kagablog

keep reading this review here: http://eustisjazz.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/341/

Had a beautiful dream of Zim last night. He was still and happy. He was
talking to two people at a round table.

He told me not to walk towards the big rock in the river but to turn
around and to try to reach him on the dry land – I managed to jump
across to him only to find that he had turned around and walked away. I
was not sad. He wore a green check jacket and his khaki pants.

He is with us still – there is no death

zaide harnecker

i wish that I had photographed all those Saturdays
when Zim and I started working from 5:30am to get the stage built in the
chapel and get the water bursting from the borehole, fetching beds and
tables and chairs from Frank and shopping for affordable linen so that
we could get the place ready for the young musicians to arrive for the
mentorship programme – the programme was the beginning of Zaide’s
connection with Aryan (Zim told me that you are a good brother but I
should be careful – you are mad! I told him SO then he is family cos we
are also mad).

I miss the silence in the citroen and the soft rising sun – our only
partners on the long journey to the farm – we always stopped for mangoes
on the way – and always stopped to greet the big fat black pig on plot
number 163 (Zim called him Magagula after his close friend) before
proceeding for a long hard day of work on the chapel and in the garden.

I have lovely pics of those days on the farm with Kyle trying to learn
to cook, Shane and Lucky organizing and David Alexander teaching the
workings of the music business… and of the dutch and the swiss
musicians jamming in the chapel.

I am blessed to have been part of the building of the physical institute
and to have shared and grown with Zimology Ngqawana.

From Jazz Magazine, number 580, April 2007. Interview by Lorraine Soliman. (Translation by Henri-Michel Yéré).

Saxophone player Zim Ngqawana is one of the most important performers of the ‘new’ generation of SA jazzmen to have emerged in the early 1990s. The 47-year-old is an accomplished musician and a committed man, who puts himself at a safe distance from politics: “Political freedoms are very limited. They are given to you, just like economic freedoms. Personally I am more interested the freedom that makes your soul travel. That’s what music is about.” If you talk about apartheid, he replies in the language of spirituality: “When I started out as a performer, most of the nationalist struggles were already through, and luckily I didn’t see most of it. I haven’t started out in a township, with music as my sole perspective. I had a spiritual approach, for my calling was spiritual. John Coltrane was a prophet. He pulled me out of misery. Saint John Coltrane!” As I mentioned the San Francisco community which worships Coltrane, Ngqawana specified: “It is a higher level of spirituality. Coltrane’s music went beyond the reaches of the infinite!” Yet one must access another spiritual realm in order to share in this experience: “South Africa is an artificial construct. To accept South Africa as such is behaving as a South African nationalist. I have been part of BC, but today I don’t find it interesting anymore. Now I am struggling with my human nature.” He sits at the piano and plays a few harmonic progressions, taken from British protestant hymns: “Some say that this is the SA sound! I just cannot dedicate my life to this European music. Been there, done that. Now I can fly.” About learning music during apartheid, Zim replies that he never had to learn music: “It was all here already: breath, heartbeats, walking…I am music.” Yet he was among the first black musicians – along with his accomplice and friend, pianist Andile Yenana – to be taught at the University of Kwazulu-Natal under Darius Brubeck: “Starting the flute at age 21 allowed me to escape the indoctrination of a traditional upbringing. When I went to school to study the saxophone, I already had it in me what sound I was going to create. I had listened to Eric Dlophy, Kippie Moeketsi, John Coltrane, Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela…The teachers couldn’t really influence me…” Furthermore,“ I am not into accord theories, it’s just noise. I am interested in sound and I don’t care whether that sound is African or not! Africa is not taken seriously. There is too much paternalism; that’s why I want to drop this whole Africa-thing.” Still, “the albums I have produced use street sounds, sounds from the church, from my surroundings… This is not about forgetting our history. I do know what it’s like to be a black man in South Africa.”

Two more reflection axes: death and language: “It’s important to busy oneself with culture and politics, but one must also face the question of the end of life. If you understand what death is, then you will never die.” As for language, once upon a time a prime tool for oppression, he imagines it to be at “another level” and he invents his own ‘corrupt’ words, such as Gobbliesation (the title of one of his pieces), a reference to the selfishness of our societies and to power abuse. Zim Ngqawana cites musicians such as Yusef Lateef or Anthony Braxton, with whom he shares a holistic vision of music that he sums up in the word ingoma, “a very vast experience, which does not reduce African music to its rhythmic dimension, or to a pentatonic scale only. Ingoma means healing, medicinal plants, rhythm, instruments, drums, all at the same time…” The Marseille saxophonist Raphael Imbert, a new accomplice in this spiritual quest, has invited him as much as possible to join in his Newtopia Project. “Raphael and I aim to underline the spiritual dimension of jazz. We want to check how high it can take us.” Coming from a musician who claims to have lifted himself out of poverty thanks to music, such a view may as well lead to…well, infinite perspectives: “In the United States the African-American community has created an art form studied today all over the world. Can you see the change? Music has turned the Slave into the Master.”

Had a beautiful dream of Zim last night. He was still and happy. He was
talking to two people at a round table.

He told me not to walk towards the big rock in the river but to turn
around and to try to reach him on the dry land – I managed to jump
across to him only to find that he had turned around and walked away. I
was not sad. He wore a green check jacket and his khaki pants.

He is with us still – there is no death

zaide harneker

first published in artsouthafrica, vol.10, issue 01, spring 2011

2 x 52 minutes
HDV
written and directed by Aryan Kaganof
sound design Joel Assaizky
produced for African Noise Foundation by Zaide Harnecker

Zim Ngqawana is internationally regarded as the most important South African jazz improviser and composer after Abdullah Ibrahim. His quartet recently performed at the prestigious Columbia University Jazz Festival in Harlem, representing their country and their continent. But Zim himself is uncomfortable with being called a “jazz” musician.

Going to the jazz is a slang expression for going to the toilet. “Jazzing” is a street term for having sex. In the early decades of the previous century white journalists associated the sound of the African-American classical tradition with activities of the only venues that they heard this music in – the brothels. Thus the appellation “jazz”. Although African-American composers took the term and made it their own, a South African born composer like Zim Ngqawana feels the powerful responsibility to reclaim the honour of naming the very music that he plays.

INGOMA refers to the state of trance induced in ritual, in shamanistic process and in the re-enactment of myth during ceremonial dances. Zim prefers to use the word INGOMA to describe the music that he plays because although his vernacular is deeply infused with the African-American “jazz” tradition, it brings that tradition home so to speak, and this homecoming, this voyage of spiritual regeneration, cannot be appellated in a foreign tongue.

The documentary INGOMA aims to portrait this pioneer of African classical music ON HIS OWN TERMS. Not to try to situate him in a paradigm created and contextualized by the history of jazz discourse, but rather to allow the audience to see and hear this music as an African phenomenon.

The documentary focuses on the ZIMOLOGY INSTITUTE where Zim has set up a school for composers and improvisers. This Insititute continues the long line of MYSTERY SCHOOLS which are the African orthodox tradition of education, wherein small groups of learners would have the secrets and history of their disciplines handed down from generation to generation by MASTERS. In these mystery schools the learners were sworn in on the basis that they would not reveal the content of their lessons to anybody who was not an INITIATE of the mystery school. The INITIATION CEREMONIES were extremely important parts of the process of education, whereby the discipline being studied was seen as an integral part of the life process itself, and not merely as an exercise in intellectual stimulation.

It is the thesis of INGOMA that what we know as Western civilization is based on a fundamental break with the oath of the mystery schools. When Plato wrote down Socrates’ dialogues for all and sundry to read, a tradition that had lasted hundreds of thousands of years came to a dizzy end and allowed for the rapid growth of the death cults that regarded the written word as more sacred than human life.

The system of music education employed in South Africa 13 years after the first democratic elections were held still utilizes the principles of the oath-breaking post-Platonics. In other words, it is anathemic to any practitioner of a truly liberated art form, in the African sense.

Zim Ngqawana, having travelled and taught extensively outside of South Africa, returned to his motherland to discover that he could not fit in to an entirely prison-like academic environment in the Universities here. In order to bring his knowledge back to his people he decided to set up his own Institute of higher learning – The Zimology Institute – which functions in much the same way as the ancient Mystery Schools.

The documentary takes the viewer through the process that a young student immerses him/herself in at the Institute. Music is taught, not as notes on paper, but as sounds in time and space – sounds that are holistically connected to states of mind, states of soul, to being itself. Music is not taught as a realm of
technique in the abstract, but rather as a healing device that helps allow the mind and soul to find balance in our deeply technocratically unbalanced world.

The INGOMA referred to in the title is the state of perfect balanced achieved when music is functioning as a conduit between this material world and the world of the spirits, the world of ancestors, whose presence becomes foregrounded and heightened by the vibrational energy of the individual who is in trance. This state of trance is the highest aspiration for any student of the Mystery School. It is a state that the mystics of all belief sytems, in all religious traidtions, have strived for. It is to this state the the students of the Zimology Institute aspire.

INGOMA is a documentary made from an Afro-centric perspective. The formal handling of light, colour and framing is entirely based on the internal dynamics of the INGOMA. Hand-held camera work that is fluid and at all times organically connected to the music allows the audience to experience the INGOMA from within. Watching INGOMA will be like undergoing a trance state for the audience. Entirely unlike a Western audience paying to watch a jazz concert, INGOMA allows us to be induced into the state of spiritual bliss that only holistically integrated sounds and images can allow for. It is a musical and spiritual trip. A journey within.

aryan kaganof
8 october 2007

and wow! just read the andile piece on zim on your blog. very beautiful. he tells us, “I have been listening less and less to music….” and herein the tragedy… because in writing zim he can’t escape the music… and whether he likes it or not it plays through him and blasts opens a door for transcendence, the possibility, the hope god damnit that allows us to advance along new paths… something that is maybe sometimes subdued in his writing and thinking… holy fuck! what have we been thinking? haven’t we learned there can’t be a revolution without music?

its what you were saying: music is always so fucking far ahead! always leading the way…. but we mustn’t forget that writing can also be a way of making music…. the best writing always sings!

dear stace
this is exactly it – and it is that singing quality that i dream of reaching, that soaring singing wail that comes from a deeper place than language
to somehow express that in language
it’s paradoxical and seemingly impossible
but it’s the only reason to write
aryan

Zim Ngqawana was full of sound. Nothing hidden, nothing saved, nothing held back. He played every note and breathed every breath as if it were his last. Playing that last note will eventually happen to all of us…maybe that’s where we finally find the silence of ourselves. I will continue to celebrate Zim’s beautiful spirit through making and sharing music. I will remember him well with great admiration, great respect, and great love. Zim will be missed but he will also be remembered. ZIMOLOGY LIVES!!!
(JEFF COFFIN http://www.jeffcoffin.com/ )

 Note from WUOT JAZZ STAFF

We are deeply saddened by the news of the passing of Zim Ngqawana and send our condolences to his family and friends everywhere. The first time I heard Zim, it was by accident. I was walking through the University of Tennessee Student Center on the way to something that at the time seemed important. I was stopped in my tracks by Zim’s music- he was playing a live show on the second floor. It was beautiful, spiritual, exciting and fun. I couldn’t pull myself away. It’s rare that music grabs me that hard. We all feel so fortunate to have been here when Zim was in town. We will continue to share his music and are grateful he shared it with us.
TODD STEED (Jazz Coordinator, WUOT radio station, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA)

 Message from the University of Tennessee’s Jazz Studies Program

The University of Tennessee Jazz Program faculty, students, and alumni are saddened by the loss of our friend and colleague Zim Ngqawana. When Zim was Artist-in-Residence for the UT jazz program in spring of 2003, he taught a course on“Jazz in South Africa,” coached and performed with student ensembles and played concerts and recorded with the jazz faculty. He taught us about his struggles as an aspiring musician in apartheid South Africa, and his roots in the folk
music of his people and in “My Favorite Things” era Coltrane. Mostly he taught us through his music, that a musician can be much more than an entertainer and an artist. Zim’s music embodied the complete range of human emotion, and always had an uplifting quality. Zim believed in the healing power of music and sound. He lived completely“in the moment”and he swept listeners along through his musical stories in every performance. We are grateful that he shared some of his life with us. The Zim Ngqawana Memorial Scholarship award for jazz students with exceptional creative promise will be established in his honor.
PROFESSOR MARK BOLING (guitarist and Jazz Studies Program Coordinator at the University of Tennessee)

Message from former coordinator of UT’s Africa Semester

Zim transformed our Africa Semester at UT back in 2003! His easy rapport with students, faculty, and community folk, and his willingness to pitch in with whatever project was going on was inspiring to all. Not to mention his music! He enraptured ANY within earshot and turned so many on to Jazz, it was truly phenomenal! I later visited him in Durban, and from even the few brief moments with his Jazz students (who happened to be around), I could see that the same was true there. He had them under his spell, and they were totally devoted to him and whatever gig he’d cooked up that was coming up next. Even in far-flung record shops in Cape Town or Johannesburg, the mere mention of Zim elicited outpourings of praise and remembrances, even from those who had never meet him! Perhaps my strongest memories are of his words of encouragement to our 15 year old son, who was just starting to play jazz saxophone, and their intense discussions about St. John (as in St. John Coltrane). ZIM you will be sorely missed, but never forgotten!
BILL DEWEY (former faculty member at the University of Tennessee, and coordinator of the Africa Semester)

Messages from the Jazz for Justice Project 

Zim changed the lives of many when he came to Knoxville in 2003 as part of our Africa Semester. He left no-one in doubt about the power of music, and more especially the power of his music. His life, his stories, his teachings, and his sounds inspired some of us to create an organization that would promote the use of music and the arts in peacebuilding in war-affected northern Uganda. The Jazz for Justice Project continues to this day. Zim played at two of our benefit concerts in Knoxville, bringing the house down, as was his wont. For me personally, learning about jazz and notably sound from Zim over the years resulted in my developing a course and a conference symposium on Sound and Music in Religion. Needless to say, the eventual book will be dedicated to Maestro Zim and Zimology. Quite frankly, I will never hear the world in the same way again thanks to Zim…
PROFESSOR ROSALIND I. J. HACKETT (Founder and coordinator, the Jazz for Justice Project and Head, Department of Religious Studies, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA)

 I am so thankful to have met someone with his vision- perhaps he was a fire-starter and for all those who seek freedom he has shared a small piece of his fire. A fire that was fueled by focus, passion, and most importantly improvisation. Now it is insured that his fire can never go out, because now there are fire-tenders across the globe who are feeding and growing these fires with the same fuel of passion, focus, and improvisation. Maybe now his energy has found a new freedom.”
JOSHUA RUSSELL (musician and former Jazz for Justice music director) 

The Jazz for Justice Project at the University of Tennessee has had the honor of working with Zim Ngqawana for the past five years. His talent electrified us all. Beyond that, though, his passion for his art and social change transformed his music into a narrative of the struggle for freedom. We learned from this narrative while sitting in the chapel at his Zimology Institute outside of Johannesburg, enveloped in incense smoke and transformed by the spiritual sounds of Zim and his students. Our Knoxville community learned from this narrative while dancing at Jazz for Justice concerts, clothed in sweat and astounded by the intimacy of Zim’s music. Zim’s improvisational music inspired JfJ’s use of creativity and music as a form of activism. With Zim’s help, we have donated thousands of dollars to music and arts projects focused on peace-building and reconciliation in northern Uganda. We are forever indebted to Zim for his vision. We aim to continue his mission of music activism through all that we do.
ERIN BERNSTEIN (one of student founder-leaders of the Jazz for Justice Project)

performing at zim ngqawana’s memorial service, baseline, johannesburg, friday 3 june 2011

Osho Says: There is life, there is death, in between there is love.

Zim and I loved to sing Frank Morgan’s ‘what is this thing called love, this funny thing called love, I ask the Lord, heavens above, what is this thing called love?’

ZIM was LOVE. Zim loved ALL of us – he walked in our skins and some of us walked in his… But most of all Zim loved Zim – he had to love Zim in order to be an instrument of god and of healing through his music. Hence his philosophy of Zimology. Zimology is all about love – the love of the self. How do we get to love ourselves? It is only through the study (the constant awareness) of the self which leads to knowledge of the self and loving the self that we can ultimately move towards selflessness. How do we get to study the self? We can only do this through silence – for it is in the silence that we hear the truth.

Zim, thank you for the long silences we shared – on the 6 hour journeys from Durban to Johannesburg 20 years ago, from Welkom to Durban when we did not speak a word. There was no need. To the long silences on the farm – it was only in that silence that we became one with the song of the birds, crickets and wind through the trees… when I quietly got up to fetch pencil and paper for you to write down new notes for new tunes…. Or you would get up and sit at the piano in the music chapel we built together and play new notes for new tunes…

I forgive you for all the times you woke me in the middle of the night 20 years ago saying: “Zai, Zai, I need a piano now, the tune needs to get out … and I would get up to drive you to the practice rooms at the UKZN for you to put down the new tunes… Ihashe likababa was born and became Amagoduka and many more were written there…in the wee silent hours of the night and early morn before the sun rose and I fetched you to come back home for your daily hours of meditation.

ZIM was TRUTH – he was a Sufi, a seeker of the truth, always questioning. Hazrat Inayat Khan says: Truth is simple. There are two things: Knowing and Being – it is easy to know truth, but most difficult to BE TRUTH. It is not in knowing truth that Life’s purpose is accomplished, it is in Being the truth that Life’s purpose is accomplished. Zim lived his own truth and NEVER compromised on this. He believed in himself and in the Beingness of All. A young opera singer whom I met last night told me that he was her teacher at UKZN. She told me how there was nearly a class riot because he told the classical music students to improvise on classical pieces; to put their own mark, their own beingness on the pieces they were told to play….the students got upset with this and his philosophy of Zimology but she says he sat there smiling silently until they understood what he was urging them to do and today a young classical pianist is flying all over the world with his own interpretations of classical pieces he plays. She spoke of how startled the students were when he told them that he would not give them marks/grades for their work – they needed to decide for themselves how much they were worth – and when they did not give themselves 110% on a test or performance, he would urge them to sit back and ask themselves why?

ZIM was a HEALER – Hazrat Inayat Khan says; music is healing, uplifts souls, music inspires persons and there is no better way of getting closer to God , of rising higher to the spirit, of attaining spiritual perfection than music….
And so, Zim, my beloved companero, as you recently received an ayurvedic yoga massage from me and urged me to take forward the healing work on my journey, I commit to taking yours forward by providing a Zimology Bench at your new resting place number 529 under the second last lamp-post on the far right side of west-park cemetery, for fellow-travellers to be silent towards achieving self-love, offering my hands to all who need healing and my love to you eternally.

Osho says in The Beloved: Chapter 5 Question 1. : I am not going to give a destination. I can give you a direction – awake, throbbing with life, and unknown, always unpredictable. I’m not going to give you a map. I can give you only a great passion to discover. Yes, a map is not needed, great passion, great desire to discover is needed. Then I leave you alone. Then you go on your own.

Moving into the vast, into the infinite, and by and by learn to trust it. Leave yourself in the hands of life, because life is god. When Jesus says, ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.’ He is saying this…

a great trust. Even if God brings death there is nothing to be afraid of. It is he who is bringing death so there must be a reason in it, there must be a hidden secret in it, there must be a teaching in it, he is opening a door.

The man who trusts, the man who is religious is thrilled even at the gate of death—he can give a lion’s roar. Even dying – because he knows nothing dies – at the very moment of death he can say’ This is it!’

Because each moment, this is it. It may be life, it may be death, it may be success, it may be failure, it may be happiness, it may be unhappiness. Each moment This is it.

Mind’s greatest fear is not death. Its greatest fear is enlightenment.

Zim, thank you for waiting for me to chant for you for the last time on Tuesday, 10th May while your soul left on your new journey and I closed your eyes at 09h45.

For a while I will continue to sign off as Zaide and Zim.

all photos by andrew tshabangu

“Only zim knew the simplicity of zimology – all of us have our own
interpretations in order to find meaning for ourselves on our journeys
to our own ologies? And there is immense beauty in each of these
interpretations.” zaide harneker on zimology

yes there is..

perhaps more than anything,

he showed that with wisdom and pure overstanding,

of the self in the youniverse,

of each one teach one,

that our collective consciousness could and should

be able to withstand any bomblast of mediocrity and subjugation.

that in our life time kingdoms and regimes have fallen,

our spirits lifted and sifted often vandalised

to feed the needy greedy

and the insatiable appetite for evil.

more than that, he understood,

that destruction of the poor is in the poverty,

and sought to give our poor souls some enrichment,

a window to another world through,

the keys and windsongs of sax and flute and watever

deemed to set before you..

he made music his muse..blues

they cannot kill the human spirit he said

that same spot that has brought us this far,

the twelve past midnight hour

of our horror

our past on the floor bleeding

the future running off with

chains and billy clubs

blinging in the wake

of our own struggle..

run nigga run..

and we struggle

cus thats wat we do best

and at best we listen now for his butterfly wingsongs

coming back on the winds

the prayers of kyles fingers gently moving across the keys,

of shane’s bassline

calling back and forth to this man

who has given and imparted his wise soul

to be and become greater than the small parts..

and yes dem say music calms

the savage beast

the ease of our own beautifical is the said returning..

give thanks for the seeds spawned in the harvest of his teaching

preaching uplifting to the said thing of his own being..

the future is in their hands

the keys sing his song and we who are alive,

can do but two things

shut up and dance

or stand like scarecrows.

who knows, they write now..

we may never pass this way again..

so let us innervoice and outervoice

give shouts praiseskisseslovetears and smiles..

for yes,
there is immense beauty in each of these interpretations.

Only zim knew the simplicity of zimology – all of us have our own
interpretations in order to find meaning for ourselves on our journeys
to our own ologies? And there is immense beauty in each of these
interpretations.

I’m a philistine!

Nor am I a musician.

In fact, I can say safely that increasingly I have been listening less and less to music.

But, ironically, I consider myself a Zimologist!

We must not make the mistake of thinking of Zim as a jazz musician.

- Zim ngqawana was a phenomena extraordinaire! (a philosopher, healer, rebel, prophet all rolled into one)

- Difficulty of speaking on Zimology and Zim (is the reverence I have and sense of the greatness that may be soiled by my clumsy mediocrity.

- The Greatness of Zim was confirmed more than once by forces bigger than ourselves (The lighting that struck as his remains were brought to the house for the last rites! The rain that harassed us that evening and stopped as soon as we were done burying the master – Wadada (Dr Mdluli, chuckled as we fumbled to try free ourselves from the stubborn red soil clinging on the soles of our shoes. Wadada said, zim must be saying “I told you Mdluli, i’m going to make you guys suffer!)

- So I will only speak about what Zimology as a philosophy means to me

- Perhaps a warning (zimology is as big as its founder!)

- What happens to a philosophy when the master goes?

- Who claims the mantle of the master? what are the ways of perusing the mission the master left incomplete?

- I want to suggest that we think about an annual interdisciplinary symposium on Zimology (musicians, writers, painters, poets, philosophers, dreamers etc) we meet and reflect on the meaning of Zimology. We need an exposition of thought and creativity to honor Zim. One would have thought the universities would find such an invitation irresistible but then this is SA.

- When talking about Zimology, the challenge for me is trying to find/construct a unifying narrative of the itself (the desperate happenings, utterances, experiences, creations all comes from a place – our job is to trace more honestly that place and to be faithful Zimologists we may have to create a new path to wards total liberation as an act of self realisation). Zim was about the freedom to create!

3 encounters with Zim to explain aspects of Zimology

1. North Sea Jazz Festival in Cpt- (I had planned to see a few more shows that night- but after Zim I was incapacitated for something like an hour. I had been taken to a place I haven’t been before, but this for me was an elevation which was also very traumatic, demanding, the climb down absolutely painful). I was left disoriented, my coordinates operating outside their moorings!

2. At Zimology institute (Zim summoned us to the chapel around 2am, we must have been about 10 people) – a spiritual and transcendental experience performance followed. It felt like the music has held us by the scruffs of our necks and forced us to look deep into our empty existence. Kyle shepherd and Zim stood on that stage with swords drawn, blood dripping. Ayanda spurring them on for more with an furious ancestral drum chant! I swear I saw Makathini’s hat fly to the sky and from a distance, someone sobbed. At that moment I was forcibly shot through the roof of the chapel and left sitting there – helpless.

Again the climb back was painful, the experience traumatic. I stayed away from the Zimology Institute and Zim’s meditations to freedom. Now I can say I knew I was not ready to be freed!

There is yet a third event which I was driven to be Kyle Shepherd, perhaps the purest of Zimologists. Kyle took the hand of the master, listened, obeyed and created. Kyle’s musical offerings bears testament to this truth. His song DIE MAAN SKYN SO HELDER from his debut album drove me to a personal realization and decision which will only be reflected in my memoirs. Thanks Kyle!

My experiences with Zim’s music can be likened to the Eagle Renewal Legend:

It is said that, “The Bald Eagle is the longest lived species of eagle, living up to 70 years (or 100). However, to reach this age, it must make a hard choice.

At the age of 30 (or 40, or 50), it flies to a high place, sheltered from the sun, where water is present, and there endures a harsh trial of endurance and change.

Its body has become overgrown with feathers, and its wings can’t move as well as they once could. It plucks all the feathers from its body.

Its talons have grown curled and useless. It plucks its talons from its feet.

Its beak has grown too long and curled. It breaks its beak against a rock.

Defenseless, it cries out and waits. Other eagles hear its cry, and come to aid it in its time of renewal. They fly overhead, scaring off predators, and bringing food to their incapacitated friend.

For 150 days, it drinks the water (some variations omit the food and other eagles) and waits for its feathers, beak, and talons to grow back.

Many Bald Eagles don’t survive this process, but those that do have the will to survive this time of change (trial, renewal, rebirth) fly away from the experience as young as a new eagle, with another 30 years of life (40, 50) still ahead!”.

This renewal gained from a Zimology experience was not for long life but for life lived intensively.

An Aspect of Zim’s Origins

Before I try explain from my perspective what are some key principles under-pinning Zimology, let me share with you a narrative I heard in the CPT leg of the Zim memorial organized by Kyle at the homely heaven of great music Tagores in Observatory. Sheppard mathe took us through the social history that partly created Zim. He took us down the battle field in the plains of kafraria – now Eastern Cape, fierce combat between hordes of white settlers and the natives. A battle that lasted a century! The merciless white violent creation of the black proletarian class – a dispossessed people, of land, labour and our sense of African being! a people who must work to live. a people in PE that assembles cars they will never own! This is the social milieu, the background we must not forget that help birth the colossal Zim!

As a social activist and someone with fantasies for a Revolution that must end politics I draw a lot from Zimology. Zim hated politics and politicians – I remember him telling us that Thabo Mbeki must be arrested for being president of a country. This radical questioning and seeing power for what it is is something any revolutionary must find edifying!

Some key elements/principles of Zimology

In few words I can say Zimology could crudely be said to be an – Over coming of fear so that we may love, live and be free!

1. Overcoming death so that we may live fully and intensely! (we arrived at Zim’s house one Saturday afternoon. He takes us to corner in the yard and says; “that’s a grave of my child. I buried the child there”- and then Zim continued to tell me how we was going to bury me when I to die. The thing is that he spoke about death and life in the same reverence and interchangeably. I was disturbed only because in our psychological and emotional make ups we are trained to separate, we don’t live unified existences. We fear and deny death and hence we can’t live life to its fullest. Zim understood at a deep level the need to overcome this fear. In fact he advised that “we must go to death with energy”. He frowned upon the idea of dying from old age an invalid!

2. Transcendence: there is away in which transcendence is avoidance! I meditate myself out of seeing the ugly reality of life and even participate in the creation of this ugly life. The idea of a slave and the slave master meditating together to find transcendental peace whilst the institution of slavery remains! This is the new age notion of transcendence promoted by the likes of Oprah. It’s the new opium of the masses!

Zim’s notion of transcendence forces us to see better and to be ethical in our life through fighting injustice. The idea of loving the self and moving towards silence and selfness is based on this notion of transcendence. Zim made it clear that he sings with a sword in his hand! Zim transcended all narrow and backward identities including so called xhosa identity and the love for place of birth etc. Here we are talking about a search for higher and purer form of existence to realize a universalism. But this universalism must not be mistaken with all the kind of universalisms that included all and it therefore unethical. Universalism in this case must be understood more as a Zizekian notion which insist on the primacy of justice as the embodiment of the universal. Therefore, not all and everything is welcomed in his universal invitation. The unethical, the oppressors, the backward etc would certainly not be part of this meditation.

I think Nina Simone’s “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free”, illustrates better the first instance of transcendence, the search for seeing better and clearer:

Well I wish I could be
Like a bird in the sky
How sweet it would be
If I found I could fly
Oh I’d’d soar to the sun
And look down at the sea
Than I’d sing cos I know – yea
Then I’d sing cos I know – yea
Then I’d sing cos I know
I’d’d know how it feels”

This Transcendence allows Zim to make the risky kind of music he made, but more importantly to be able to pose the Question! We are fated to recreating ourselves, here Zimology, meets existentialism and Black Consciousness. Zim was able to ask “What is Africa?”, I heard him say “I have no culture, no tradition, no religion”- here we are dealing with what Fanon called “the absolute intensity of the new beginning”. Many wouldn’t know but Zim went beyond his xhosaness and qula! The power to pose the question makes also totally responsible for our lives! We can chose slavery or liberty!

3. Refusal to Compromise with Betrayal

Africa is what is it because we have are too happy to accommodate betrayal. Think about the film makers that go Burkina Faso and shake the bloody hand of the man who killed Thomas Sankara! Zim didn’t forget, forgive or accommodate his enemies and those who betrayed him. SA is founded on betrayal! This country betrayed Chris Hani, Sobukwe, Biko, Abram Tiro. We accepted the betrayal of mandela and Desmond Tutu – Reconciliation without justice – what is more disturbing is that we celebrate Betrayal! This is a key principle of Zimology I would would like to highlight- refusal to accommodate betrayal! We are a people who are afraid to say Africa has enemies, we have enemies! We want the peace of the betrayed and we wonder why Africa is what it is!

A short conclusion

There are two ways to celebrate a master. To either reject the master completely or to re-read the master in new ways! Because we can’t be the master and there is only one master! but there are parameters of any philosophy or a way of being in the world. Zimology needs to be made more explicit and this will be a labour of contest and uncompromising creativity and imagination

I return to death! I have had a very negative relationship with the idea of my death. For a long time it has been the one thing that tormented me more than most. But through Zim’s death and how he has prepared us for it, I have come to terms with my own mortality and i’m at total peace with it. I can only truly understand Biko and his notion of death as possible renewal for rebellion through Zimology.

Enkosi Zim for Zimology!

kyle shepherd will be performing

lefifi tladi will read poetry

organised by wadada

andile mngxitama will speak

I was stunned when I learned that Zim Ngqawana, South African jazz musician extraordinaire, passed away a few days ago, on May 10, 2011. Sometimes with musicians, a death can be especially joltng, because somehow we expect the music to always be there, evolving into something that will grow even better with age, like a fine Cabernet. Judging by news reports in the South African media, many South Africans are also deeply saddened to lose their beloved 52 year-old jazz “genius.” Perhaps now people will appreciate Zim Ngqawana more like a national treasure, a standard bearer of South Africa’s fabulous jazz tradition. To experience Zim Ngqawana live on stage was to witness dazzling talent and exuberance, delivered in a captivating spectrum of arrangements and compositions. Zim would masterfully jump between the flute, saxophone, harmonica, piano and vocals, always with a great ensemble of musicians blending seamlessly with his unique stage presence.

I remember Zim telling me that his musical journey was touched off by a small harmonica his father gave him in a Christmas stocking when he was 4. Zim told me that he had a very strong relationship with his father, who taught him through the best of African oral tradition; on his album sleeves and bios Zim would simply say that he was taught the age-old wisdom of Ubuntu. Zim found it very perplexing and distressing that some people were earning masters’ degrees and PhDs by doing dissertations on Ubuntu. He felt that making Ubuntu into an academic subject was an aberration and misrepresented the intuitive understanding that comes from centuries of African tradition.

Zim was a great composer and performer; but through all the year’s I’d known him Zim’s passion was to teach and expound upon South African music to as many earnest students as he could find. He envisioned a new generation of artists that would be multi-instrumentalists like himself, each with their own musical proclivities, but all being taught music theory and piano as a foundation. He wanted to create a musical pedagogy, instead of expecting young people to pick up individual instruments and learn music on their own. Building his audience and touring throughout Africa, Europe and the United States, Zim realized his dream by eventually buying a farm outside of Johannesburg and establishing his Zimology Institute where he trained talented artists. But criminals broke into his farm in December of last year, and besides stealing personal possessions, they vandalized Zim’s studio equipment and broke the piano legs to his two prize grand pianos.

“This was an attempt to break us. I was demoralized see the grand pianos worth half a million lying flat on the ground,” Zim said. “The souls of the people have been vandalized. What kind of criminal doesn’t know the value of a piano?”

The spiteful thieves who broke Zim’s pianos, broke his heart and his dream. Beyond anything material, the grand pianos and the Zimology Institute were part of Zim’s passion to transmit and preserve the beauty of South African jazz for future generations. Zim may never have fully recovered from this transgression, this deep wound – it was like an attack on his soul and the goodness he was trying to create in the world.

With Zim gone, we have to find more fundis and griots to purvey the oral wisdom and human imagination that our world so desperately needs. Zim always believed that his music was medicine, his music was a kind of healing balm. Zim’s 1999 album, was called Ingoma. The Zulu and Xhosa word for song is “ingoma,” which also means “medicine;” a “sangoma” is a traditional healer or medicine man. African languages have many words with multiple integrated intuitive meanings like that. Zim understood that he was a shaman, and his intention was to teach and share in a broad vision for the future. His music will always be with us, but it seems his dream has been mortally denigrated by the banality of jealousy, envy and greed. Hamba kakuhle, my dear bra Zim! Sizabonana kwakhona, umhlobo wam. Kwahkhona.

first published here: http://islandofspice.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/hello-world/

SAXOPHONIST Zim Ngqawana, who died two weeks ago and whose memorial service takes place this Friday afternoon at the Wits Great Hall, was one of the few creative, original South African jazz players to take on the illogical South African Music Award system and win. So it’s gratifying that amid the chaos, pretentiousness and inanity of last Saturday’s ceremony at Montecasino in Joburg’s northern suburbs, the jazz winners, at least, both represent genuine creativity.

Major labels received a long-deserved rebuke for their conservative commissioning policies; both the winners were independent productions distributed by the champion of new South African jazz, Jassics. Singer Tutu Puoane’s warm, polished album well deserves Best Traditional Jazz Album award — although, given the outstanding strength of this year’s list, it’s a pity there could be only one winner. And University of Cape Town-based newcomers Ological Studies, winners of the Best Contemporary Jazz accolade (again, from a very powerful list), show how strongly the ideas informing Ngqawana’s work have infused the approach of many younger players.

For Ngqawana served, in many ways, as a bridge between the innovative modern jazz scene that flourished in SA before the end of apartheid, and the one we hear today.

As he noted in an interview: “Port Elizabeth musicians had a philosophy that they had to organise themselves and create music without it being commercialised…. They had a very significant way of teaching us. They would give you a nickname: mine was Ornette. I didn’t know who Ornette Coleman was, so I had to go and find out … meaning you had to go and research and teach yourself.”

Ngqawana took the legacy of that informal but rigorous training with him to the University of Natal, Durban and later to the US, where he attended classes led by Art Blakey and Archie Shepp.

Later, he took his own units on tour in both the US and Europe. Out of this restless exploration he created a music that drew on both the legacies of bebop and the western avant-garde, and Xhosa tradition, brought together most powerfully in his best-known track Qula Kwedini: “Xhosa tradition? I’m still studying it,” he said “and I always feel as if I am just scratching the surface.”

Ngqawana proved it was possible to make searching, challenging modern jazz drawing on cultural roots and still find a following — audiences sought his music out, though neither promoters nor record labels made it easy to find.

That lesson has stayed with younger bands seeking integrity before commercial success. And he went back to the classroom, setting up the Zimology Institute — tragically vandalised last year — to introduce jazz education that was both accessible and iconoclastic: “Our playing should be informed by history. We should not be afraid to say that the revolution is not over, and refining our music is part of that revolution.” Hamba kahle to a unique spirit.

first published here: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=143783

Given the number of excellent pieces published in the wake of Zim Ngqawana’s recent tragically untimely death, this was always going to seem too little too late. I didn’t know him, though I met him a couple of times, and didn’t quite get around to interviewing him. It was something I intended to do, and there were a couple of failed attempts to do so for my radio show a few years ago. Zim was willing, but the timing was never quite right and then, suddenly, there was no more radio show. And now, even more suddenly, there’s no more Zim. As someone once said, regrets … I’ve had a few. Reading, over the past week or so, some of the interviews he did give, that might end up being one of them. All of which makes me especially glad that we have Vadzimu, his fifth and last substantive album for Sheer Sound, released in 2003, to remind us, not quite exactly, but about as closely as the artificiality of a recording studio can get, precisely what we’ve lost.

Vadzimu is a Shona word, despite Zim’s Xhosa origins but reflecting the universality of his approach, designating the family spirits, and the album, which is divided into four thematically linked suites, entitled Satire, Diaspora, Liberation Suite and Nocturnes, appears, more than usual, to be something of a personal manifesto, even for an artist whose music was always as much a mirror of and even a vehicle for his very being as Zim’s was. Of course, many artists will make that claim for much of their work, but in this case it really does feel like it’s specifically designed that way.

Satire deals with the musician’s own South African musical roots, perhaps as much from the perspective of an outsider as from any internal expression of reality. Umthakathi, raw and raucous and characterised by shouting, whistling and traditional drumming, segues into the gorgeous ballad, Kubi, where the expressiveness of Zim’s singing more than adequately compensates for any vocal limitations he may have had. He plays all the saxes on the record, from baritone to soprano, in a line that takes in Coltrane and Dolphy, Sanders and Shepp, Moeketsi and Pukwana and even Albert Ayler, and his soprano solo on Kubi is especially striking. The suite closes with Amagoduka Part 3, a tribute to migrant workers. Its head melody’s folkishness might be emphasised by Zim’s rudimentary harmonica playing, but Andile Yenana’s solo is the perfect encapsulation of the marabi to Monk method of many of the best South African pianists.

Diaspora ranges as widely as its title and seems to trace a lament of Eastern European Jews on their way to a New Orleans funeral via Cuba and the Middle East, yet everything fits beautifully and leads logically into Abdullah Ibrahim’s joyous Tafelberg/Carnival Samba medley, the introspective Unamaqhinga Na, a tone poem for Zim’s voice and brilliant flute extemporisation, and Anthem, a more personal investigation of Nkosi Sikele’ iAfrika’s musical and emotional possibilities than the one once so memorably essayed by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. More hymnlike than anthemic, and more hymnlike than Haden’s, its various moods tell the struggle story as well as any conventional history could.

The last section, consisting of three solo piano studies played by Zim himself, follows the title track’s cathartic atonal block chording with the quiet, spiritually content Thula Sizwe in a summary of the album’s demonstration of how, in the right hands, folk music and the avant-garde are simply two sides of the same coin. Vadzimu won the award for Best Traditional Jazz Album, whatever that may mean, at the South African Music Awards. Although the recognition is important, its categorisation hopelessly misunderstands the truly visionary nature of what Ngqawana achieved.

first published in the business day of 23 may 2011

grand master

it’s been a long time since i have interacted with you but sir this time is a very painful hour to write so late to you . i’m trying to gather some words to express my feelings for this past nine days of total shock .it even becomes more painful when that pain is caused by the passing of a person of zim calibre .

isithonga sokuwa kweligorha lezongqungqo liwothusile umzi kakhulu.kwaye eyona nto indixhalabisa ngakumbi kukuba lombele umpompoza lengqaka uye usoma .i’m talking of ezra & duke , mankunku , robbie, hotep & the line is long . but the passing of zim is a direct loss to the world of arts entirely as the man was beginning to be a phenomenon in his field with his experimental music . i remember meeting herbie (bassist) at pass festival last year and as we were chatting i mentioned zim and herbie told me honestly that zim has moved far far ahead & it is even difficult for him to catch up with the man . he also mentioned his intense spiritual convictions

i regard myself as the fortunate one because on the 29.03.03 when i last saw him he left me with these wise words & i quote him ” ELVIS . TRUTH LIES IN DREAMS’ unquote . those words i guess is the one that make me still exist . those words carry hope & positivity , they carry life . i think it should be fair enough for me to say on 29.03.03 zimasile ngqawana gave me reason to live , he gave me life

ndlelantle kwedini lent’ukufa ligwala kakade . death shall die