Kudzanai Chiurai and Tumi Mogorosi breathe new life into jazz classics

The end of September saw an important one-off event at the Constitution Hill complex, as a highlight of the programming for The Demonstration. This was a series of events and art interventions under the auspices of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, tackling the vexed question of race and representation.

Artist Kudzanai Chiurai and drummer Tumi Mogorosi were the leading lights of a film and jazz performance collaboration that took as its fascinating starting point the seminal album from 1960 by legendary drummer Max Roach, We Insist! At the time both lauded and controversial, Roach’s album was explicitly a protest album against white racism and in support of the American civil rights movement. Intriguingly, the original album widens its purview, taking in themes of black liberation further afield, especially in post-independence Africa. It concludes with the standout track Tears for Johannesburg, an excoriating lament for those killed in the Sharpeville Massacre.

The Freedom Now Suite band did not disappoint. Mogorosi led the improvisational passages, mostly avoiding any locked-in grooves in favour of complex polyrhythms accented by the counterpoints of Dalisu Ndlazi’s upright bass playing. Rhythms from Gontse Makhene’s percussion drove the tracks forward, leaving the lead to the all-star horn section of Ofentse Sebula on the tenor sax (played on the original recording by the legendary Coleman Hawkins), Ndabo Zulu on trumpet and Malcolm Jiyane on trombone.

The latter had a whale of a time decrying the oppressors with some improvised vocals on the closer, Tears for Johannesburg. Out in front of all that musical talent was the amazing vocal range and interpretive skill of Gabi Motuba, providing genuine depth and drama to the edginess of the protest music. She was ably abetted by DJ Kenzhero, adding a contemporary touch to this new rendition of Roach’s work with his turntablism, dropping samples and scratching to great effect.

Inevitably the focus of visual attention for the collaboration is Chiurai’s fllm, separately titled We Live in Silence. Split into seven chapters, the film takes its own route into the same questions and protests against racism and colonialism posed by the updated jazz suite. Chiurai’s signature hi-definition slow-motion zooms and pans are in evidence, as is his use of characters in tableaux, but there is also liberal use of found historical footage. The key intervention is the use of an interview from the 1950s with Miriam Makeba, speaking on the travails of being a touring musician and black activist dealing with segregation, apartheid and widespread racism.

Makeba, of course, had personal experience of the impact of postcolonial racist oppression in both SA and in the USA, where she mixed in radical civil-rights circles. Chiurai carefully edits these intros to each section of the film. At the end of each snippet of Makeba’s interview, she abruptly but also wistfully looks off-screen, away from the gaze of the out-of-shot interviewer, seeking solidarity and support for her condemnation of the widespread racism she had experienced. The film is full of the counterpoints between seductive set pieces and shocking revelations of violence that we have come to expect from Chiurai. One misstep for me is the staged interview scene laying out the terms of white monopoly capitalism in the postcolonial world. The artist is rarely doctrinaire, and the didacticism in the scene, while perhaps necessary, is nonetheless jarring.

He is far more effective in the closing stanza, where a Last Supper tableau is focused on a still, stately figure at the centre of a long banquet table, flanked by slow-mo revellers laughing and pouring wine. The exquisitely slow zoom out reveals a chaotic and violent mob scene, foregrounded by an upended and burning vehicle, as the frenetic version of The Freedom Now Suite’s version of Tears for Johannesburg boils in the background.

The experience as a whole is an amazing counterpoint to Kentridge’s film Oh to believe in another world, also seen recently in Joburg as a companion piece to Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony. Both these incisive and challenging multimedia productions provide us with a template for art engaging urgently and critically with the now by respecting and rejuvenating the past.