Maxine Macgregor, widow of acclaimed jazz musician and composer Chris Macgregor, travelled from her rural homestead near Tonneins in Bordeaux in France last week to sit on a panel discussing his band, the Blue Notes, at the recent indaba held at Rhodes University.
The Blue Note’s band and their music emerged in the early 1960’s, an era when the apartheid regimes objective of social, political and cultural exclusion was being aggressively consolidated. The Blue Notes’ music has been described as “a fiery fusion of bebop and South African musical traditions… representing a joyful defiance of the apartheid laws”.
It is planned that many of the obscure and unreleased recordings which have never been seen in cd format will be digitised for scholarly purposes with the intention of exposing the wider listening public to this wonderful music of South African origin.
Prof Robbie van Niekerk pointed out that the band, coming as they did mostly from the Eastern Cape, represents an ideal anchor group on which the research on Eastern Cape jazz musicians carried out by the Jazz Heritage Project can be based.
The band’s history and music has a foundational place in the Rhodes University/ Mellon Jazz Heritage Project.
All but one of the members (drummer Louis Moholo from Cape Town) came from the Eastern Cape. Pianist Chris McGregor was born and bred in the Transkei, Mongezi Feza the trumpeter was from Queenstown, Johnny Dyani the bassist from King Williamstown and Dudu Pukwana the sax player from Port Elizabeth.
The name of the band, derived from an iconic bebop jazz record label in the USA, was intended to obscure their mixed-race line-up, and avoid the attention of the security police. Due to the extremely restrictive laws of the time, which made it virtually impossible for the band to rehearse or play together, the Blue Notes applied for a grant which would take them overseas, to the Antibes Jazz Festival in France.
Of the group, only Nikele (Nik) Moyake permanently returned to South Africa during the apartheid years, with the rest of the band choosing to remain in exile. Drummer Louis Moholo returned to live in South Africa after the end of apartheid.
Maxine Macgregor has been described as “the unseen member of the band” and worked tirelessly to bring the Blue Notes to the attention of the public. From booking their concert venues, to arranging their travel documents for the Antibes festival, and to holding down a job in London to support them while the band tried to make it big, she was an integral part of the Blue Notes.
“I believed in Chris, and I believed in the music. That’s how I coped with the chaos,” Maxine explains. “I believed the music deserved to be heard by a wider audience.”
The panel discussion was chaired by Prof Van Niekerk, Director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), and a member of the Jazz Heritage Project. As a passionate jazz music lover and collector of rare vinyl recordings of South African jazz he is the privileged owner of virtually all the vinyl recordings made by the Blue Notes, Chris Mcgregor’s Brotherhood of Breath and the recordings of the individual band members.
The Blue Notes ended with a fall-out among members in the 1970s, and Chris Macgregor went on to form and play with the Brotherhood of Breath. However the members of the Blue Notes did come together once again, on the death of trumpeter Mongezi Feza, where they recorded the studio album Blue Notes for Mongezi.
A spontaneous tribute to this youngest band member and trumpet virtuoso, Prof Van Niekerk describes the recording for "Mongs" as he was fondly known as “suffused with tragedy,” as the remaining members of the Blue Notes lament their loss with powerful, elegiac jazz sounds."
Photo: Maxine Macgregor and panel Chair Prof Robbie van Niekerk discussing Blue Notes Band.
Photo by: Adrian Frost
By Jeannie McKeown