Hugh Tracey, colonial dance bands, and the jazz sound of Bulawayo

George De Stefano examines the intersection of recorded sound and ethnographic practice in a review of the latest Hugh Tracey recordings from Africa to be released on CD.

Two albums capturing an era

Colonial Dance Bands — Kenya, Tanganyika, Portuguese East Africa, Northern Rhodesia, Belgian Congo, 1950 and 1952
Bulawayo Jazz — Southern Rhodesia, 1950, 51, 52
Both released by Sharp Wood Productions (www.swprecords.com)

The Ghanaian scholar Kofi Agawu, in a critique of how ethnomusicologists conceptualize and write about Africa, points to a 1953 speech that Hugh Tracey delivered to the International Folk Music Council. Tracey observed that everyone at the Council was European, a fact that he said left them at a disadvantage when discussing the music of “a people radically unlike ourselves.”

Yet Tracey urged Europeans to take on the task of representing “the African” because, in his words, “he” was “pathetically incapable of defending his own culture and indeed is largely indifferent to its fate… we… are attempting to tide over the period during which irreparable damage can be done and until Africans themselves will be capable of appearing at our conferences as well-informed representatives of their own peoples.”

Agawu, a musicologist who works in both African and European classical traditions, contends that Tracey’s depiction of Africans as “radically unlike” Europeans is part of a lasting strategy of “differencing.” Highlighting distinctions between European and non-European cultures rather than shared traits is a pattern that stretches back to the Enlightenment and is deeply entwined with European colonialism and racism.

An Englishman by birth, Hugh Tracey moved to Rhodesia in 1920 to manage his family’s tobacco farm. There he became captivated by the songs his Shona-speaking African workers sang while laboring in the fields. That experience sparked his lifelong fascination with sub-Saharan indigenous music. From 1929 until his death in 1977, he devoted himself to finding and recording African musicians.

Tracey was an enlightened colonialist who firmly believed that African music possessed enormous aesthetic value and that it could help foster African social and cultural development. He pursued this conviction despite opposition from colonial administrations and religious authorities who denied that Africans had any culture worth preserving.

His earliest efforts included a handful of discs featuring performances by young Africans from southern Rhodesia, produced for Columbia Records’ British division. These tracks were the first recordings of indigenous Rhodesian music ever made and published. The pioneering producer John Hammond used some of this music as an overture to his legendary 1938 Carnegie Hall concert “From Spirituals to Swing.” Throughout the 1930s, Tracey documented hundreds of African performances on plain aluminum discs, using a primitive portable recording machine.

In 1954 he established the International Library of African Music (ILAM) in South Africa, eventually issuing a series of more than 200 albums that form a vast and unparalleled archive of indigenous African music.

Tracey believed that Africans would eventually outgrow the need for European intermediaries and would represent themselves, and he thought European rule in Africa would be temporary. Yet, as Agawu points out, Tracey and other Africanist ethnomusicologists “did not pursue the task of transferring power to ‘Africans themselves’ with any urgency.” Agawu adds that even if they had wanted to, they could not have, because “maintaining an imbalance of power is logically necessary for ethnomusicological practice.”

Bulawayo Jazz and Colonial Dance Bands contain about 50 tracks that Tracey recorded between 1950 and 1952, before liberation movements transferred power from Europeans to Africans. The music reaches us heavily shaped by Tracey’s taste (fortunately his ears were good), by technological and commercial constraints, and, most significantly, by the lack of power — both political and discursive — that Africans endured under brutal European rule. The name of one of the bands featured on Bulawayo Jazz says it all: De Dark Brownies.

All right, you might say: these two albums are heavily overdetermined as cultural artifacts, with performances compromised and even warped by colonial production relations. But do they still deserve our attention? Absolutely. Some selections are rough and forgettable, but more often we hear gifted musicians playing with soul, creativity, and pure enjoyment.

Although some of Tracey’s recordings were released commercially by South African Gallo Records, most of his invaluable collection never reached an international audience, remaining accessible mainly to scholars. That changed in 1998, when drummer and producer Michael Baird, together with Tracey’s son Andrew, launched the Historical Recordings by Hugh Tracey series on the Sharp Wood Productions label. Bulawayo Jazz and Colonial Dance Bands are the final two albums in this series, and both include tracks that have never been released before.

Dance bands and jazz in colonial Africa

Some of the colonial dance bands were professional, playing in hotels for European audiences; others were amateur groups that copied what they heard on the radio and performed their versions for predominantly African crowds. The typical lineup featured a lead tenor sax, along with trumpet or clarinet, strummed banjo or guitar, stand-up bass or tuba covering the bass parts, drums, and various percussive noisemakers like rattles and struck bottles. Their repertoires included rumbas, tangos, fox-trots, and songs in the taarab style — a homegrown idiom blending Swahili and Arabic influences along with Indian and Egyptian film music. Taarab numbers such as “Baadina” by the Egyptian Social Club and the four tracks by the Mombasa-based Jauharah Orchestra contribute some of the album’s most appealing moments.

Bulawayo jazz (the style) originated in the city of the same name, a commercial center in southern Rhodesia. As Michael Baird notes in his thorough liner notes, until the 1960s Bulawayo’s was the only jazz style to emerge outside the United States other than the gypsy swing of the Hot Club de France.

The Bulawayo sound centered on a lead alto sax, typically part of a front line that also included tenor sax and trumpet. Strummed banjos and acoustic guitars, double bass or tubas and trombones handling bass parts, and occasionally pianos and violins rounded out the ensembles. Jazz enthusiasts might hear echoes of early New Orleans and Kansas City styles in some tracks. But the raw material came from African folk music or original compositions rooted in traditional sources, not the blues and Tin Pan Alley pop tunes that fueled early American jazz. This is distinctly African jazz, as fans of later artists like South African saxophonist Dudu Pukwana will instantly recognize.

It is also jazz with little improvisation, most tracks clocking in at under three minutes. This was a commercial decision. Baird explains that these tracks were “musically ‘censored’ so to speak, clean-cut with a minimum of improvisation” so that Gallo Records — whose owner subsidized Tracey’s field trips — could release them as singles.

That means we are not hearing what these musicians truly played, with the exception of “Skokiaan,” a tune by saxophonist, songwriter, and vocalist August Musarurwa, the leading figure in the Bulawayo scene. (Musarurwa appears everywhere on Bulawayo Jazz, playing on 15 of the album’s 23 tracks with both the Cold Storage Band and the Chaminuka Band.) “Skokiaan,” named after a potent homemade liquor, became an international hit in the 1950s, recorded by Louis Armstrong, the Four Lads, Perez Prado, and Bill Haley and the Comets.

The version on Bulawayo Jazz is actually a practice take, but as Baird notes, it captures the true sound of the Cold Storage Band: loose, cooking, and “exploding with energy and improvisation.”

Although intensely rhythmic, Bulawayo jazz did not swing. It hewed more to a South African approach that sat midway between straight eighth notes and swing time. “I Charlie Jive” by the Los Angeles Orchestra is one of the few tracks played in true swing time.

Sound quality and legacy

What is surprising is the sound quality of these half-century-old recordings. It is remarkably good, especially considering the technology available at the time and the conditions under which the recordings were made. Most performances were captured in Bulawayo, many in a social hall. Like nearly all of Tracey’s recordings, they are mono, captured with hand-held microphones, with few fade-ins or fade-outs because Tracey felt those techniques violated the integrity of the performance.

Bulawayo Jazz and Colonial Dance Bands serve as time capsules from a dark period in human history, when Africans were subject peoples living under foreign domination, their labor exploited and even their art compromised and distorted by what Bob Marley would call the “Babylon system.”

Since the end of colonialism, African musicians have operated from an incomparably stronger position, despite the deep inequities of postcolonial societies and global capitalism. Consider this partial list of brilliant artists who have emerged from Africa since the 1950s: Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Manu Dibango, Orchestra Baobab, Super Rail Band, Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Youssou N’Dour, Baaba Maal, Salif Keita, Amadou and Mariam, Maryam Mursal, Thione Seck, Toumani Diabate, and the late Ali Farka Toure.

Although they still rely on transnational recording companies to distribute and promote their music, today’s African musicians are far better compensated than Tracey’s musicians were, most of whom never received proper payment for their work. (Some long-overdue restitution is now being made: a portion of royalties from sales of ILAM recordings on Smithsonian’s Global Sound website will be distributed to the original musicians or their descendants.) They now have access to an international market and perform all over the world to enthusiastic audiences. In July 2006, I and several thousand other fans had the enormous pleasure of watching Amadou and Mariam turn Central Park into one big joyous party — a fête in a global village, to paraphrase one of their song titles.

I think Hugh Tracey would have appreciated the Malian couple and their high-powered band. And as he shook his English hips to their dance beats, he might have realized that African music, far from being “radically unlike” the West’s, is now “ours” — a dominant and irreplaceable strand in the world’s music.