HISTORY, the proverb says, is written by the victors: whoever comes out on top provides the filter through which we view the past. Equally, history can only be read and written from the evidence that survives.
In South Africa, that has created an odd situation. Democracy and majority rule have been won, but not before the relentless grind of colonialism and apartheid had destroyed much priceless archival material. Black families — continually uprooted and removed — lost furniture, documents, family albums, ornaments: all the physical anchors of personal and community memory. As older members died, the memories, too, were lost.
Meanwhile, some perspectives inherited from past eras persist: narrow definitions of "high art" and "authentic tradition" continue to influence collection and preservation priorities — and budgets.
South Africa came within a whisker of losing the priceless photographic and musical archive of Ian Bruce Huntley, introduced in this book. Photographer Cedric Nunn, who restored the 120 images published, estimates that "some would have become irrecoverable within only a few years".
The reclamation story is remarkable. Huntley worked, made more than 1,500 photographic images and recorded more than 50 hours of jazz, predominantly in Cape Town, during the 1960s and 1970s. He documented the scene as a friend and admirer of the music, without thought of commercial sale. He presented and discussed his work with the musicians after the sessions he had documented. For Nunn, moving back nearly half a century later from Johannesburg to Pietermaritzburg, where Huntley now lives: "I knew there was someone there who’d been a legend to us, with a body of work that was a must-see."
Then Nunn met up with music historian Chris Albertyn, and Ben Pretorius, founder of the legendary Rainbow jazz club — and with Huntley. "We talked a lot about disappearing heritage and how something needed to be done." That impulse led to a small exhibition of Huntley’s work at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, curated by another KwaZulu-Natal photographer, Rafs Mayet, and eventually to the book project. "Ian had very fixed ideas about who he wanted to work with," says Nunn. "I was lucky enough to be both on that list and around at the time."
With such a huge archive of images, was curation a problem? "Not at all. Ian and I started from his sub-edit of around 50 sheets of negatives and 100 colour slides. He wanted the published collection to represent particular musicians, and his instinct and vision were unerring. In every case, he’d nailed the sweet image as his selection. He’d lived with those images for so long, he got it absolutely right."
The technical issues were more challenging. "Ian had done his best to archive and preserve, but he was working in an ordinary private home, not a climate-controlled museum room. In addition, some pictures had been made in poor light conditions, and much of the initial processing had been done at corner pharmacies in the 1960s; often not fixed properly, with chemical residues still left. Over time, the chemicals, scratches from dust, mould and fungi were destroying the pictures."
For Nunn, it was sometimes days of work on a single image, "learning on the job" about digital restoration techniques. He cites the cover: a vivid image of bassist Big T Ntsele, who died only last year; the gleaming golden wood of his instrument offset by the soft rust of his mohair sweater. "Those textures emerged from an absolute mask of mould."
That is not all that emerges through the book. In his framing essay, UK-based jazz scholar Jonathan Eato documents the complex social and technical dilemmas Huntley was navigating to produce an archive not only of music and images, but also of dreams and visions: the cultural world which could be; a world of diversity, equality, joy and love.
This was a defiantly multiracial world. As many musicians who worked during the era have pointed out, jazz could be (even if it was not always) one of the few creative spaces in which the music created a common language and democracy. It was a ferociously creative world, where musicians wove together ideas from jazz and African tradition, individual character and community aspiration to make something new. And it was an insouciantly stylish and trend-setting world, represented in the tilt of a hat, the crispness of a shirt, the shine of a shoe and the print of a dashiki. Donald Tshomela’s 1972 leather gilet and trilby and his friend’s pink skinny jeans would not look out of place on the grass at a jazz festival today.
These were the players in their prime: young, proud and optimistic. Nunn says: "People need to see this, especially if their memories of some of these musicians are only of the ageing and sometimes broken and worn-down figures of the 1980s and 1990s.…"
The mythology of South African jazz history — shored up by a lack of just such evidence — is that the 1970s were a "dead" period, when too many players were in exile, and those who remained were often gagged by laws and conditions. Musicians have always vehemently denied this. Though they faced a scarcity of public arenas, the music flowered more intensely than ever; the urge to create was a motivator for staying alive. Now the images in Keeping Time provide evidence, and the hours of music — due to be released via the Electricjive website — will provide more.
The photographs themselves are both remarkable and beautiful. Huntley understands what makes a compelling music photograph: the moment of communication and inspiration caught in a shared glance or laugh between players or in the fire that suddenly lights up eyes and body language; the pensive instant while a player’s mind shapes the solo to come, or considers another’s. But Huntley has also captured some rare, hardly documented events in jazz history: saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi’s visit to Cape Town; Dennis Mpale playing not trumpet but drums. Nunn says that when he was working on the pictures, Huntley also had a wealth of "extraordinary stories", and if there’s a criticism of the book, it is that only some of these have found their way into print alongside the pictures. Every one of these pictures is indeed worth a thousand words, but even a few hundred more would have been nice.
Huntley was a skilled photographer, but his book also prompts the question of how many perhaps less skilled but equally involved people still possess frozen memories like these, slowly mouldering away in attics. "I’m delighted that at least this story of an archive in peril will have a happy ending," says Nunn. "Now the pictures are digitally preserved and can be accessible to researchers. But our cultural heritage is as rich as our gold mines, and I hope this initiative will make people with the power to act aware of how fragile it also is."
By Gwen Ansell
Picture by: Ian Bruce Huntley
Source: Business Day