Teboho Louis: The Outie from Langa

IN ONE of the most personal and powerful accounts of Louis Teboho “Bra Tebs” Moholo, titled Remembering the Blue Notes: South Africa’s First Generation of Free Jazz by Gwen Ansell, the author shares a quote that encapsulates the deep frustration which drove the mass exodus of some of South Africa’s finest artists.

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It also conveys the stifling, oppressive environment experienced by them - and other people regarded as non-white - in apartheid South Africa.

“We were all kind of rebels,” drummer Louis Teboho Moholo-Moholo recalls, “so, like birds of a feather, (we)flocked together.”

Birds do not walk away - they fly. And so it was with the Blue Notes: a group of rebels and radicals - literally, figuratively, and artistically. They flew to places where they could be themselves: artists, creatives, free spirits.

They took with them “ideas from the Xhosa music — complex rhythms; overtone singing; the oscillating harmonics of stretched bowstrings; a heterophony of voices, each cycling through its own sequence of notes and beats — that have infused Eastern Cape jazz, from the work of pioneering bandleaders such as Christopher Columbus Ngcukana in the 1950s right through to current players such as Andile Yenana and Feya Faku,” as Ansell writes.

One could add that they also carried with them the rich and vibrant urban township (elokishini) sound of the Merry Macs, and the lasting influence of big band leaders like Joel “Mbrooks” Mlomo, of whom Langa had several.

As he left these shores, Teboho carried the haunting resonance of Tem Hawker's Harmony Kings Band with him - Bra Tem is a story all on his own.