‘Jazzified’ now showing at National Gallery “City Night Life” by Sambo Kingsley (1964)
“City Night Life” by Sambo Kingsley (1964)

“City Night Life” by Sambo Kingsley (1964)

At the Gallery
The subject of this exhibition is the celebration of music that shaped the history of the urban Zimbabweans. The ability of African performance arts to transform the European tradition of composition while assimilating some of its elements is perhaps the most striking and powerful evolutionary force in the history of modern music. The genres of music that bear the marks of this influence are legion and of note is jazz and blues music. The ritualised vocalising of black workers, with its proud disregard for Western systems of notation and scales, comes in many variants: field hollers, levee camp hollers, prison work songs, street cries, and the like.

Jazz music has its roots in the struggle of the poor, black arts movement and the Black nationalist movements. The original call and response style is as much a matter of social integration as an issue of musical structure. It reflects a culture in which the fundamental Western separation of audience from performers is transcended. Integrated into ritual occasions, music retains its otherworldliness for the African, its ability to transcend the here and now.

In Zimbabwe, jazz was modified into township music, a fusion which allowed the performer to present an individual statement of pain, oppression, poverty, longing, and desire. Yet it achieved all this without falling into self-pity and recriminations. Instead the idiom offered a catharsis, an idealisation of the plight, and, in some strange way, an uplifting sense of mastery over the melancholy circumstances recounted in the context of the music. In this regard, the music offered us a psychological enigma as profound as any posed by classical tragedy.

The powerful racist traditions of the colonial government created a spectre of the macabre which froze blacks into a powerful white construct of demeaning subservience enacted by acts like the pass law of 1904 which enforced racially exclusive definitions of nationality, citizenship and identity. Here Kumbirai Mapanda’s “Mother and Child” can be seen as a protest against the gendered discrimination of the pass law.

Early on during colonial rule urban settlements developed and soon became “sites of struggles” as they were characterised by the colonial politics of domination, control, segregation and exploitation. The shebeens became the centres for these struggles.

Township music found its niche in the shebeens. The shebeens were a crucial meeting place for activists during the colonial era to discuss political and social issues. Segregation laws barred Africans from bars and pubs and led to the establishment of shebeens. The shebeens were run illegally by shebeens queens and served home-brew and home distilled alcohol; they were periodically raided by police leading to the arrest of owners and patrons.

It was here that the patrons could express themselves culturally and they offered a safe place for discussion unifying the community. Township music provided the backdrop to the black experience and united people across the divides of race, region and national boundaries and made powerful statements about freedom, creativity and identity.

How art finds fulfilment — for both artist and audience — by dwelling on the oppressive and the tragic has been an issue for speculation at least since the time of Aristotle. It is against the mood and feel of Kingsley Sambo and Charles Frenandos paintings — highly sublimated pictures drained of all chaos all inchoate emotion and all romanticised unbalanced play of parts — that the artworks in the exhibition take on whatever conviction they have.

Also nestled in this exhibition is a painting by Thomas Mukarobgwa one of the early workshop painters nostalgically titled “Inyanga” which shows a yearning of things far beyond the everyday. Thomas Mu as he was affectionately known was one of the true masters of contemporary art in Zimbabwe. His artwork in this exhibition propels one to look closer.

One feels when looking at Jazzified painting that it is the composition of the whole which is the real value, indeed the only reality. Charles Fernando was a jazz player, his work shows similarities with the music he played painted in vibrant colours.

Boira Mteki’s apocalyptic “After the War-looks” in bold colours at the lack of gains by the Africans after the Second World War — stripped bare of apologies. Finally to round off this exhibition is Marvelous Mangena’s “Inspiration” from a bass player, a post-independence celebration providing a reflection on the role jazz music played as another “site for the struggles”.

Like jazz music, the artworks in this exhibition draw from life experience and human emotion as the inspiration of the creative force and a history of people. They undertook to make something invisible visible. The collection on display showcases the unifying elements of the rhythm and actions that brought people together. The meeting point for the reflections is the music.

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