Joys From South Africa: Steve Dyer's "Freedom Melody"

It is approximately 8,000 miles from Massachusetts to South Africa, and although a world apart, the US and SA share both a debilitating history of race relations and a deep commitment to jazz music. The latter was on full display on Monday, October 20 as the Steve Dyer Quartet performed for 65 North Americans at the Community Music School of Springfield.

Steve Dyer is a highly regarded 65-year old South African saxophonist, who along with Aaron Rimbui (piano), Jimmy Mngwandi (bass), and Matthew Fu (drums), shared the exuberant power of South African jazz by delivering an uplifting concert of original music.

Dyer, who is white, refused mandatory service in the apartheid SA army, and moved to Botswana, where he started a family and became a cultural activist. (One of his sons is the well-known pianist Bokani Dyer.) As befits someone whose life is built on acceptance and a shared humanity, Dyer’s band included a Kenyan pianist, a South African bassist and a Houston-born drummer of Chinese descent.

They played music composed by Dyer, which was by turns euphonious and wistful, full of strong melodies and sturdy rhythms. Incorporating earlier South African music styles such as marabi, kwela, and mbaqanga, Dyer’s program, titled “Freedom Melody”, had the swaying optimism we associate with South African jazz.

In April, 1985 in Gaborone, Botswana, Dyer helped organize the Freedom Melody festival. Musicians from all over Southern Africa converged for a memorable weekend of cultural events, headlined by Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa. Two months later, the SADF raided Gaborone, killing 12 people and terminating cultural activity in the area. Dyer’s Freedom Melody tour, with stops in Newport, RI, New York, Oakland, UCLA and University of Arizona, was commissioned by Lincoln Center and celebrates the aims of the original festival.

Stretching over 20 years, Dyer has a long history with Mngwandi, who has performed with South African legends like Miriam Makeba, Bheki Mseleku and Masekela, as well as Americans like David Murray and Will Calhoun. For years he has split his time between Johannesburg and New York, and told us a beautiful story about being taken under the wing of Reggie Workman. Bending rules at the New School, Workman gifted Mngwandi his first upright bass and allowed him to attend classes without paying. He didn’t get a degree, but he learned a whole lot of music. Mngwandi’s warm personality translated to the stage, where he served as a one-man welcome center for the music’s expansive agenda.

Born in Nairobi, pianist Aaron Rimbui is a modern African man, comfortable with world travel, the latest technology, and pop music, with the depth of spirit to play the real jazz. He’s currently co-leading a class with Seton Hawkins on Abdullah Ibrahim and Bheki Mseleku through Lincoln Center’s Swing University. Hawkins, incidentally, is South African and a tireless supporter of his country’s jazz artists, and is Manager of Public Programs and Education Resources at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Over dinner, Rimbui described the process of producing music with Burna Boy, the hugely popular Nigerian rapper/producer. The amount of resources and technical precision required to pull off these stadium-size productions are mind-boggling. He said after doing this type of work for a few months that when it came time to do a jazz gig, he ran out of ideas a third of the way into his set. He had to switch his musical mind. His string-dampening percussive work inside the piano with Dyer’s quartet added a wonderful dimension to the music.

Drummer Kabelo Mokhatla couldn’t make the first half of the Freedom Melody tour and recommended Matthew Fu for the job. Now 21 years old, Fu is in his last year at the Manhattan School of Music, and is already a professional grade drummer. What with the skiffle-like rhythms and four-beat shuffle patterns that distinguish South African jazz, a clueless drummer can bring the lilt to a halt in a hurry, but while he did not grow up with the music, Fu embodied the intrinsic buoyancy of South African jazz. Dyer told me how impressed he was with Fu’s sense of purpose and seriousness, and gave him a public nod as he introduced his piece, “The Young Ones”. Fu loves Ed Blackwell and knows his jazz history. Between gigs and his studies, he’s already rubbed shoulders with Kendrick Scott, Frank Lacy, Nicole Glover, and John Benitez. His solo on the last piece of the evening revealed what we knew all along: the young man can play the drums. 

In Springfield, Steve Dyer played alto and soprano saxophone, and flute, and sang on a number of pieces. The concert included a number of compositions from Multipolar, his forthcoming release on Ropeadope Records (produced by Seton Hawkins). It’s his 11th as a leader, and it reveals a musician finding inspiration in the triumphs and tragedies of his country. South Africa has a long and distinguished jazz tradition that began when merchant vessels brought early jazz records to Cape Town, and flowered in the 1950s and 1960s with groups like the Jazz Epistles and the Blue Notes. In the 30 years since apartheid ended, the music has continued to flower, and Steve Dyer is a major part of that renaissance. 

Invoking the Gods: Harris Eisenstadt October Trio

One of the most disparaging things you can say about an artist is that they “dabble”. In a biological context, the term refers to ducks who feed in shallow water. We connect it to amateurs with light commitment and a lack of serious intent. 

Percussionist Harris Eisenstadt, who performed on 10/10 with his October Trio at the Institute For the Musical Arts, doesn’t dabble. Over the last 15 years or so, he has engaged in a deep dive into the fathomless wellspring of Afro-Cuban religion and music. Along with bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck and pianist Angelica Sanchez, Eisenstadt shared prayers for the orishas with 50 congregants in Goshen, MA on Saturday.

Splitting his time between trap kit and a set of three sacred two-headed batá drums, Eisenstadt gave us improvised instrumental versions of songs dedicated to the deities (orishas) of Santeria, the Cuban cosmology that emerged from the Yoruba people of west Africa. The hourglass-like batá, ranging in size from the mother drum (Iyá), to the father (Itótele) and baby (Okónkolo), are traditionally played by three people, but as has become the convention in jazz settings, the drums sat tied together in front of the seated Eisenstadt. Mauricio Herrera used the same set-up with Patricia Brennan’s Quartet at IMA a couple of years ago.   

It was the band’s debut performance, there was scant time to rehearse, and Sanchez and Schoenbeck had only met once in a large ensemble. In lesser hands, the results could have been tepid or tentative. But these uber-accomplished mid-career artists did what professionals do: they dug in, listened hard and played their asses off, albeit at low volume and with muted intensity. The music rarely rose above a whisper and there was lots of space. The contrast with last week’s drummer-led group at IMA: Ches Smith’s electric-fueled Clone Row, could not have been more pronounced.

Eisenstadt came in a day early to lecture in Jason Robinson’s class at Amherst College, and we invited him to join me, Priscilla Page, Marta Ostapiuk, and our friend, the cultural historian Ivor Miller, to break bread and facilitate connections. Miller, whose father, biologist Lynn Miller, was a founding faculty member of Hampshire College, is one of the foremost scholars/chroniclers of Cuban religious and musical practices. He and Eisenstadt had a lot to talk about, spending a considerable amount of time exchanging books, links and stories. 

Eisenstadt, who was born and raised in Toronto and lives in Brooklyn with Schoenbeck, was dressed all in white, a year-long requirement for recent initiates into Santeria. He introduced each piece, giving us thumbnail descriptions of each orisha. The music, which made passing references to the melody of each prayer, was subtle and slightly ambiguous. Eisenstadt’s light hand kept a steady pulse without ever locking into a conventional groove.  While I wished they had opened the floodgates a bit more and maybe sang a piece or two, the contemplative reverence they evoked allowed me to concentrate on the trio’s sonority, which was beautiful. Eisenstadt’s touch on batá was pure caress, and he used the six drum heads at his disposal to create beautiful melody.

Frank Zappa referred to the bassoon’s “medieval aroma”, and like bagpipes and accordions, the instrument is often linked with a particular musical genre or repertoire. But Sara Schoenbeck is changing all that. She’s at the forefront of a group of creative bassoonists who are finding new uses for its peculiar low end buzz. Harris told me she’s constantly getting calls from composers and bandleaders who need a bassoonist who can read, improvise and play with soul. Her duo concert with pianist Wayne Horvitz at IMA a couple of years ago was memorable, as was her performance with fellow bassoonist Michael Rabinowicz in Jeff Lederer’s band in Brattleboro in August. Check out her 2021 self-titled Pyroclastic recording, a stunning series of duets with Roscoe Mitchell, Nels Cline, Mark Dresser, Nicole Mitchell and others. An interlude, where she played only the “mouthpiece” (the bocal and tenor joint), was other-worldly, calling forth the animal antecedents of the music. Over dinner, Sara told us the heartbreaking story of her bassoon getting stolen last year.

Since 2012, when she performed as part of A World of Piano, Angelica Sanchez has become a leading light of her generation, a regular visitor to the Valley, and a good friend. Now tenured faculty at Bard College, Sanchez has recent duo recordings with Chad Taylor and Marilyn Crispell, and trio records with Tony Malaby/Tom Rainey, and Michael Formanek/Billy Hart. She’s playing the Berlin Jazz Festival next month with bassist Barry Guy, and the Walker Arts Center with trumpeter Rob Mazurek in December. Her Nonet recording, Nighttime Creatures, was voted one of the best releases of 2023. She’s a cliché-free, no-nonsense improviser who’s not interested in impressing you with technique or facile pretty notes.  She invariably opts for the least traveled path, which is never the easy way.

Eisenstadt speaks fluent Spanish, has visited Cuba 13 times, and is part of New York’s Afro-Cuban religious music scene. For the 50-year old percussionist, this is clearly not a passing fancy. As his knowledge deepens and he continues to explore this world, I look forward to the continued flowering of his ideas in this realm.

A Bunch of Barnstormers: Ches Smith Clone Row

There are artists content to make a life in music by mastering one particular sound or approach, and working it. Others - like Ches Smith, who brought his latest project, Clone Row, to the big barn at the Institute For the Musical Arts in Goshen, MA on October 4 - are explorers, always on the lookout for new musical challenges.

Featuring Mary Halvorson and Liberty Ellman (guitars), Nick Dunston (bass, electronics) and Smith (drums, vibraphone, electronics), Clone Row has enough current to conjure Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, or the orbits of Jimi Hendrix and Sonny Sharrock. But because Ches Smith has such wide vision and ambition, this band has its own sound.

Marc Ribot, who wrote the liner notes for the new record, remarks that Smith’s latest endeavor is a composer’s project, and indeed the level of coordinated intricacy in the writing is remarkable. Electric instruments don’t need to breathe, and the sound world they created was dense, filled with non-stop vibrations. Smith sometimes provided two simultaneous rhythm streams: drum kit or vibes, alongside electronic beats. When the guitars shimmered and twined, and Dunston added additional electronic washes, the air became saturated with sound. We left dazzled and spent. Then, after a concert with little space between notes, we entered the October silence of a Goshen night. 

Just as on the record, the concert bolted from the gate with “Ready Beat”, a driving fusillade that began and ended with some very tasty programming from Smith, and we were off and running. While the multi-threaded complexity of the music was sometimes staggering, the composer’s knack for writing ear-capturing melody and rhythm, the superb sound separation in the room, and the prodigious talent on stage, produced a deeply satisfying musical experience. We were witnessing something impressive and newly made.

Clone Row is Ches Smith’s latest project of distinction. His previous recording, Laugh Ash, is an extraordinary amalgam of contemporary classical, electronic and improvised elements, written for large ensemble. We All Break (2021), highlights Smith’s 20-year immersion in the music of Haitian Vodou. His trio, with newly minted MacArthur Fellow Craig Taborn and violist Mat Maneri (who was in town last week with Lucian Ban), has produced two “chamber-jazz” masterpieces on ECM and Pyroclastic. Then there is his long-running solo project which highlights his enduring interest in electronics and vibes. That's not to mention his singular contribution to Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, Tim Berne’s Snakeoil and Secret Chiefs 3. Smith is as busy and productive as one person can be. He’ll be at the Iron Horse with Anna Webber’s Nonet in January and back in the Valley in May with Ralph Alessi’s Quartet.  

Speaking of ambition, Smith put together a packed two week tour in support of the self-titled album, including performances at Edgefest (Ann Arbor), Earshot (Seattle), SF Jazz, Angel City Jazz (LA), and stops in Vancouver, Denver, Chicago, Portland and Minneapolis. Saturday’s western Massachusetts gig was second on their itinerary.

Ches Smith first met Halvorson in 1998 in Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant, and the drummer knew Ellman from the Bay area, but despite their mutual admiration, the two guitarists had not worked together. Smith’s intuition to pair Ellman’s more conventional, R&B approach with Halvorson’s awkward bentness was prescient, producing streams of charged interaction.

Ellman, perhaps best known for his long tenure in Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, has made music with Myra Melford, Wadada Leo Smith, Butch Morris, Steve Lehman, Somi, Nicole Mitchell, Ledisi and Michele Rosewoman, and has released four highly regarded records as a leader on Pi Recordings. He served as producer and mixing engineer on Threadgill’s Pulitzer Prize winning record, In For a Penny, In For a Pound, and has engineering credits on albums by Sam Rivers, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Steve Coleman and Tyshawn Sorey. I first met him at UMass in 2004 when Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd presented “In What Language”, and again with Jason Robinson’s Janus Ensemble in 2014. Now back on the west coast after time in New York, Ellman sightings are not as frequent as I’d like.

Like Smith, Halvorson is everywhere. Her concert in Holyoke last month with her sextet, Amaryllis, was a singular event. After she gets off the road with Clone Row, she takes her band to Europe for 14 dates; she was just on the Continent last month touring with Tomeka Reid’s Quartet. On the go and going places, Halvorson has won Guitarist of the Year honors in the DownBeat Critics Poll for the past nine years, and is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.

Nick Dunston’s plate is also full. Ribot called him “my favorite bassist of the new generation.” I’m inclined to agree. At 29, he’s the youngster in the band, yet has seven releases as a leader, the latest of which is the Afro-surrealist-anti-opera COLLA VOCE. He holds the bass chair in Amaryllis, has been commissioned to compose for Wet Ink Ensemble, Bang On a Can and JACK Quartet, and has already worked with many of the most creative musicians on the planet. I met him eight years ago when he performed with Jeff Lederer, Mary LaRose, Joe Fiedler and George Schuller in Carol Smith’s backyard at a Jazz Shares party. Dunston went to school with Jeff and Mary’s daughter, Hallie.

It is a joy to watch outsized talent blossom in real time. May Ches Smith and his band of renowns continue to reap all the rewards for their good work.