John Jazz Wri- Sounds like ting for Drum Mag 195 azine -1957 , |azz up as a quintessential^ American art form, one Sounds Like i) Jli:corollar is" that man y of y thi peopl s assertio e out n- neither to the canons of English d*corumnof -t dtribal ethnicities. Looking back over the past half-century, it is hard to the 'jazz cadence' of the urban *A f i culture that has endwredas a e rhythms - of jazz.' Few national settings demonstrated iis with greater clarity than South Africa in the middle of the .^ As the cultural ferTOS^M^95^#b^s ^^^W^W^s^^2 TheliteKMwr^iQyrOQ^S^'1?^ and music passed down from the townships of tf«e=p?fc- ^ early apartheid eras are saturated with American refete^1 quotations and allusions. When the first film % 'nqjjyes' was premiered in 1949, onto the silver screen in the persona alocally enlisted big band and singing about "Jo' #Wffi?Łr#e do™^rtW^'W9Hy%!ytoh (^)lden Crty"to the tune of Salt Lake City Bh&* ^^ayi^0fldPp^e^r%e^5fe!y was i n v ° ^ in the names o i . f ^ J ^ ^ l c ^ P ^ ^ expanding urban middle and working classes, looked to 9fP«pslike the Harlem Swingsters or the Manhattan ffcothefiN °nd then there were figures li Photographs taken from Drum magazine 1962 SEtETSES CHILDREN 6«0W UP FINE! • GOtOEN NOIR MZZ HOT COOl' ;ang Ella Fitzgerald's numbers but also styled her hair in the ;ame manner, and whose fans called her "onse Ella" Afrikaans for 'our Ella'). Jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela re- :alls referring to his idol, Louis Armstrong, in a vernacular 3rm of endearment that somewhat reverently connotes both a ;pecifically African respect for elders and a conjectured intimacy: And guys like Louis Armstrong we referred, you know, :e affectionately, as the Old Man, die topi, you know. We ever said Satch, always said die topi, the Old Man. And Ice we talked about this and that like we knew them altost. 4 Rich local reframings of American (or, more accurately, vfrican-American) culture like these resonate in numerous mecdotes, images and quotations bequeathed to history by 1950s, many of which were famously memorialized in the ages of the landmark pictorial and literary South African iblication first published in March 1951 as The African Drum. ifter a somewhat faltering start, Drum went on to be pub- <16 Drum magazine, cover pages. lished, in regional editions, in much of anglophone West Central, and East Africa, lending credence to its publishers claims to being "Africa's leading magazine". Since its demise as an independent publication in the mid-1960s, the magazine has been the object of extensive literary and scholarly commentary. It has also provided music scholars with a notable source of primary historical material, coming to inform significant portions of existing accounts of black South Afri can music of the mid-twentieth century. What I will highligh here is something that remains implicit in the extant literature. Drum's status as perhaps the major progenitor of music historiography pertaining to jazz in South and Southern Africa, most notably in a series of interviews, reminiscences, and historical pieces written for the magazine by Todd Matshikiza during the course of the 1950s.5 A gifted musician and writer who, in former Drum editor Anthony Sampson's words, "thought and spoke in jazz and exclamation marks," Matshikiza was a figure who would not only significantly reshape musical coverage in the fledging nagazine, but would himself become a major protagonist of he developments about which he wrote. As a musician and composer, he is perhaps best known for his role in writing the nusic for the musical King Kong, which broke new ground for South African theater in the late '50s, running on London's West End and on Broadway. As a literary figure, Matshikiza las received relatively little attention from historians and critics who have examined the work of the so-called Drum writers, where the tendency has been to emphasize the short fiction Dublished in the magazine, hereby overlooking his numerous Feature and review articles (his novel, Chocolates For My Wife, was published in London inl961). Between joining the Dermanent staff of Drum in 1951 and 1957, Matshikiza dominated coverage of music on the magazine's pages, eaving a body of historical information that is not only empirically valuable in providing extensive information aertaining to South African jazz musicians, but illustrative of ivhat one might term the cultural reconstruction of jazz in the "nilieu about and for which he wrote. Matshikiza's writing, aoth in its content and in the inimitable style which his news- •oom colleagues dubbed Matshikese, illustrates an interpenstration of journalistic reportage and interpretive elaboration hat can be regarded as emblematic of the emergence of the South African jazz tradition at large. On the pages of Drum, Matshikiza positioned jazz both as a means of transcending Nfrican ethnic particularity, and as a means of reclaiming it; 3S a multivalent marker of both American-derived cosmopolitanism and as a reincarnation of African tradition. The Concert and Dance Despite South Africa's marginal position on the rim of vhat is currently labeled (to invoke Paul Gilroy's term) as the Slack Atlantic, people of color in the United States and South ^frica have in many respects faced comparable social, political and economic predicaments.6 Given these parallels, over and above a common African ancestry, it is hardly surprising hat the cultural expressions of Black Americans should have 'esonated with audiences in Southern Africa. Jazz was by no means the first American musical form to have acquired an enthusiastic local following in the region/ Some mission-educated Africans tended, at least initially, to weigh jazz unfavorably against the purportedly elevating effects of perorming Western classical music and Christian choral music [the latter including concert versions of Negro spirituals made Popular by touring minstrel troupes). Thus, in the published opinion of R.R.R. Dhlomo, one of South Africa's earliest black iterary commentators, European concert music offered "sooth- "9 and inspiring effects," which could "tone" and "moduate" the "natural impulse of the young," jazz, by contrast, "as inseparable from "suggestive movements and passionate expressions." Moreover, the consideration that jazz reached African shores as a mass-mediated, recorded commodity seems to have led to some uncertainties about the music' social origins. This is borne out in the words of one columnis in the black South African newspaper, llanga Lase Nata who noted, with reference to the influence of jazz on blac youth: "One of our best Native brains has said, 'Let us cop from the whiteman [sic] only that which is good', but it appears we are also entangling ourselves with his vices."8 Early reservations towards jazz such as these graduall' gave way to greater acceptance, though not without this be ing rationalized, as Christopher Ballantine has pointed out with the argument that, as the swing era dawned in the mid- 1930s, it was the music that had changed. Nevertheless, the 1930s and '40s saw the consolidation of a social institution that was central to the establishment of a jazz scene in South Africa: the so-called "Concert and Dance" parties that took place in venues ranging from ramshackle township halls to fashionable centers such as Johannesburg's Bantu Men's Social Center or the Ritz Palais de Dance. Typically beginning with vaudeville entertainment which ran from 8 p.m. until midnight, followed immediately by a dance, the Concert ana Dance was directly shaped by restrictions on the movements of urban black South Africans, since the structure of events exactly mirrored the curfew hours during which blacks were not permitted to be on the streets. Transforming these restrictions into an opportunity for recreation and social affirmation, these parties served, in Ballantine's formulation, as a crucible in which a black South African jazz tradition, modeled on American culture, emerged in a symbiotic relationship with both locally and internationally oriented theatrical idioms.9 The first feature article that Todd Matshikiza wrote for the December 1951 edition of Drum, titled 'Twenty Years of Jazz,' enables one to date these developments with considerable precision. In a four-column piece printed along with a large photograph of himself at the piano, Matshikiza traces local experimentation with jazz-like idioms back to 1928 and dates the appearance of 'the first African jazz band' in Johannesburg's music halls and fashionable circles to 1931.10 The article also illuminates several important features of the local jazz tradition as it had taken shape in the decades leading up to the 1950s. To begin with, it cites the role of commercial recordings not only as a means of disseminating imported music but as a surrogate means of apprenticeship for musicians: The gramophone had made its debut and patterns of American Jazz music were available on record. We find at this time African musicians fiddling away at their squeaky violins or blowing their guts out on an ancient slide trombone in pursuit of the new style of dance music from America. Note that Matshikiza is explicit here about jazz cominc "from America," and that he makes no reference to the mu- ic's Negro patrimony; this is a distinction that goes unmentioned in the entire article, though it probably is asumed. 11 But whatever the position of jazz music in the culural inventories of black South Africans, there is little queson in Matshikiza's account that elements of the imported music were readily assimilable to indigenous aesthetic sensibilities: By this time, Jazz music had already won its way into he hearts of the African people. It was a new art and a new orm possessing the rhythmic characteristics of traditional Afcan music and plenty of excitement. Jazz is, then, identified here as an American music with African elements discernible in it, and it is not necessary to sk essentializing these elements by uncovering alleged Afri- :an stylistic retentions in American jazz to make the case that |the music resonated deeply in cultural and historical terms in outh Africa.12 In the circles in which the Merry Blackbirds and their vals played, Matshikiza continues, the music's status as an mport definitely afforded it upscale connotations: They played the 'sweet' song-style jazz that dominated opular music in America in the early 'twenties. They were 18 South Africa's Jazz Epistles Rrom left, Jonas Gwangwa, Hugh Masekela and Kippie Moeket si entertaining selective audiences and the fashionable circles were dancing to their imported tunes. It was the vogue. There was potentially a contradiction, of course, in middle- class Africans signaling their desire for cultural and civic autonomy by mimicking an imported musical culture. This consideration was not lost on local black commentators, particularly as political prospects for urban blacks deteriorated through the 1950s.13 There was, consequently, a political incentive for black South Africans to seek if not an alternative to jazz, then at least a way of grounding it more closely in African musical values and practices. And as has recurrently been the case in the U.S., middle-class socialites found this in the cultural expressions of the working classes with whom they lived cheek by jowl in South Africa's racially segregated urban areas. Marabi Culture and its Influence on the Emergence of South African Jazz In the light of the political ambivalences following the strongly American identity of jazz music in 1950s South Af- •ica, it is significant that Matshikiza chose to begin his account of "Twenty Years of Jazz" notwith references to the Merry Blackbirds playing at upscale venues but to a musician associated with Johannesburg's slumyard low life. The piece opens with the following personal recollection: Looking back on the progress of Jazz Music among the tfrican People of South Africa, I am reminded of my first little Decca model gramophone from which issued the strains of a W/o-step dance tune of those days - a fune with the strangely quaint title of U-Tebejana ufana ne-Mfene (Tebejana resembles a baboon). Tebejana is the name of the man who composed what was perhaps the very first African dance tune ifter the idiom of American Jazz. He lived in a suburb of Johannesburg called Prospect Township, a place which was 3 typical outgrowth of a large city like Johannesburg. He, uith other pioneers like him, has since sunk into oblivion, hut the music that they composed then and entertained the zrowds with has remained with us since the days of Marabi n the early 'twenties. In grounding his account of jazz in South Africa in ebejana's marabi music of the 1920s, Matshikiza is making explicit a very different vernacular line of influence from repreented by bands who modeled their uptown performances on 'Wierican recordings. He, here, offers what in retrospect is Dneofthe earliest and most authoritative definitions of a prooundly influential neo-traditional urban African style of muic that effectively constituted 'the prehistory of South African azz.'14 Matshikiza emphasizes several defining features of he music: 'Marabi' is the name given to the 'hot,' highly rhythnic repetitive single-themed dance tunes of the late 'twenies. The tunes were largely the illiterate improvisations of he musicians of the day. 'Marabi' is also the name of an ipoch. A period when a variety of spontaneous music and accentuated rhythms were sweeping the African entertainvent world like wild fire, and everybody was singing and dancing to a type of Jazz that flourished in the 'dives' and iof so 'classy' places - the not-so-posh entertainment houses md private parties. The significance of the appellation 'jazz' to refer to this ic cannot, I think, be over-emphasized, for it points towards American jazz coming to be understood as being akin o, or even serving as an umbrella term for, neo-traditional ^frican musical practices that could be related to it indirectly, at all. Much like legendary figures of New Orleans jazz, like Buddy Bolden, who lie just below the horizon of historical jocumentation, the musical styles associated with marabi were, s Ballantine has noted, never recorded in their original form, ]°r described in anything but the most cursory manner, ^atshikiza's accounts of marabi are therefore doubly signifiant. They enable us to see that in the creative imaginations '' black working- and middle-class South African musicians, jazz offered a way of emulating and absorbing imported Amen can influences while simultaneously accessing a wide varie of indigenous musical material. This process of musical synthesis is hardly surprising whe one considers the social context in which marabi emerged. A the discovery of diamonds and gold accelerated industrial zation and cities sprang up virtually overnight, the majority o African workers were obliged to live under deficient, racial segregated conditions. Despite chronic overcrowding, lack o services, and exorbitant rents, most urban Africans preferre (as a sociological study of 1948 reported) to stay in what wer known as the slumyards close to town, rather than in the municipal housing provided at some distance from the centers. Commentators have argued that lack of official su pervision in the slumyards gave the people who lived there who came from a wide variety of backgrounds in Southerr and even Central Africa, an opportunity to adapt socially anc culturally to the urban environment with some degree of au tonomy. Equally important, under regulations which largely proscribed black economic enterprise, the slumyards were th center of what was the most significant local home industry the illicit preparation and sale of beer and liquor. Anthropologists and historians have long recognized tha' beer is not only a food but an economic and social currency among many indigenous African peoples, and that it is usec to thank, reward, reconcile, ritually cleanse, honor, entertain and generally bind people together.15 These traditional mode: of sociability offered a means of maintaining a sense of socia cohesion in urban centers, where official tendencies to pathologize and suppress the so-called liquor trade became a leitmotiv of municipal administration. Given the absence o legal recreational facilities where alcohol could be consumed private rooms were turned into public drinking houses or speakeasies called shebeens, typically presided over by a female hostess, whose social and material status soon came to be represented in the slumyard persona of the so-called 'shebeer queen'.'6 The preparation of beer was, moreover, a genderec African tradition; custom prescribed that women should brew it for their husbands, and this was expected from those relatively few wives who were able to accompany their spouses tc the cities, regardless of legal prohibition. In the urban contexts in which many women found themselves, performing this role for strangers in the context of a cash economy offeree one of the few avenues for financial independence and advancement. Matshikiza offers an evocative and informative description of a marabi performance in the first of a series of articles written for Drum in 1957 on "our Jazz and the Black star; who make it." He attempts here to provide a broader contex for the developments which he had traced in "Twenty Years o Jazz" six years previously, and the piece also enables one to trace his development as a writer, both in the themes which h chooses to emphasize, and in aspects of his style. Making an mportant point about the extension of South Africa's fledging jazz culture beyond the urban centers with which it is srimarily associated, Matshikiza begins this narrative away from Johannesburg in his home town of Queenstown in the Eastern Cape, a provincial center that exemplified the increasng interpenetration of urban and rural worlds, and whose conflicting cultural currents were embodied in the person of a ocal 'jazz organist' named Boet [Brother] Gashe. It is worth quoting Matshikiza's description of Gashe's playing at some iength, not only for the additional information which it provides about the performance of marabi (or Tswari as it is called here; a creolization of "soiree"), but also because it conveys, from a middle-class child's perspective, the sense of forbidden fascination with the milieu with which the music was associated: "He was the only jazz organist. No pianos in those days. His organ was carted on a donkey truck from house to house, and wherever it moved, the people went. Queenstown was happily situated for Gashe because every train bearing miners ('mine boys' in South African English) between the Eastern Cape and Johannesburg stopped there overnight. And the miners' veins were full with jazz, as they were with women, and they got both at Gashe's sessions. We looked upon the women Handjievol ['little handfuil'], Nomadabi, Annatjie, \lodoli [Dolly] and others with awe. Us kids knew those women's names weren't clean, though we never knew why. But we cnew they were the women that danced where Gashe played. Gashe's dances were called 'I-Tswari' where you paid 3d. at the door and entered into a dingy, stuffy room where the dust from the dancers' feet smothered the solitary paraffin lamp which flickered in the shadows of dancing partners who could nardly see or didn't know each other. The hostess hunched next to a four-gallon tin of beer in the corner. She sold jam tins full at 6d. a gulp and held her hand open for another 1 s. f the client wanted to go into the room behind the curtain. 3ut actually one saw nothing in that dust. Not even Gashe, who was bent over his organ in one corner, thumping the rhythm from the pedals with his feet, which were also feeding the organ with air; choking the organ with persistent chords n the right hand, and improvising for an effective melody with his left hand. He would call in the aid of a matchstick to iold down a harmony note, usually the tonic (doh) or the dominant (soh), both of which persist in African music, and you get a delirious effect of perpetual motion. Perpetual moion. Perpetual motion in a musty hole where a man makes friends without restraint. There Gashe plays 'I-Tswari' - a music consisting of three chords repeating themselves infinitely over our, five or six hours each night, punctuated only by murmurs and groans of deep satisfaction. Paragraphed only when 3ashe stops for a draught of beer, which is part of his pay. n the morning, the men have pawned their papers, passes <20> and purses. But they've had their fun, and the women too. And Gashe trucks his organ to the next 'Tswari.'17" Writing Jazz The association between marabi/jazz, liquor, and sex ("the miners' veins were full with jazz, as they were with women") had, by 1957, become a pervasive feature of Matshikiza'sl writing iorDrum. This was, however, by no means exceptional! by the standards of his colleagues, nor is it, of course, a departure from representations of jazz music in American filmj and other entertainment industries. This raises a set of ques-; tions concerning not only the gender and sexual politics of Drum magazine but also, I would suggest, its racial politics. Several commentators have discussed the objectification of women in Drum's covers, photo features, and advertisements; the absence of women writers from its staff; and the sexism, sometimes bordering on misogyny, of some of its content.18 These elements, doubtless, illustrate the strain under which rural patriarchal values came among black city dwellers, prompting a far-reaching renegotiation of traditional gende roles and relations, which the magazine both reflected anc symptomized. But I would venture a consideration more spe cific to internal relations among the editorial staff: that sharec patriarchal assumptions may have offered a means of male bonding across racial lines between the magazine's white edi tors and its largely black cadre of writers. Whether one accepts this interpretation or not, there i little doubt that jazz emerged in South Africa as a gendered discourse and Matshikiza's writing amply illustrates this. On the one hand his fascination, in the description of Gashe' playing quoted above, with those aspects of marabi culture that took place "if the client wanted to go into the room behind the curtain" had long been a feature of middle-class representations of working-class jazz culture in South Africa (as they had, of course, been in the United States and numerous other settings). Beyond the mere prurient association of marabi/jazz with sexual license, one can discern some anxi ety in his writing about the emergence around shebeens of modes of female autonomy unfettered by the canons of do mestic propriety. In another striking characterization of marab which sardonically references Johannesburg's status as a 'Golden City,' he observes: Marabi. Tsaba-tsaba [another early South African jazz style]. Dark days when partners didn't dance cheek to cheek or nose to nose. That was too tame. The girl danced b herself. Wild, furious. Agitated. Shaking. Foaming. Sick. An nouncing the modern age and golden pavements. To he with home and shame!'9 Alongside such ambivalence, jazz articulates and au thorizes a certain sexual playfulness in much of Matshikiza' writing. This highlights the extent to which both local and American styles of jazz were closely associated with modern urban courtship rituals and the renegotiation of sexual norms: Don't let this picture fool you. It is the sombre, dolorous and docile portrait of a lively living bubbling brook of a hep [sic] cat, Mabel Mafuya. The Jazzingest twenty-four-inch waist I've seen in a recording studio. And what can you get in a wiggly waggly twenty-four inch waist that heps and jives and dashes behind [a] partition to rehearse the next verse in the middle of the recording session? Lots. You get herTroubador AFC 353 that paints the grim grime of a miner's life in jumping tones.20 The argument could be made that the exaggerated sexuality of Matshikiza's female subjects has a tongue-in-cheek quality about it, becoming another ironic Americanism that quotes and plays on existing mass-mediated representations of jazz even as it reproduces them. Parodying the language of American entertainment is undeniably a feature of Matshikiza's style, as illustrated in the following interview, where some slippage in the exact linguistic register being imitated seems evident as the dialog proceeds: Then said Louisa Emanuel to Isaac Peterson, "Will you be my turtle dove, or not?" Isaac replied (in the English used in Show biznes [sic]), "No I ain't no turtle an' I ain't no durv. So I cain't be yo' turtle-durve." Louisa said, "I'm looking for a man to sing with me. He must coo as I purr. Coat as I fur. In other words, his voice must match mine." Says Isaac, "Baby I'se got ze voice. Dunno if I'se got ze figure anyhow." That's how this partnership started.2' But whatever one's assessment of the role that jazz plays in sexualizing Matshikiza's journalism (and vice-versa), it would be a mistake to leave one's analysis of jazz elements in his work at that. An equally significant feature of his mannerist writing can be seen (or, rather, heard) to follow from a selfconscious attempt to musicalize his prose. Here is one example among many: There's a big surprise in the mixed "bag" of hits that Dotty came especially from Bulawayo to do for the Troubadour label. This "yippity - woo - biddy-hi-de-ho" crooning lass cast off her intimate night club style for /wo discs, to do ... hymns. It's always a pleasant shocker to hear a jazz voice doing the most modest pious Sunday morning fare and giving it a bang.22 Matshikiza's musical writing is not limited to onomatopoeic effects. His evident intention to write rhythmically has already been illustrated in his description of Boet Gashe's playing above, where "you get a delirious effect of perpetual motion. Perpetual motion. Perpetual motion in a musty hole where a man makes friends without restraint." Notice the more abrupt, call-and-response patterns of rhythm and rhyme in a piece titled "What They Say About Tandil," where the opening interaction between interviewer and interviewee could be compared with trading fours, and then twos, in jazz: / said to Tandi, "Where you born, Sister?" She saia "Turffontein Mister." I said, "You're cute." She said, "Shoot. This is what I shot out of her. She's the biggest, heppest, anc jivest of a family of nine.23 Writing such as this is recurrently interwoven with Matshikiza's journalistic documentation of South Africa's nascent jazz culture, adding an element of swing not only to Drum's music features but to the magazine as a whole. Conclusion With the aid of Todd Matshikiza and a few other South African commentators, I have attempted to trace the contours of the distinct jazz culture that had emerged in South Africa by the time that Matshikiza was writing for Drum in the 1950s. Narratives and visual images associated with music can sometimes obscure the complex origins of syncretic expressive practices, but a strong sense of the multi-stranded heritage ol South African jazz emerges from Matshikiza's journalistic sketches. On one hand, he acknowledges the American ancestry of the music (the African-American patrimony of which is teasingly, perhaps vexingly, left implicit), while, on the other, he highlights the articulation of imported styles to a range of urban black South African musics that themselves drew upon and melded together a variety of traditional African elements. By the time that Matshikiza's pieces were appearing in Drum, these various lines of influence were becoming increasingly indistinguishable; orchestras like Peter Rezant's Merry Blackbirds were playing big band arrangements of marabi tunes, and township schoolboys were playing Ellingtonesque arrangements of American standards on hand-made guitars and pennywhistles. What emerges from Matshikiza's writing, beyond the history that he recounts on the pages of Drum, is that jazz furnished black South Africans with a potent metaphor for reinventing themselves - in short, for improvising - in circumstances that seemed increasingly inimical to celebration and play. The jazz-like qualities that I have discerned in his writing communicate an ethos of risk-taking and experimentation that in some respects uncritically reproduced imported stereotypes, particularly those that reinforced indigenous patriarchal values, but in others entailed creative ways of enunciating modern African experiences in an international language- For all its contradictions, the jazz culture of and with which he wrote had come to express a distinctive South African sensibili The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s, which contains a more extensive and updated bibliography. 6 See Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. 7 On the influence of African minstrel shows on Cape Town's vernacular New Year festivals, see Denis Constant-Martin's Coon Carnival; on the influence of the same on Zulu performance genres like isikhunzi and isicathamiya, see Veit Erlmann's African Stars and Nightsong. 8 Quotes in this paragraph are from Christopher Ballantine's Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville, 80 & 81; 22-23; 82-3. 9 For more on the Concert and Dance, see Ballantine, Marabi Nights, 11-38. 10 "This group," Matshikiza reports, "was curiously named 'The Japanese Express' band under George 'Makalman' Boswell. They had a violin, a trombone, piano and drums. Although this band was short-lived they had broken the ice and ventured into the new possibilities that this new music from America had to offer." "Twenty Years of Jazz," Drum, December 1951, 27. 11 On this point, Ballantine has pointed out that "the category of black American musicians was not entirely rigid in the minds of black South Africans: white Americans occasionally slipped in, perhaps because they were - rightly or wrongly - identified with the music made by 'Africans in America.' Indeed, alongside the strong, emotive category of 'Africans in America', the performance culture of black South Africans drew on another, looser category, a commercial pantheon, filled with images of the stars and styles of Western - mainly American - popular culture." Ballantine, Marabi Nights, 17. 12 David Coplan makes the following case regarding these parallels: That there is far more interest in American jazz [in South Africa] there than in Western and central Africa (the areas from which the black American community originated) is due to three major factors: (1) similarities in the sociohistorical experience of black Americans and South Africans, including rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, and racial oppression; (2) similarities in the kinds of musical resources available to both peoples in their urban areas, and in basic African principles of composition and performance; and (3) the value of black American models for black South African urban cultural adaptation, identity and resistance." See The Urbanisation of African Music: Some Theoretical Observations," 123. 13 Ballantine also makes this point in "Looking to the USA." 14 The phrase is Ballantine's; see Marabi Nights, 25. 15 This formulation is quoted in Coplan, In Township Tonight!, 51. 16 "Shebeen" is reportedly a Gaelic word meaning "little shop." Coplan avers that the term emerged in Cape Town in the early twentieth century among immigrant Irish members of the police force. 17 "Stars of Jazz." Drum, June 1957, 3743. 18 See Nixon, ibid., 20, and Lara Allen's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Representation, Gender and Women in Black South African Popular Music, 1948-1960, 102-7. 19 "Jazzmo" Antonio Saude. Drum, April 1955, 40-41. 20 "Gramo Go Round by Hot Toddy." Drum, February 1956, 73. 21 "Jazzing The Blues!" Drum, April 1955, 20-21. 22 Matshikiza, "Gramo Go Round by Hot Toddy." Drum, December 1955, 79. 23 "What They Say About Tandi!" Drum, December 1954. The "Thandi" referred to in the title is Thandi Mpambani (later Klaasens). References Cited Vaudeville. Johannesburg: Raven Press. publishing houses. For a concise history of the publication, as well as an invaluable guide to the magazine in its heyday, see Dorothy Woodson's Drum: Allen, Lara Victoria. 2000. Representation, Gender and Women in Black South An Index to "Africa's Leading Magazine," 1951-1965. For literary commentary African Popular Music, 1948-1960. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cam- on the Drum writers, who included Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Ezekiel bridge. Mphahlele, Nat Nakasa, Lewis Nkosi, Arthur Maimane, Casey Motsisi, and Ballantine, Christopher. 1993. Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Richard Rive, see Anthony Sampson's Drum: A Venture into the New Africa; Mike Nicol's A Good Looking Corpse; Rob Nixon's Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond, and Michael Chapman's 1999. looking to the USA: The Politics of Male Close-Harmony Song Style in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s" Popular Music 18, no. 1: 1-17. Chapman, Michael. 2001 (1989). The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press. Coplan, David. 1979. "Marabi Culture: Continuity and Transformation in African Music in Johannesburg, 1920-1940." African Urban Studies , no. Winter 1979- 80: 49-76. 1982. The Urbanisation of African Music: Some Theoretical Observations." Popular Music 2 : 113-30. 1985. In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Erlmann, Veit. 1991. African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996. Nightsong: Performance, Power, and Practice in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. 77>e Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Martin, Denis-Constant. 1999. Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past to Present. Cape Town: David Philip. Matshikiza, Todd. 1961. Chocolates for my Wife. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Nicol, Mike. 1995 (1991). A Good-Looking Corpse. London: Minerva. Nixon, Rob. 1994. Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond. New York: Routledge. O' Meally, ed. 1998. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Sampson, Anthony. 1956. Drum: A Venture into the New Africa. London: Collins. Woodson, Dorothy C. 1988. Drum: An Index to "Africa's Leading Magazine," 1951-1965. University of Wisconsin. Primary sources "Twenty Years of Jazz," Drum, December 1951, 26-7. "What They Say About Tandi!" Drum, December 1954 "Jazzmo" Antonio Saude. Drum, April 1955, 40-41. "Jazzing The Blues!" Drum, April 1955, 20-21. "Gramo Go Round by Hot Toddy." Drum, December 1955, 79. "Gramo Go Round by Hot Toddy." Drum, February 1956, 73. "Stars of Jazz." Drum, June 1957, 37-43. Notes 11 am very grateful to Lara Allen, as well as the staff at the Schomburg Library in Harlem, for their assistance in obtaining copies of the out-of-print material discussed in this essay. 2 The reference here is to the phrase as employed by Robert G. O' Meally in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, which is in turn adapted from African- American literary critic Stephen Henderson. 3 The film in question was Jim Comes to Joburg (also known as African Jim), directed by Donald Swanson. 4 The references to Kwenane and Masekela are drawn from Christopher Ballantine's article looking to the USA: The Politics of Male Close-Harmony Song Style in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s," 1. 5 Though a descendent of Drum still appears on South African news stands under the same title today, the magazine was marginalized and reshaped after suffering bans and other government restrictions from 1965 until 1979, when the original owner, Jim Bailey, finally sok) it to a conglomerate of South Africa <22>