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.