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Yakhal InKomo A Classic South African Jazz Album PDF
Yakhal InKomo A Classic South African Jazz Album PDF
album
By Tony McGregor
July 2008
"I once saw Mankunku Ngozi blowing his saxophone. Yakhal' inkomo. His
face was inflated like a balloon, it was wet with sweat, his eyes huge and
red. He grew tall, shrank, coiled into himself, uncoiled and the cry came
out of his horn.
"That is the meaning of Yakhal' inkomo." - Mongane Wally Serote: from the
introduction to his collection of poetry entitled Yakhal' inKomo, published
by Renoster Books in 1972.
From the first deep,
broad notes of
Agrippa Magwaza's
bass one knows that
this is a special
album. The title
track, Yakhal'
inKomo, starts with
Magwaza and pianist
Lionel Pillay laying
down a funky groove
with a two-note bass
ostinato until the
soulful tenor of
Winston Mankunku
Ngozi comes in
about four and a half
bars later to lay
down the main
theme.
This theme came to
be one of the most
1 Cover of the CD re-releaseinstantly recognisable in all of South African jazz.
Fans at jazz gigs unfailingly greet these bars with
shouts and cries of recognition. This composition by the man
affectionately, and almost universally, known to jazz fans simply as
"Mankunku" was taken into the hearts and consciousness of people from
its first release in 1968, to the extent that it sold around 50 000 copies in
its first two years. This is an incredible figure in South African jazz
recording history, and made it the biggest jazz album ever released here,
a position it still holds against some pretty stiff competition.
When this album was recorded apartheid was exactly 20 years old and
many of Mankunku's peers had gone into exile and those who stayed had
to endure what jazz writer Gwen Ansell, in Soweto Blues (New York:
Yakhal’ inKomo Page 1
Continuum, 2004), called "symbolic annihilation" which "became part of
the hegemonic staging and broadcasting of jazz," because "the white
authorities found it unacceptable that black musicians should be
acknowledged as capable of playing such 'sophisticated' music."
Ansell goes to relate how "Playing behind a screen at Cape Town City Hall
while a white musician mimed his notes, reedman Winston Mankunku
Ngozi was billed as Winston Mann."
Poet John Hendrickse, who knew a thing or two about jazz and South
Africa, must have had this in mind in his poem “Remember” (in Khoi,
1990):
Where did you steal that culture
Where did you steal that suit
Fear gave him that sinking feeling
He’d been stealing dignity
In a 2003 interview with Gwen Ansell, quoted in her book, Mankunku said:
“Yakhal’ inKomo was an odd tune. Things were tough then – but don’t ask
me about all of that, I don’t want to discuss it. You had to have a pass; you
got thrown out; the police would stop you, you know? I was about 22. I
threw my pass away; wouldn’t carry it. We had it tough. I was always
being arrested and a lot of my friends and I thought it was so tough for
black people and put that into the song. So it was The Bellowing Bull: for
the black man’s pain. And a lot of people would come up to me and say
quietly: “Don’t worry bra’. We understand what you are playing about.”