When darius brubeck was six, his father-the jazz musician Dave Brubeck-took him backstage to meet Louis Armstrong. Later he met the awesome Duke Ellington, too. "He was a huge presence. He was a sort of father figure to Dave," says Darius. But it was Miles Davis who spent the most time at the Brubecks' house in Oakland, California. "Everyone assumed that they were having profound conversations about jazz, but actually Dave and Miles had a passion for talking about boxing and basketball. One day the famous jazz critic (and later founding editor of Rolling Stone), Ralph Gleason, called by. He was a big power in the music business-everyone knew that. He was charmed by the sight of two such big jazz personalities just sitting around yarning about Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson: in those days, not a lot of white guys had black friends round to their houses. So Gleason was impressed. 'You know,' he said to Miles, 'you could come over to my house too.' Miles always had to have the whole world on his terms and, having formed the impression that Gleason didn't know much about boxing or basketball, just said. 'Oh yeah, what for?'"
If Darius (named after the French composer, Darius Milhaud, under whom Dave, like Burt Bacharach, studied) was once a little white boy sitting at the feet of these black jazz greats, a good deal of his own adult life has been spent transmitting what he learned to the predominantly black world of South African jazz. Darius has been my friend for many years. One of the best things in the friendship has been that he was a supporter of the ANC for pretty well all that time, and while that once described me, too, it ceased to do so some time back. In South Africa such friendships aren't easy. Our tastes in jazz have diverged too-Darius delving into more abstract sounds, while I remained an uneducated enthusiast. But what he has achieved through his music is not something for which you need a musical education to appreciate. As director of the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music and professor of jazz studies at the University of Natal, Durban, Darius has been a big figure in South African jazz: for 17 years he tirelessly taught, performed and fundraised for-sometimes even housed-the aspiring talents from the townships who are the bulk of his students.
Inevitably, this has plunged him into a deeply political atmosphere. Jazz was the culture of the anti-apartheid struggle: in the popular mind, the black jazz scene of the 1950s-the era before Sharpeville and before the ANC was forced underground or into exile-was imprinted with a special verve and style; a lost golden age. Jazz greats such as Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim had chosen exile rather than compromise, and the jazzmen who stayed on were self-consciously the bearers of a black art form; as such they were sympathisers with the liberation movement.
Anyone who attended jazz concerts in the mid-1980s in multi-racial Durban venues such as The Moon or Ben Pretorius's Rainbow Club could not miss the dissident overtones of the enterprise-even if you didn't know that clandestine ANC assignations were going on in the room behind Ben's bar. Ben, one of the unsung heroes of the struggle, had the bright idea of putting a jazz club right at the bus terminal, where Africans were bound to congregate, and holding his concerts at mid-day so that "white by night" was not an issue. The bus terminal was a rough place, but once you went down the steps into the Rainbow, Ben's genial spirit reigned. I remember once staggering out of the multi-racial togetherness of the Rainbow to face a white motorcycle cop, gun drawn, standing over a suspected (black) mugger, saying "Go on, make my day": the old South Africa on the street outside; the new South Africa, waiting to be born, back down there in the club.
Darius often played the Rainbow with his professional band, Afro Cool Concept, or the student bands he supported: the NU Jazz Ensemble, the Jazzanians, the NU Jazz Connection. You only had to see white and black students gripped by the virtuoso trumpet solos of Johnny Mekoa, or swaying to the banshee wail of the township sax of Zim Ngqawana (one of Darius's prize students, now with a big reputation in the US and Europe), to realise the political potential of it all. Suddenly, music made people one-made ethnicity and language, let alone colour, irrelevant. But music was political for another reason: the cultural and sporting boycott of South Africa ordained by the ANC could have cut off South African jazz from the international scene. Thanks in part to Cathy, Darius's South African wife and manager, it didn't.
I first met Cathy in 1963, when we were both part of the embattled little anti-apartheid movement on the Durban campus of the University of Natal. Cathy had already served as national secretary of the Liberal party; while I was to the left of her, all that really mattered in the eyes of the mainly racist students was that we both supported universal suffrage and wanted complete racial integration; this meant that we were both regarded as dangerous. I joined the Communist party but got fed up with its authoritarianism. Cathy never joined, and so remained more idealistic and more in touch with the exile movements than I did. On such details biographies hang.
Cathy first met Darius in New York in 1976. Her exile links proved invaluable when Darius moved to South Africa in 1983. Both the ANC exiles and the US Congressional Black caucus understood the "struggle credentials" of the bands Darius put together. Crucially, this allowed the Jazzanians to sidestep the cultural blockade in 1988 and tour the US, where they appeared on CBS and NBC television. This seemed light years away when I first heard Darius play at The Moon down the South Coast road from Durban in 1984: the jazz mingles in my memory with the smell of diesel, the potholed roads, the cheap curry and beer, the badly lit hall whose only virtue was that it was close to the giant Umlazi township. But you knew that out there where the ANC was, in London or Lusaka, this had street cred.
the equation between jazz and non-racism was natural to Darius. "Whereas the white people I knew in the US ranged from poor white to rich, more or less all the black people I knew were talented, capable, and some were famous. If anything, I got the feeling that black people were more up-market than whites," says Darius. Dave Brubeck's complete refusal of racism was not just a matter of loyalty to black friends: he was a thorough-going modernist-the Oakland house is still an architectural modernist landmark-and liked all sorts of people, all sorts of music. There were two Leonards about the house-Leonard Bernstein, with whom Dave sometimes worked, and the occasional babysitter, Lenny Bruce, radical cynic and comedian, who broke his leg jumping off a wall in a cape, claiming to be "Superjew."
Young Darius liked the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. He liked playing rock on an electric guitar and was determined not to be a jazz musician. This was not just a matter of escaping the shadow of a famous father. "There was, so to speak, a long time before Dave Brubeck became Dave Brubeck. He was just a musician making a living, and the whole family moved from gig to gig." Darius was not yet into his teens, however, when Dave's success put him on the front of Time magazine. Soon after, in 1959, the quartet cut Take Five. Columbia Records hesitated: it thought jazz musicians should perform covers of the latest hits from musicals, not cut "concept" records like Take Five. The disc was only released in 1960-it quickly became the biggest selling jazz record of all time, and goes on selling steadily today. Even this achievement was only softly registered. "I am one of six, with four brothers and a sister," says Darius, "and we sort of noticed that the question of whether we were all going to university was no longer a financial issue."
It was a household in which it was natural to be a liberal: even in the 1940s and 1950s Dave would refuse to play anywhere which was not racially integrated, and would defy all "Jim Crow" barriers and rules. Darius, who by now had moved with his family to Connecticut, spent the summer of 1965 registering blacks to vote in Mississippi, but he wouldn't have described himself as political. South Africa changed that. In 1984 the police broke up one of Darius's concerts in Durban, not just because it was integrated but because they sensed, rightly, that the whole jazz culture was politically subversive. Unabashed, Darius took a group to play in the Soweto Jazz Festival that year, with the township in tumult and armoured police cars everywhere. Most whites would have feared for their lives, especially since it was the day before a mass action stay-away. "In fact the atmosphere was festive and politically very upbeat," Darius recalls. "The police were present, but were neither threatened nor threatening: no heavy artillery that time, at least." Darius took another group to play in the Umlazi Jazz Festival: potentially even more dangerous, because the giant township near Durban was then racked by violent conflict between the (ANC-aligned) United Democratic Front and Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha movement. Darius got through this without difficulty too.
But the overall situation could hardly have been bleaker, and in 1985 Darius went with his colleague Chris Ballantine and the black jazzman, Allen Kwela, to explain to a music conference in Montreal "How apartheid killed jazz in South Africa." Partly it was because the crackdown on the black liberation movements had knocked the heart out of black culture in general: the police were brutal and most Africans were cowed. But jazz is also a quintessentially urban form. It depends on having venues and clubs in accessible urban settings which, crucially, have to quench their clients' thirst in order to pay their way. The Group Areas Act and the forced removal of black communities such as Sophiatown and District Six meant that both the audience and the musicians were now a long way from town-and the pass laws were used to ensure that cities were "white by night," the natural time for jazz clubs to operate. The facilities in the white city were in any case rigidly segregated, and thus barred to black jazzmen and their fans. Toughest of all, the Liquor Act made the mixed race consumption of alcohol illegal even in private homes.
Neither the record companies nor the South African Broadcasting Corporation supported black jazz. Apartheid decreed that music should be ethnic: there would be a Zulu music programme, a Xhosa one, and so on. Even when white teenagers danced to rock-'n'-roll, the Springbok Radio was careful not to tell them that many of the singers they were listening to were black (for years, like most such teenagers, I had no idea that Fats Domino and Chuck Berry were black). Jazz, not only inter-ethnic but from its deepest roots inter-racial, was anathema.
No wonder, then, that the black 1950s jazz world seems now like a lost golden age-rather like the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s. Some leading black jazz players were still around, however, and it was to them that Darius turned when he arrived in South Africa in 1983-to Barney Rachabane, Johnny Mekoa, Sipho Gumede, Winston Mankunku, Sandile Shange, Ezra Ngcukana, Allen Kwela and Victor Ntoni. Several of these established players were to attend courses and teach with Darius at Natal University, but their expertise was already such as to provide a solid core grouping and the key to finding township talent. The problem was that, back in the 1980s, it was difficult to find black students able to pass the university's entrance requirements. Darius got round this by insisting on a diploma for which the usual entry requirements did not apply. Most black students who arrived to study jazz knew only the impoverished and parochial world of the townships. But two of his students became Fulbright scholars, one became a Hollywood composer, others have won prizes, become international performers in their own right, or are jazz teachers themselves today.
Gradually, through Darius's programme, new jazz stars emerged: Melvin Peters, now one of the top jazz pianists in the country and a music academic himself; Zim Ngqawana; and Victor Masondo, now a producer and session musician in the US and South Africa. Other musicians, a mixture of nationally known professionals and students-Duke Makasi, Barney Rachabane, Lulu Gontsana and Sazi Dlamini -toured abroad with Darius and appear on various of his CDs. Later, big established names such as Joseph Shabalala (leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo) and Hugh Masekela were made fellows of the Jazz centre.
When Dlamini (who now writes music for Sesame Street in the US), Gumede, and Shabalala got together with Darius for a concert combining American and South African standards, Darius found himself teaching them Swing Low Sweet Chariot-and later was pleased to hear that Ladysmith Black Mambazo had teamed up with Dolly Parton to make a new hit version of the song in 1994. For the Jazz centre was now a place in which such international tie-ups were entirely thinkable.
was darius's position as a white leader in the predominantly black world of South African jazz ever challenged on racial grounds? Never in South Africa, he says. His worst moment on that score actually came at a performance the Jazzanians gave in Detroit, attended by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. "They were quite way-out guys-not just Afro shirts but war paint on their faces-black power sort of stuff. As I finished playing, Joseph Jarman, their sax player, walked across and demanded to know who was the leader of our band. My heart sank and I thought, oh boy, here we go. But when I said 'I am' he just said, 'How can I get one of those NU Jazz T-shirts?'"
Darius has been involved in an enterprise parallel to that of his fellow American, Paul Simon, who helped to put South African music on the world map with his Graceland LP. When Simon staged his Born at the Right Time tour of South Africa, Darius's Afro Cool Concept band opened his show in Durban. "People like Ray Phiri and Joseph Shabalala saw their work with Paul as one the greatest things in their lives. What I respect about Paul so much is that although he may appear laid-back, he knows just what he wants to create and then just goes at it till he gets it right."
With the ending of apartheid and the arrival of democratic politics, the whole context changed. The jazz centre now finds itself continually asked by government to provide music for official occasions-jazz has lost its status as the culture of struggle. "It's ironic," says Darius. "Technically our students are better now than they used to be. On the other hand, I find myself having to explain not just jazz, but what apartheid was." Darius himself has stepped back a pace or two from the political arena.
You sense that the time could be coming when he might want to move on. California's University of the Pacific has set up a Dave Brubeck Institute and has invited Darius over to see whether he might play a role there. The Brubeck family has always exercised a powerful pull. When Dave turned 70, and then 75, Darius and his brothers-Matthew (cello), Dan (drums) and Chris (trombone, bass)-played with Dave at special concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra in the Barbican. The 70th birthday was an especially grand affair, with St?phane Grapelli on violin and Prince Charles and Princess Diana in attendance. Darius and Dave played two grand pianos alongside one another. The 80th birthday celebration this year-again in the Barbican (21st-23rd December)-promises to be an even bigger affair.
Currently on sabbatical at Nottingham University's music department, Darius and Cathy see England mainly in terms of their other great passion: football. But although Cathy is a member of the South African Manchester United's supporters' club, they also cheered for Leeds United last season because they take such delight in seeing a black South African, Lucas Radebe, captaining a big English side. But for Darius, Nottingham really represents a return to his roots: he is writing a thesis on the meaning of 1959-the year in which Take Five changed everything-as a pivotal year in jazz history, and he has been holding a series of special concerts around the theme "1959: The Beginning of Beyond."
This all made me rather gloomy that the Brubecks might be joining the brain drain from South Africa. "No way," says Darius. "I'm going back. I'm too committed to what's been built there to walk away. But I can't say I'm staying anywhere forever. The whole thing about being a jazzman is that you have to stay open to improvisation and new experience." Hey, man, I say, is that just jazz talk? But then, it only seemed like jazz talk that Darius might swap a privileged life in California to risk his neck in the townships. If jazz talk isn't serious, he says, what is? n
