Covers, Copies, and "Colo[u]redness" (1) in Postwar Cape Town (2002)

To copy [note] for [note], word for word, image for image, is to make the known world your own ... It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of reality. Hillel Schwartz 1996, 211-2 Despite their prodigious use of recordings in formulating perspectives on jazz history, historians have tended to avoid theorizing the actual status and function of these artifacts_the very artifacts that ... would seem to constitute primary evidence about jazz music. Jed Rasula 1995, 134 There was a time when radio was pure magic ... the magic [came] from entering a world of sound, and from using that sound to make your own vision, your own dream, your own world. Susan Douglas 1999, 28 to sit in this dark place, and magic takes place on the wall. For a moment, we forgot apartheid, we forgot there was another world that wasn't good; we sat there, and were carried away by the dream of these American movies. Actor John Kani to Peter Davis 1990, 23 On January 25, 1959, a short but rather glowing review appeared in Golden City Post, one of South Africa's most popular newspapers targeted at a non-white (2) audience. It read: There is no doubt about it, Beatrice Benjamin is the mostest, the greatest and the most appealing girl singer in the Cape, whispers Howard Lawrence. What she did to the audience at Post's show, Just Jazz Meets the Ballet was wow. got it bad when she sang I Got It Bad. Everybody else got it bad too and they kept shouting for more of that feeling. Most promising singer for 1959. Agreed. [my emphasis] Five decades later the performance of Duke Ellington's music in Cape Town, South Africa may not seem particularly noteworthy. In its historical moment, however, it was a remarkable achievement for a local singer of mixed race to move her interracial audience emotionally with a foreign repertory, i.e., a style of song performance far removed from the site of the music's original production. It begs the question of how jazz had become both a naturalized discourse in Cape Town and part of the individual and collective experiences of so many who lived through that period of South African cultural and political history. For this Cape Town-born singer, I Got It and That Ain't Good has a certain aura. Sathima Bea Benjamin (3) recalls that this Duke Ellington tune created an immediate and steadfast bond between herself and internationally acclaimed South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (aka. Dollar Brand). (4) Benjamin and Ibrahim were each working separately on the piece when they first met at the jazz fundraiser mentioned above. Unbeknownst to them in 1959, through an extraordinary sequence of events, they would come to meet and record with Duke Ellington and his musical partner, composer-performer Billy Strayhorn in Switzerland four years later. Benjamin and Ibrahim memorialized that encounter by performing I Got It Bad once again, but this time in the presence of its composer. Two records came out of the 1963 encounter, one featuring Sathima Bea Benjamin (A Morning in Paris, 1997) and the other Dollar Brand, (Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, 1963, reissued 1997). These records signified a climactic moment for South African jazz because while many South African musicians had performed the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in Johannesburg and Cape Town, few imagined they would ever have the opportunity to meet these musicians, or witness them performing live, let alone record in the presence of such internationally acclaimed artists. As the Cape Town jazz pianist Henry February commented to me, at that time for people in his community, travel to America was like travel to the moon. The only experience ever had with Americans was through records. (5) Similarly, when South Africans began to travel in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, they report that they rarely met anyone abroad who had any knowledge of South Africa's vibrant jazz communities. …