John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

"One Love, Ghoema Beat: Inside the Cape Town Carnival"

I've created a website for my book, One Love, Ghoema Beat:  Inside the Cape Town Carnival.  It's published, in South Africa, by Random House Struik and, elsewhere, by the University of Virginia Press.  An audio/video preview of the book is the star attraction on the site.

A Night in Zurich, A Morning in Paris: Sathima Benjamin and Duke Ellington, 1963

In 1963, Duke Ellington changed the lives of two young South Africans forever.  One of them was the composer/pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, then known as Dollar Brand.  The story of Duke’s discovery of this great talent in a Zurich, Switzerland, nightclub, the recording session that he produced in Paris, and the subsequent release Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio is well known.

The world is less familiar with Sathima “Bea” Benjamin, the singer who persuaded Duke to visit that tiny club on a snowy winter's night.  She and Ibrahim, her husband-to-be, had fled South Africa in search of freedom and opportunity.  They were poor, but they were making music on their own terms.  Benjamin's singing impressed Duke deeply, and he recorded her as well as Ibrahim in Paris.  Sadly, her effort languished in a vault, until it was finally released to much acclaim as A Morning in Paris in 1996.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Benjamin, in Cape Town, South Africa, where she has resettled.  While we spoke about many things, the story that she told about being discovered by Ellington was especially vivid.  She told me that, when Duke arrived in Zurich for a concert she already knew that Frank Sinatra had asked him to recruit new talent for Reprise records.  She was determined to get his attention:

“...I don't know how I got backstage. ...there were all these women with their furs.  You know, Duke Ellington loved the ladies, and the ladies loved him.  So there were a whole lot of rich, elegant Swiss ladies, with their furs and jewels, waiting to get in his dressing room.  ...and I'm standing there with my little Salvation Army clothes....  But every time the door would open, he would catch my eye.  Then at one point he said, ‘Let her in.’  And there I was in the room.  It was a miracle.

 

 

"I'm Glad There is You."  Sathima Benjamin with Abdullah Ibrahim, piano.  Paris, 1963.

 

"I said if you'd just come with me when the show is over and listen to the Dollar Brand trio, I think you would be very interested.  He didn't even ask me at that point what do I do.  He said ‘Ok.’

"Afterwards... we get to the club and the owner had the key in the door.  Abdullah and [band members] Makaya [Ntshoko] and Johnny [Gertze] were standing outside, and they see me get out of the car with Duke Ellington.  Oh, my God!  ...So the owner puts the key back in the door and we go in.

"The trio played, and Duke sat there in wonderment.  [He] said, ‘Listen.  Be at my hotel at 10:30 am.’  We didn't sleep that night.  It was February and was snowing.  ...We just couldn't believe what happened.  [The next day, Ellington arranged for Sathima, Abdullah, and the band to travel to Paris to record for him.]

"...when we got to Paris... they took us to the Champs-Élysées.  I have never in my life lived in such a grand hotel.  ...I was just amazed at the grandeur of it all.  But that's what Ellington did.  [At the Barclay studios], Ellington came in with little Billy Strayhorn.  And he aid, ‘Strays... this is Bea.  I think the two of you can do wonderful things.’  And Strayhorn sits there, he has his big glass of champagne and his cigar.  He says, ‘What are we going to do?’  Instead of me coming up with an Ellington song, I said I'm going to sing ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.’

 

 

"Solitude."  Sathima Benjamin with Duke Ellington, piano.  Paris, 1963.

 

"Then Ellington said sing with the trio...  When I started to sing ‘I Got It Bad,’ he  ran out of the booth.  He said, ‘Get off of the piano,’ to Abdullah.  ‘This is my song.’  I thought, ‘Oh, first it was Strayhorn, now here's Ellington.  I can either drop dead now or sing like I never sang before.’  And I know I sang like I never sang before.

"A little later I sang ‘Solitude’ for the very first time.  And ever since that time, when it comes time to do ‘Solitude’ in a show, I tell the pianists ‘No, no, no.’  They tell me that I don't have to sing it alone.  I say, ‘I'm not singing it alone.  I'm hearing Ellington accompanying me.  I'm not alone.  ...Ellington is here with me.’"  [Yes, she's talking about the recording directly above.]

* * *

This interview also appears in the June 2012 issue of Ellingtonia, the publication of the Duke Ellington Society.  I'm very grateful to Miss Benjamin for giving me several hours of her time.

Things Historians Like: Old Stuff -- Like Paper & Ink

Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.

--Nickolas Ashford & Valerie Simpson

* * *

Analogue is better.  Paper, ink, typewriters, LPs.  Film.  I've been rediscovering this simple truth as I look through the 18 September 1950 issue of Life magazine.  Digital may be more convenient, but it's almost never as good.

This particular edition of Life is on my desk because contains a powerful, yet largely forgotten photo essay about South Africa by Margaret Bourke-White.  (At the time, she was probably the most famous photojournalist in the world.)  The essay was the first visual exposé of apartheid, South Africa's system of white supremacy, to appear in the mainstream American press.  It was a surprisingly hard-hitting condemnation of racial oppression and labor exploitation.  I spoke about it at the winter 2012 meeting of SERSAS/SEAN.  Now I'm turning the talk into an article for the journal Kronos:  Southern African Histories.

Until this point, I've been looking at the magazine on Google Books.  That's been useful.  And convenient.  But I knew that to do the essay justice, I needed to see, and hold, the real thing -- to come as close as I can to experiencing the magazine as people did in 1950.  Ebay to the rescue.

 

Life, 18 September 1950, pp. 110 and 111.  [Click on the image for a larger version.]

 

Without a doubt, seeing Bourke-White's essay in the magazine has changed the way that I'm thinking about it.  Here are a few random (and not particularly profound) thoughts about Life that arise as I turn the pages.

The thing is big.  Really big -- about 10 and 1/2 by 14 inches.  I'm old enough to have seen the magazine when it was still being published in the '60s and '70s, but I'd forgotten how large it was.  And it's heavy, all 172 pages of it.  The size and weight give the magazine a real presence.

The magazine might have a presence, but it's by no means an aesthetic object, like a book of fine photography.  While it's more substantial than a newspaper, it's clearly sometime that's meant to be disposable.  A couple of weeks on the coffee table or a couple of months in a barber shop, and it's done it's duty.  (Thank God for people who thought otherwise.)  Bourke-White probably couldn't have imagined that anyone be paying attention to her essay 62 years after it was published.

Nobody could possible have read the thing cover to cover -- not in a single sitting.  It's too big, too long, and it contains an almost overwhelming onslaught of words and images.  The South Africa essay almost gets lost.  It begins on page 111, and it's preceded by hundreds of ads -- 1/8th page, 1/4 page, 1/2 page, full page, double truck -- for movies, cars, toothpaste, tires, women's hosiery, fountain pens, shoes, clock radios, TVs, cigarettes, spark plugs, girdles, dog food, candy, sport coats, coffee makers, life insurance, baby strollers, vacuum cleaners, bourbon, and Vitalis hair cream, for "That Clean Groomed Look."  I could go on, but you get the point.  The magazine makes the internet look tidy.  Sure, I could see all of this on the Google site, but the physical act of turning the pages slows you down and heightens the impression of information overload.

The editorial content is almost as much of a mish-mash as the ads, ranging from "This is War," David Duncan Douglas's still moving photo essay about American marines fighting in Korea, to stories about a woman mayor in Virginia, a typhoon in Japan, Russian female athletes ("The Stronger Soviet Sex"), begonia breeders, Ethel Merman's new Broadway show, and an University of Wichita graduate student who invented eyeglasses that turned the world upside down.  All of this is accompanied -- or, more properly, lead -- by the prodigious use of photographs.  Once again, the act of turning the pages shapes the experience.  When you start a page one, page 111 is a long way off -- and, given all the distraction, you might not get there at all.

As important as Bourke-White's essay was to the magazine's editors -- with 31 photos spread over 16 uninterrupted pages (no ads), it was one of the longest and densest essays Life ever ran -- it was something that readers could have skimmed or skipped altogether.

All of this helps me understand something about Bourke-White's style.  Her photos were never subtle, never ambiguous.  She seems to have always been aware of the clutter that would surround them in the magazine, so she made images of power and clarity that were designed to stop readers in their tracks and to tell them immediately exactly the photos meant.  This is something the magazine's photographers did routinely.  Holding Life in my hands has made it easy to see why they did it.

I'll have some more substantial things to say about the essay itself in a later post.

Funky Friday with Nadine Hutton

When I met Nadine Hutton last October, my first thought was this:  She's what I would have been, if I were South African, a woman, had far, far fewer hangups, and more talent.  Of course, that's a complete fantasy.  I know -- heck, you know -- that no matter how South African, female, footloose, and fancy-free I manage to become, I'll never be as cool as Nadine.

Nadine's an artist and photographer, not a musician.  But, as the second video clearly shows, she's sure 'nuff funky.  (The first video is an introduction to her wide-ranging work.)  She's in Los Angeles right now, where for the next few weeks, she'll be an artist-in-residence a the 18th Street Arts Center.  That's reason enough to celebrate.

 

 

 

Nadine's one of my favorite photographers.  I love her portraits -- for instance, two images that she made of the great Hugh Masekela.  The first makes me happy; the second blows me away.  You can see them here and here.

I'm also a big fan of an ongoing series of photographs that she's making with an iPhone, in which she's exploring, as she says, "a personal, often ironic and humorous vision of home, Johannesburg."  You can see these wonderful images here.

 

 

 

Nadine's documentary photography is as strong as her more purely artistic work.  "I Have Fallen," an essay on poor whites in South Africa is an example.  As both photography and journalism, it's probably the best work I've seen on the subject.  (I've discussed some recent photo essays on poor whites here and I've looked at the historical backstory, here.)

A Funky Friday without music?  Not a chance.  Play that second video, again.  It will make you want to dance.

Belgian Congo Pale Ale: Yes, the Horror

[Updated, 18 May 2012.]

Belgian Congo Pale Ale?  Or perhaps you'd like some Nazi Dachau Brandy?  Or some Soviet Gulag Vodka?

I've been alternating between anger and despair every since I found this ad on the back page of C-ville, my home town's "alternative" weekly.  As absurd -- as impossible -- as it sounds, the Devils Backbone Brewing Company, of Roseland and Lexington, Virginia, is marketing an ale that celebrates a colonial regime that was responsible for the deaths of 10 million people, a crime that some argue constituted genocide.

 

[Click on either image to see a larger versions.]

It's hard to know what the people at the Devils Backbone Brewing Company were up to.  Part of me hopes that the name of the ale represents nothing more than rank ignorance.  After all, not every college graduate has taken a class in African history or the history of genocide.  Not every reader has come across Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, a best-selling popular history of the atrocities in the Congo.  Yes, it's possible that nobody at the company knew that Belgium's King Leopold and his minions were responsible for one of the most brutal and all-encompassing forced labor systems that the world has ever known.

It's possible.  But how, then, would we account for the ad's tag line:  The Horror?

That tag line tells us that whoever designed this ad knew about the crimes of the Congo.  Knew that Joseph Conrad had written about them in his great novella Heart of Darkness.  Knew that Conrad had put the words "The horror!  The horror!" into the mouth of his character Mr. Kurtz, the colonial agent who decorated his outpost with the severed heads of his African victims.

Heart of Darkness is fiction, but it's fiction based on Conrad's experiences in Leopold's Congo.  The book, Conrad once said, "is experience... pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."

If we've eliminated ignorance, how do we make sense of the people at Devils Backbone Brewing Company and their ale?

At the very least, they've decided to attract attention in one of the most cheap, cynical, and distasteful ways I can imagine.

At worse -- and, under the circumstances, this is plausible -- they are indeed celebrating genocide.

 

Anti-Slavery International:  Congo.  Photographs of Congolese persons mutilated by rubber sentries, by Alice Harris and W. D. Armstrong, c. 1905.  Reprinted from Mark Twain's pamphlet, "King Leopold's Soliloquy."

* * *

Russell Schimmer, of Yale University's Genocide Studies Program, has written about the atrocities in the Congo:

[During Leopold's personal rule and after he had relinquished control to Belgium, the forced labor regime was designed to produce extravagant profits from the exploitation of African labor.  The commodities in question were ivory and, especially, rubber.]

Male rubber tappers and porters were mercilessly exploited and driven to death.  Leopold's agents held the wives and children of these men hostage until they returned with their rubber quota.  Those who refused or failed to supply enough rubber often had their villages burned down, children murdered, and their hands cut off.

Although local chiefs organized tribal resistance, the FP [Force Publique, colonial Congo’s military police] brutally crushed these uprisings.  Rebellions often included Congolese fleeing their villages to hide in the wilderness, ambushing army units, and setting fire to rubber vine forests.  In retribution, the FP burned villages and FP officers sent their soldiers into the forest to find and kill hiding rebels.  To prove the success of their patrols, soldiers were ordered to cut off and bring back dead victims' right hands as proof that they had not wasted their bullets.  If their shots missed their targets or if they used cartridges on big game, soldiers would cut off the hands of the living and wounded to meet their quotas.

From 1885 to 1908, it is estimated that the Congolese native population decreased by about ten million people.

Belgian parliament refused to hold any formal commission of inquiry into the human rights abuses that had occurred in the CFS [colonial Congo].  Over the next few decades, inhumane practices in the Belgian Congo continued and a huge number of Congolese remained enslaved.

You can read Schimmer's full account, here.

* * *

Update:  18 May 2012:

Jason Oliver, the head brewer at Devils Backbone, has responded to my criticism.  In explaining why he chose the name, he writes:

1) I named it because I was interested in the hypothetical “what if” premise of a pale hoppy beer the Belgians would have brewed (right or wrong for their “infamous” colony) that could have survived a tropical journey.  It was born of historical (revisionist) curiosity that has since morphed into a more contemporary Belgian-style IPA.  Even though I was aware of the terrible legacy of the colony, I was first and foremost interested in the technical aspect and not the cultural weight of Belgians involvement in the Congo.

2) “Belgian” added to the name was meant to help identify what vein of beer it is, for example : “Belgian IPA” or “Belgian Witbier”.  Belgian beers are complex and varied but often share the thread of being somewhat fruity in nature (from the unique yeast strains used).  “Belgian” being added to “Congo Pale Ale” was not meant to make light of the brutal colonial horror but to help describe some of the beers flavor to the consumer.

You can read Oliver's entire response, here.

Funky Friday: Warren Wolf, "One for Lenny."

Warren Wolf, a tremendously talented young vibes player, is in town to play a concert with the University of Virginia Jazz Ensemble, on Saturday night, and to lead a masterclass, on Saturday afternoon.

This is great news.  I was lucky enough to hear Wolf and the jazz ensemble rehearse last night, and I can tell you that it's going to be a terrific concert.

 

Warren Wolf, rehearsing with members of the University of Virginia Jazz Ensemble, 26 April 2012.  [Photos copyright John Edwin Mason, 2012.  Click on the images to see larger versions.]

Wolf released his first album last year.  (You can hear a track in the video below.)  He says that he's "trying to bring forth what most cats did back in the day, coming out right at you swinging, nice and hard, not a lot of hard melodies or weird time signatures.  I like to play really hard, fast and kind of flashy. I like to take it to a whole other level."

Also on the album are bassist Christian McBride (who co-produced the recording), pianist Peter Martin, drummer Greg Hutchinson, alto and soprano saxophonist Tim Green, and, on two tracks, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt.

 

 

Warren Wolf, "One for Lenny."  From the album Warren Wolf.

It doesn't surprise me that the university's music department has a lot of good things to say about Wolf.  In the jazz world, he's making a name for himself.

Warren Wolf is a multi-instrumentalist from Baltimore, Maryland, who has recorded two albums under his own name and performs internationally with jazz greats like Wynton Marsalis, Mulgrew Miller, Christian MacBride, Jeff "Tain" Watts, and Esperanza Spaulding.  His cutting-edge work as a leader has included some of the most forward looking up-and-comers in the genre including Darren Barrett on the trumpet and saxophonist Walter Smith.  [His] a luminous talent... combines mastery of vibraphone/marimba, drums, and piano with a unique compositional style.

 

Warren Wolf talking shop with University of Virginia Jazz Ensemble drummer Kendrick Smith, 26 April 2012.

Tomorrow night's concert will be the first time the Jazz Ensemble has hosted a vibraphonist.  Wolf will be featured on compositions by John Coltrane, Thad Jones, Pat Metheny and Kenny Dorham, among others.  The evening will also include two compositions by the jazz ensemble's director, John D'earth.

But wait, there's more.  Three student vocalists will perform in a variety of styles.  Gracie Terzian will sing her original lyrics to the Wayne Shorter classic, "Iris," from Miles Davis' groundbreaking album, ESP.  Adrianna Foster will revive the Billie Holliday classic "Fine and Mellow."  And Emily Voreas will appear with the band for the third time singing a new D'earth composition entitled "We Shall See. "

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Warren Wolf and the University of Virginia Jazz Ensemble, 8:00 pm, Saturday, 28 April 2012, Old Cabell Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.  More information, here.