We Have Waited Too Long

At the height of apartheid in 1983, Darius Brubeck, son of the legendary jazz giant Dave Brubeck and an accomplished jazz pianist in his own right, took the bold step of moving with his wife Catherine from the US to South Africa, where they established the first multi-cultural university jazz education programme on the African continent at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Working with impoverished students they defied academic bureaucracy and the repression of the apartheid state to make a vital contribution to South African music and to the cultural and material lives of hundreds of young artists.

In total the Brubecks created five multi-racial bands during apartheid, the most notable of which was The Jazzanians, with a line-up of Melvin Peters (piano), Johnny Mekoa (trumpet), Zim Ngqawana (alto sax/flute), Nic Paton (tenor & soprano sax), Andrew Eagle (guitar), Victor Masondo (bass) and Lulu Gontsana (drums and percussion).

Before recording the album We Have Waited Too Long under Brubeck’s direction, the ensemble toured America where they appeared on national television, signposting the way to the Rainbow Nation and the democratic direction a post-apartheid South Africa would soon take.

Brubeck describes the recording of We Have Waited Too Long as “a jubilant expression of the creative interaction apartheid tried to stifle” and on its welcome reissue it still sounds like a potent and infectious landmark in South African jazz.

The seven tracks on The Jazzanians’ album are all original compositions, from the opener ‘Bayete’, with its swinging township rhythms and Zulu guitar licks to the closer ‘Se Hamba Nabo’ (We Go Together) which features some wonderfully burnished trumpet playing from Mekoa of which the mighty Hugh Masekela himself would have been proud.

Elsewhere the horns are gorgeously layered, the rhythm section dynamic and the solos tight and melodic while two softer pieces, the lyrical ‘Peace Meal’ and the title-track, with its cosmic flute trilling from Ngqawana, offer light and shade.

Several of the musicians Brubeck mentored in The Jazzanians continued to play with him, Gontsana joining Rachabane and Victor Ntoni (bass) in Brubeck’s group Afro Cool Concept, while Ngqawana co-composed with Brubeck a suite setting to music speeches by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu which was commissioned in 2004 by Jazz at Lincoln Center. Ngqawana, Gontsana and Mekoa have since died but most of the other Jazzanians remain professional working musicians to this day.

The album’s reissue is accompanied by the publication of a book, Playing the Changes, in which Darius and Catherine Brubeck chronicle their years in South Africa, and a forthcoming documentary film of the same name.