, I suppose, at the time. But I find it very interesting that maybe he wasn't supposed to fly, but supposed to drive like everybody else. The story I've learned from various sources is that when he arrived at the airport, he got into difficulty with the law and they wouldn't let him go. I wonder how much of that was actually deliberate, the bureaucratic frustration of black life, you know, it was a real thing. Like Dostoevsky says, mess up your stuff, just to let you know that we exist.

AAJ: This notion you raised with this idea of the quartet and that Nduduzo raised with the idea of this conceptual flow between Africa and America over time raises the point of the two pieces on Yakhal' Inkomo that Mankunku didn't write. Can we talk about the choices of "Bessie's Blues" and of "Doodlin'"?

SW: "Bessie's Blues" is very interesting. Coltrane initially apprenticed, trying to be Charlie Parker, and Charlie Parker gave us a new way to play the Blues. It was more harmonically complex, and it had a different type of voice leading. But "Bessie's Blues" goes back to I-IV-V. Nothing fancy. It's an earlier approach, what musicologists would call more "primitive," not in the sense of being less sophisticated, but primitive in the sense of more primary, closer to the source of where the Blues comes from. And it's interesting, because Trane's moving in two directions at the same time. He's going back to the source, to Bessie Smith, but he's also advancing the language of music. So it's interesting that Mankunku picked "Bessie's Blues," which is an anthem in a way, about what is at stake here. Even as Coltrane was becoming a bit more abstract and more difficult for some people to understand, he still stood on the kind of directed simplicity and the emotional resonance of the Blues.

I think Mankunku tapped into that in a way that was quite beautiful. He was able to see what was at the core. Mankunku was also more melodic than Coltrane was, and this allowed him to look at that side of Coltrane. Usually, when people try to do Trane, they look at the harmonies. But Mankunku was able, because of his melodic gift, to see a different way. And "Bessie's Blues" allows that. It's a Southern, good-old-time downhome approach to the Blues.

AAJ: Kevin, in transcribing Mankunku's playing on "Bessies Blues," what were some of your thoughts?

KD: As Salim was saying, this is an interesting Blues. The "normal" Jazz Blues in the 9th bar has a ii7 chord, and in the 10th bar is a V7 chord, and then you get the last two bars, which are some kind of turn around, coming back to the top. But with this Blues, this is the rock type of Bues where in bar nine, you've got the dominant chord V7, moving to IV7, moving to I. And that's something we associate more with rock music than with Jazz. So it does add that unusual structure, but there are the odd occasional secondary dominants and occasional passing chords. When I transcribed the solos, I tried to make the chords accommodate the melodic line as much as I can.

But Winston, as Salim said, was more melodic than Coltrane in some ways. Melody for Winston always overrode everything. And I don't think he had the preoccupation of vertical sound that Coltrane had. Winston's playing is more floating. It's like comparing Lester Young to Stan Getz, I suppose. It's coming from a different place. His solo is incredibly beautiful, he nails everything in sight. And again, the motivic development is just so strong with him, and when you try to transcribe something, you can see how all these ideas are originating. Winston wasn't a memorized lick player, he didn't learn fancy things on the sax that sound good. He played from the heart every time. So every time he plays the Blues, it's going to be completely different because he's in a different point in his life and his feeling is different. I think that's true for a lot of us. But it's an incredible solo, and the way he states the head, he's improvising from word "Go." I think he just let the sound wash over him, and he picked from that sound what felt relevant and valid for him. But yes, they're interesting choices, and it's very interesting that "Doodlin'" is the other track.

AAJ: In a way, it's counterintuitive. Given the other original on the album, "Dedication," is subtitled "For Daddy Trane and Brother Shorter," you'd think the other tune would be a Wayne Shorter tune, rather than a Horace Silver tune.

KD: "Dedication" to me is pure modal playing, pure Coltrane, in the Sheets of Sound era that Coltrane went through after his work with Miles Davis, while he's working with Thelonious Monk.

PM: If I can jump in, I want to take us back to a point that I thought I would make earlier, but we had moved on. When we talked about Lionel Pillay, I'm glad that Kevin brought up the Miles Davis band, because I was thinking that Wynton Kelly was to Trane in the Miles Davis band almost what Lionel Pillay was to Winston. There's something there, and I couldn't find the language for it, but when I think of Wynton Kelly, I think of Lionel Pillay. I don't know what you guys have been hearing in terms of the saxophonists' relationship to pianists in that way?

NM: I'm going to just branch off a little bit. I've just been thinking as we were speaking about repertoire on the record. I'm just wondering if it wasn't perhaps because the band had just come together, and they used the standards as the common place for everyone to get to blow. Do you think it was a really deliberate thing for them to like call those standards, or did they just do it because they just had just come together? Do we think that Bab'uMankunku maybe had other original tunes that he would have loved to record, but he thought maybe they needed something that was common since they just met as a band and had to do this? Is there any history of them playing together, especially with Bab'uPillay, before Yakhal' Inkomo? I know he was pretty much inside the language that was spoken at the time.

PM: I know that these records were very large in Winston's imagination because if you look into at least the two years or three years before the recording of Yakhal' Inkomo, you hear the music that is captured in the Ian Huntley Archives. They show versions he does of "Doodlin,'" and in fact that Horace Silver album from which "Doodlin'" is lifted, it seems like it's an album that he was checking out. There's a number of tracks that he records. So in the Ian Huntley Archives, even with "Bessie's Blues," this was not the first time that he goes at it. It's in those recordings in the archive, of some gigs recorded in Cape Town. So Winston had been thinking about the music for awhile, but as for the band, I don't have any evidence that the band had been together before this. I suppose the fact that they played with such feeling maybe tells us something about the place these records held in the musical community of cats at the time.

AAJ: To that point of it being a new band, there is the false start on "Dedication (For Daddy Trane and Brother Shorter)" where they have to pick it up again. That they, they leave it on the record.

SW: It's interesting, because the tune in which they call to reference Coltrane, he'd been dead for about a year when Mankunku recorded Yakhal' Inkomo.

PM: Yes, it was exactly 12 months.

SW: Yes. Prior to his transition, Trane had recorded Transition. He had played duets with Rashied Ali. His aesthetic had moved beyond what was referenced on Mankunku's recording. I've wondered about that. Mongezi Feza, Dudu Pukwana, they're referencing Trane's later sounds, in a way that Mankunku doesn't dive into. I've wondered about that. Did he feel constrained? Or was it because of his strong sense of melody?

NM: Bab' Washington, I'm also thinking that sort of period you're talking about that goes with Babu Rashied Ali, it influenced mostly the musicians that were in exile. I'm just thinking about the ones that were here, that movement I don't think fully developed in South Africa. But it did with South Africans in exile. If I think about Bab'uTete Mbambisa, for example, someone who is very important from the Soul Jazzmen, I think they really stayed with this kind of sound that Bab'uMankunku stayed with. Maybe it goes back to your paper on Inziles and Exiles, and in terms of how that influenced how they responded to sound. Maybe some of the collaborations that were happening as well with Bab' Don Cherry and other people that were into that sort of sound that were in exile. I think also in terms of when the records would get to South Africa. Every time we would get hip to something, it was someone like Trane who evolved almost every day. So by the time something gets here, Trane is gone already. So, I think that's what happened.

AAJ: What are people's concluding thoughts on the album, on Mankunku, and on the legacy of Yakhal' Inkomo?

KD: I'm hoping that this album doesn't die, the same way that I'm hoping that in 200 years time people will still be listening to A Love Supreme. In terms of Winston and the album, the young players of today need to realize that Coltrane went backwards before he went forwards. He studied the music that had gone on before him because how else could he find something new? People don't realize this, but he actually loved Johnny Hodges, and I have a rare album of a young John Coltrane playing with Johnny Hodges. I'm hoping that the new musicians of today are going to feel this need to look back. I'm still listening to music from the fifties; this thing of "new is always better," I don't subscribe to that at all. There are albums of 1970s that I listen to that will affect me for the rest of my life. So I'm just hoping that that's how we can keep his legacy alive in that way.

SW: I think that Winston Ngozi is one of the treasures of the world. He's especially important in what is now called the Black Atlantic, which is something that was instigated by the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade. And so you have all these cultures that are refracting, reflecting, and rebounding off of each other. There are very few places where that type of argument can be made more convincingly than it can between South Africa and Afro America. And I would think that one way of understanding Mankunku, is that he presents an example of the Black Atlantic at its best.

PM: I'm thinking about about the power of this music, and I think at the heart of Mankunku's refusal to run away, so to speak, is a commitment to making home. I think he understood the source of his power as a musician to also be a place he needed to plow into. He speaks about "My music is needed here" or "I need to be heard here." But I think it's a kind of cyclical thing: it is the source as much as it is also the destination. I think of the fruits of that is seen in young musicians like Linda Sikhakhane and Sisonke Xonti, as Nduduzo was saying earlier on. I'd love to hear more young people grapple with the meaning of Winston Mankunku. That is how he continues to enrich us. I think there's much more still to be understood about his musicianship and that will come out as younger musicians come to his music with questions more than answers. And I think it's in asking more rigorous questions of the music, that we're going to benefit from it more. I look forward to what further questions are going to be.

NM: Obviously Yakhal' Inkomo and Bab' Winston Mankunku are very important for Jazz in South Africa. It's important for how we define Jazz, in the same way that in the US, BeBop would become sort of like the foreground. Maybe when it comes to Jazz in South Africa, we do not see these sort of foundations as important as maybe in New Orleans. Yakhal' Inkomo contributes towards those kinds of meanings for Jazz in South Africa. It should be standard and foundational knowledge for people to understand Jazz. I think this idea that Mabandu also spoke about on the notions of modernity, I think sometimes it just doesn't go so well with our African concepts of time. We feel it's important to sort of embrace the past as a way of understanding the now and going into the future, more like Bab'Washington was proposing with the Sankofa symbol. So I think that sort of thing is very important for the future of this music. If we can construct even deeper meanings, thinking of Bab'uMankunku as an ancestor that has to be remembered, and this becomes part of what we have to do, as opposed to just saying, "Oh, I'm into Joshua Redman, you're into Joe Lovano, and that guy is into Trane." If you think of it more like the ancestors that need to be remembered, more like a grandfather, and Bab'uMankunku's horn as teachings from your grandfather, then it carries a deeper meaning for an African person that understands how important these teachings are. We have to "unlearn" how we think about these contributions of these great masters and try and link them more to our cultures, to develop a stronger Jazz culture in South Africa.

Selected Discography
Winston Mankunku Ngozi, Yakhal' Inkomo, (World Record Co, 1968)
Chris Schilder Quintet, Spring, (Atlantic City, 1969)

NOTE: The Gallo Record Company CD reissue in 2007 of Yakhal' Inkomo includes the tracks from the album Spring. The Jazzman CD and LP reissues in 2017 of Yakhal' Inkomo do not include the additional tracks.


Selected Reading
Percy Mabandu, Yakhal'Inkomo: Portrait of a Jazz Classic, (DASH-Art Media, 2016)
NOTE: This book is available online at Chimurenga.

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