Duke Ellington, Sathima Benjamin and "Solitude"

After watching segments of the documentary, Sathima's Windsong, I know understand how Benjamin describes her singing as "emoting" as well as noting the influence of Billie Holiday on her vocal style and outlook to jazz vocal artistry. "Discovered" in Europe while Duke was on tour in Zurich, back in 1963, "Solitude" was part of a series of recordings that were never released until the 1990s. Duke plays piano whilst members of Dollar Brand's South African trio accompany, though the somber tone and relatively sparse arrangement is based on an ethereal Sathima's longing vocals, heartbreaking yet optimistic. Indeed, this is perhaps my favorite recording of Ellington's standard, "Solitude," along with an instrumental take from the Money Jungle sessions with Max Roach and Charles Mingus from the same decade. Her take on "Lover Man" from the same 'rediscovered' album recorded in 1963, showcases her affinity for Billie Holiday as well as a unique use of space with occasional stops of breaths that permeate the "Solitude" and "Lover Man."

That these South African jazz artists, from Cape Town, were exposed to jazz and other American (particularly, African-American) musical and cultural influences is noteworthy, too. As a cosmopolitan port city with exposure to American minstrelsy, African-American gospel hymns through the influence of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Abdullah Ibrahim was exposed to this Christian church, which appealed to many Black South Africans and some Coloureds, and, according to lectures at UCT, Black South Africans generally looked up to or valued African-American intellectuals and culture, to a certain extent), the presence of West Indian and African-American sailors in the docks  (apparently, that's the origin of the nickname, "Dollar," for Ibrahim, and Ibrahim's grandmother was a founding member of the AME church in South Africa, according to this interview ). In addition, radio, marabi and local evolutions of jazz in South Africa's townships, derived from ragtime, blues, as well as 'traditional' forms of music of the Xhosa, Zulu, and other ethnic groups carried over to create a plethora of local jazz scenes and styles in South Africa, as well as the influence of American swing and bop. And, as Sathima herself describes in Sathima's Windsongs, the parallels between American Jim Crow and racism with South African apartheid, from the similar language (Coloured and Colored) to racial segregation, provided another link between Cape Town and South Africa's urban Black population (Black meaning Black South Africans as well as Coloureds), illustrated evidence of trans-oceanic links within a broader sphere of the "Black Atlantic" with similar struggles and identity formulations. The 1970s "Afro" movement in some Coloured Cape Town townships during the rise of youth anti-apartheid resistance, though never completely bridging the divide between Xhosas and Coloureds in the Cape Flats, is another instance of African-American culture, music, and aesthetics appealing to a broader "Black" world across the Atlantic, as John Edwin Mason so convincingly argues in his "Mannenberg: Notes on the Making of an Icon and Anthem."

Thus, Sathima's relationship with Duke, not only represents their musical affinities for one another, but part of a broader process and dynamic set of relations that transcend national divisions, linking Cape Town to 'colored' people of the US in terms of music and, to a certain degree, religion and resistance to apartheid, both American and South African. And last but not least, the beautiful heterogeneous music of American jazz, itself a fusion of African, European and Latin American influences, was never decidedly "American" due to its diverse origins, spread, and codevelopment of local styles all over the world, from South Africa to Ethiopia, France to Russia. We, the listener, are treated in the process with compelling music, that shows the intersections of humanity along cultural lines, through oceans, mountains, deserts, and tundra. Jazz, simply, is universal music.