Wednesday, March 6, 2013

‘It is not the mystery that has changed, but the questions which are asked of it and the revelations which are expected from it’: An appraisal of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (1961)*


by Sibabalwe Oscar Masinyana


This is the most widely circulated and therefore easily accessible biographical information about Cheikh Hamidou Kane: he lives in Dakar and he was born in 1928 in Mataru in Senegal. Like most Muslims born into an Islamic family and community he began his studies at a madrasa (Islamic school) in Senegal, and then attended the University of Paris to study philosophy and law before training as an administrator at the Ecole Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer. He returned to Senegal in 1959 to occupy a string of significant administrative posts in Mamadou Dia’s government before working for UNICEF in Lagos and Abidjan. In 1961, he published L’Aventure Ambiguë which won him the 1962 Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noir. 

A slim work most likely, even if loosely, based on his personal experiences, Ambiguous Adventure (translated from French by Katherine Woods in 1963) is one of the best kept secrets in African literature with its continued survival assured by a devoted cult (word of mouth) following. It has recently been re-issued in a revised translation by Melville House publishers as part of their Neversink Library series that "champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored." Being the only novel Kane wrote, it shares the same mystique (and provokes the same fealty) as the other more famous singular novels written by an author –Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1758-67), Alain-Fournier’s The Lost Domain (1912), Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard(1958), John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), and probably the most famous of them all being Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960). It has received high praise and cited as a favourite by personalities like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Angélique Kidjo.


“That day, Thierno had beaten him again. And yet Samba Diallo knew his sacred verse;” thus begins the novel with the young Samba Diallo being severely punished at the madrasa by his aging teacher for mispronouncing a verse of the Holy Qur’an. The teacher is harsh, so merciless that Samba’s ear, “already white with scarcely healed scars, was bleeding anew” from Thierno’s hard pinch “cutting through the cartilage of the lobe.”  Yet, this scene of what we’d now certainly classify as child abuse is soon transformed by the teacher’s reflections as a necessary even though seemingly cruel step in ensuring that this child achieves perfection in his recitation of the Word of Allah. Thierno is a very old and highly devoted teacher responsible for the religious education of the county’s children in the school he runs on the hearth. He is highly revered and regarded as the conscience of the country, for “No one in the world, certainly, had crouched down like this so many times in his life as the teacher of the Diallobé, for no one prayed so much as he.” 

He believes that this child is a gift from Allah; “In the forty years that he had devoted himself to the task – and how meritorious a task it was! – of opening to God the intelligence of the sons of men, the teacher had never encountered anyone who, as much as this child, and in all facets of his character, waited on God with such a spirit.” Whilst listening to him correctly recite the verse, Thierno is moved anew by how the “Word of God flowed pure and limpid” from Samba’s lips. The teacher is devoted to making him a perfect hafiz because of his certainty that “So closely would he live with God, this child, and the man he would become, that he could aspire – the teacher was convinced of this – to the most exalted levels of human grandeur.”

But Thierno’s plans for the child are interrupted at the behest of Samba’s cousin, The Most Royal Lady (La Grande Royale), who insists that the child, along with other children of the elite families should attend the foreign school even though she detests it as much as everyone else in the community. She is the older sister of the Diallobé chief and the first born of the Dialloubé royal family, and although a woman (and therefore not eligible for rulership) she is nonetheless a powerful, persuasive woman with whom “no one dared hold out against for long.” “It was said that it was she, more than her bother, whom the countryside feared,” and that she had pacified the enemy tribes by her firmness and that the tribes “subjugated by her extraordinary personality had been kept in obedience by her prestige.”  She convinces the whole community that they should send their best children to the foreign schools in order to learn from their conquerors “the art of conquering without being in the right” as a way of ensuring the future of their children. 

However, the chief’s main concern, which surfaces throughout the novel, is that in learning from these new schools the children will forget. “Would what they would learn be worth as much as what they would forget?” The Most Royal Lady shares these concerns: “Perhaps the memory of us will die in them. When they return from the school, there may be those who will not recognise us.” However, she insists that for the future survival of the community they as the elders “should agree to die in our children’s hearts and that the foreigners who have defeated us should fill the place, wholly, which we shall have left free.” The rest of the novel, which chronicles Samba’s experiences as he journeys from the Dialloubé country to the foreign school and eventually to Europe to study philosophy at a university in France until his return to his native country, is an extended engagement with this question of the effects of foreign, Western, education on the psyche of the African child and adult.

To be sure – as should be obvious from the above summary – Ambiguous Adventure is dated and exhibits numerous features common to almost all post-independence African literature; in a lot of ways, it covers territory we have encountered often and that we already know more or less well through other texts. At every turn it is clear in one way or another that the work is from another time, whether due to encountering what are now historical shifts presented as having just happened or through finding some philosophical exposition that the novel hoists as a dawning, and thus perhaps to us a not yetfully developed response to some still-unfolding event. Of course this is neither a surprise nor a flaw in the author’s imaginative expression; Kane was among the first bourgeois Africans to travel and study in Europe during the colonial era and must have seen as new things that our continuous exposure to them either through books or through various media or even from personal experience now seem very quotidian. 

There is, for instance, the character of ‘the fool’ in this novel that has a very Fanonian moment of being seen for the first time as a black man by white Europeans and suffering through the “incongruity” this encounter causes within the self. There is also ‘the fool’s’ exaggerated fascination with European architecture and his reflections on the West’s alienation from nature because of streets covered in asphalt that has no end; “nowhere the tender softness of the bare earth.” Moreover, the novel has a very ‘un-novelistic’ feel to it – written more like a philosophical treatise grappling with the inevitable clash of civilizations that arose from Africa’s encounter with the physically and mentally colonialising European nations – and has such, goes on tangents that although developed admirably and organically still seem to ‘lose the plot’ as it were. 

Ambiguous Adventure shares these characteristics with several other, perhaps more spectacular, African artistic products of the time – an era when, collectively and for the first time, young extremely talented politically conscious and rabidly witty (usually male) black and/or African writers in Africa and in the diasporas and abroad were articulating enduring critiques of Western civilisation through the very tools or genres that Western education had afforded them (the novel; particular kinds of poetic and philosophical expressions; the essay; etc). Observations in the novel such as, “The new school shares at the same time the characteristics of cannon and magnet. From the cannon it draws its efficacy as an arm of combat. Better than the cannon it makes conquest permanent. The cannon compels the body, the school bewitches the soul” are observations these African writers constantly wrestled with in their work. 

Kane’s conversation with the Western philosophical, historical, scientific and even religious traditions are all subjects to which African literature kept returning to and addressing with varying levels of success. So Kane’s offering, in narrative terms, is to some extent not an outlier or necessarily one that shines the brightest even though it is amongst the most noble.The text’s quiet and humble stature, I think, is what accounts for (ambiguous) comments of/or praise such as “An interesting read, though not one I’d have picked up unprompted” or “you cannot miss that this book was written more than 40 years ago” by bloggers such as MAP-MAKER from the UK and BOOK-Man-8 from Germany, respectively; it’s as if someone has to champion the book and bring it to one’s attention as special (this is how I became aware of it) because it does not particularly stand out as a literary classic that it is due to the frequency of its themes in other more highly acclaimed or popular works and also due to the relative obscurity of its creator.

However, Kane’s work stands apart for the fact that it wasn't just the usual story about an African abroad but about a Muslim African in Europe, a confluence of identity that is now decidedly more topical than it ever was during publication of the text. As such it brings into the equation a distinctive set of considerations and a particular sensibility that are necessarily absent from most of the works of this time. This subject position offers a testimonial that, historically at least, rarely rises to prominence amidst the sheer volume of African literature that was and is often underpinned by either a focus on or the conjunction or  opposition of the Christian and/or the traditional African mythos. 

Moreover, unlike most of these texts with religion as one of the central themes, Kane’s novel is a spiritual text in that it takes seriously, without a hint of irony or ridicule, the spiritual crises that Samba undergoes both as a child who is wholeheartedly engaged in an attempt to lead a life of piety as one of Thierno’s disciplines at the Glowing Hearth and then later as an adult trying to reconcile Western intellectualism with those African and Islamic values learnt from his teacher. His princely father, The Knight, with whom he lives with briefly as a university student when he arrives overseas is another instrumental figure in Samba’s spiritual and intellectual development, and the conversations in the book between father and son are decidedly some of the most brilliant moments – philosophically and spiritually – in the entire novel. It his father who, sensing the fatigue and “profound disquietude” that is threatening to break and overwhelm his son, commands him to leave Europe and go back home in order “to learn that God is not commensurable with anything, and especially not with history, whose vicissitudes are powerless in relation to His attributes.” The Knight’s letter to Samba, which constitutes Chapter 7 of Part 2 of the novel, is one of the best and most concise discourse on the merits of religious practice (as opposed to philosophising about religion) available in any literature. 

Furthermore, Ambiguous Adventure puts to unique and effective use a stylistic approach to the novel that has since become one of the conventional frames in African literature. It is a framework that was already evident in Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe’s early works, was chiselled to perfection by Wole Soyinka in his novels and dramas, and underwent endless reconfigurations right up to some of the works of contemporary writers such as Ben Okri and Véronique Tadjo in varying degrees: a rubric that is skeletal on plot, heavy on philosophy and insight, unusually religious or spiritual in an almost cosmic or mythical sense, rudimentary in characterisation in preference for one or two relatively well developed characters intermingling with numerous symbolic-figure-characters rather than particularised individuals, necessarily political if not outright polemic, and set in an unspecified yet distinctively outlined (real or mythological) African context. With these troupes for a novel-text, Kane nonetheless produced an impressively succinct, thoroughly effective and extraordinarily moving – or at least persuasive – masterpiece that is Ambiguous Adventure.

But most crucial than all this (the beauty of its remarkable yet simple sentences;  the arresting but uncomplicated imagery; the sketchily plotted adventure from Africa to Europe and back again without getting lost amidst the many characters and ideas that emerge and disappear throughout the work),the thing that ultimately inspires the reader’s fierce affection for Ambiguous Adventure, I think, is its enduring authenticity – the manner with which Kane portrays the emotional, spiritual and intellectual evolution and maturity of the novel’s main character, Samba Diallo. Samba’s feelings about the trails of his journey are feelings that many African can still identify with.  

When he says, “It may be that we shall be captured at the end of our itinerary, vanquished by our adventure itself,” he speaks of a fear that many honest African intellectuals would be very familiar with. “It suddenly occurs to us that, all along our road, we have not ceased to metamorphose ourselves, and we see ourselves as other than what we were. Sometimes the metamorphosis is not even finished. We have turned ourselves into hybrids, and there we are left. Then we hide ourselves, filled with shame.” But rather than leave us condemned in this state of shame, Kane, through Samba, offers us insights to reflect upon as possible solutions to this transformation dilemma. Reading this book would go a long way to elucidate many of the spectres encountered on our own, contemporary, ongoing, but no less ambiguous, adventure.

 *This piece was originally commissioned for publication in the inaugural issue of Deviant arts journal in late 2012 but was never published. 

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

In Rarefied Company: Remembering the Cécile Verny Quartet at Hiddingh Hall

by Sibabalwe Oscar Masinyana



True stars impel; they need never campaign. What discovery each Czgowchwz stalwart would make–of such mythic inheritance, of such erotic dimension, of a duration outside the world’s measure–was to be made in dream time. Thus, to continue the tale of Czgowchwz is to surrender to that impulse that dream logic, dream effect, dream narrative, and dream figures play on, to reveal all that there is to reveal in that insistent mode, valence, sequence, and style the Czgowchwz dream saga commands.

         James McCourt describing the fans’ devotion to the opera diva and title character of 
               his 1971 novel,  Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced “Mardu Gorgeous”)


The band enters first and we offer the customary clap as they begin strumming their instruments. Bernd Heitzler is on bass, Obi Jenne on percussion and Andreas Erchinger on piano and keyboard. Obi Jenne is playing tonight, it seems, in place of Lars Binder, the quartet's resident fourth (reason: unknown). Anyway, a short while later she enters and again we clap, perhaps begrudgingly. With this act alone  coming in last, being waited on, anticipated  her manner is already like that of the divas of old; and with a name like that she is entitled to. Nonetheless, our reluctant applause is justifiable, to a degree – most of us in this hall do not know her, and revealed finally by her entry is the fact that she looks like no diva. She is dressed in a tight-fitting knee-length white cotton dress splashed with black blotches, a loose unbuttoned black cardigan covering her arms. Her accessories are a simple black watch and ring on her right hand and a plain black necklace made out of what looks like polished river stones. Her hair reminds one of Jill Scott’s early but now-abandoned Afro-look of mildly wild dreadlock-looking hair held back with an invisible band. Voluptuous,  round-faced and endowed with thick calves covered in shiny skin-tone stockings, tonight Cécile Verny does not come across as the embodiment of a contemporary (or any other era) jazz diva.


Cape Town, Hiddingh Hall, Wednesday 29 August 2012. 20h15. After introductory speeches, Cécile Verny and her quartet have just begun their final performance to their first tour to South Africa and Lesotho. The tour began in Johannesburg with the Joy of Jazz Festival and went on Maseru, Lesotho, before concluding here tonight. They have enticingly titled tonight's program Keep Some Secrets Within, after their latest albumI have never heard of them. Not that many others here, I don’t think, have heard of them. Towards the end of the evening, when Verny thanks their sponsors and hosts (The Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts – GIPCA; the Goethe Institut; Alliance Française, and others) she too refers to the quartet as a relatively unknown band and thanks the sponsors for taking a chance with bringing them over.


My being part of this here moment is a result of one of those decisions that one weighs all day but reserves verdict for the very last minute with only the faintest hope that there shan’t be much to regret; in the end I simply came to see them out of my love for jazz and a chance to see a friend. Other people here perhaps came out of love for Germany or all things French, and some for reasons I cannot guess – all of us unusually united in the hope of a fairly satisfactory evening in the company of a German/French jazz band on its first South African tour. As she enters, I am pleased that my hopes were never particularly high, so all that is at stake is lost time. By the end of the evening, however, we all get more than we could have bargained for. But we don't know that just yet; right now I am just so underwhelmed by this woman on stage, promoted as the versatile vocalist of ballade, chanson, and rhythmic up-tempo numbers; the woman whose voice the programme says “has been one of the most important in European jazz;” yes, no, no  I don't yet see how that can be true.  For all the wrong reasons (and I know my reasons are wrong, but still), I am sceptical and feel justified. 


See, her look is the perfect picture of dowdy stability, unadventurism, and she seems unbearably tame. Beautiful, no doubt. A lady, definitely. But not really what I imagine a jazz diva ought to look like. In fact, she looks like an older version of my cousin, Sanette – humble, down-to-earth, very everyday. Nowadays a vibrant, loud look or at least a persona that says different, even for jazz musicians, is like a trademark: indispensable. But when I look at her the closest comparisons to divas that come to mind are the prim and proper Barbara Hendricks and Sibongile Khumalo, acceptable of both of them because they are, after all, classical–turned–jazz soloists (and if a classical soprano isn't prim and proper I'm not sure what else they can be). But then perhaps...


... there's also Billie Holiday (when in doubt). But Verny, as she walks around a bit listening to the band strumming their instruments, is the Holiday of early days; the days when the name Lady Day carried no hint of irony or sadness but was full of the fresh colour and the innocence of spring signified by the gardenia in her hair; the days before Billie was Billie – before the cocaine, the prison spells, the mad and wild romances, and the endless late nights filled with booze and cigarettes took their toll and eventually cemented the legendary artist that was to be passed on to us as the quintessential Billie Holiday. Though appealing in her own right, and with a life just as rough and difficult as her last years, musically early-Billie has nothing on later-Billie.  And Cécile Verny, at this moment, could pass off as young Billie reincarnated, sweet. As for the other band members assembled around her – they practically vanish. So everybody on stage, in the way they look, is positively staid. As they strum their instruments and she begins to sing I’m already thinking perhaps I shouldn't have...


The first song, Automne, for which Verny wrote the lyrics, is a recollection of her walk in the forest with her blonde childhood crush that she tried (unsuccessfully) to win over shortly after arrival in Europe from the Ivory Coast. (We learn this history from her narrative once the song is over. The song is in French.) Her voice, mingling with the languid, faint accompaniment, lures us into her den with its breezy French cadences, like an old lady’s lullaby for young love’s labours lost. With this mellow introduction, Verny invites us in – unrushed to please – warms us up by her kindling fire, but does not yet surprise us. When it’s over, we are not disappointed, but we’re not particularly pleased. It is by the end of the second song, Money Ain’t Funny, which she delivers with such gusto, that her unassuming image begins to unravel, slowly. We begin the process (that will go on until the end of the evening) of expanding the landscape into which we had initially squashed her.


Composed (or with lyrics written) by a friend of the quartet, Money Ain't Funny charts the personal and political dimensions of money and its loss, including the dangerous irresponsibility of the banking system towards people's money. “Then I got this neighbour… / She got really screwed / when she took all of her savings to a broker who was said would never lose..." That tale, of course, doesn't end well. "Now she’s sleeping on a carton public shelter / and don’t pay no rent…” This is a very serious subject about which she nonetheless sings in a manner so light and upbeat you almost want dance. (I digress. It is hard to turn money into an interesting, let alone sexy, subject for creative treatment. Even in literature. This is why contemporary literature is in a real fix: more than ever, money is a dominant governing force in our lives in ways that are confounding but we are still to come up with an aesthetic that transforms talk of money into beautiful or poetic prose.)


Thematically, Money Ain't Funny and another of the Quartet' song, Too many Frontlines, remind me of Simphiwe Dana’s Thwel' Ubunzima, a song about the difficulties of the black condition in South Africa’s cities, and like these two songs it also never fails to get the body moving. One cannot but be impressed by the daring experimentalism of juxtaposing searing social commentary with dance in such songs. Perhaps to offer us catharsis? I doubt it. More like to let the message sink in unobstructed by the defensive nature of the conscious mind; but to let it all in or in drips and drabs because its catchiness allows us not to pay much heed while it sinks in; and once locked in it slowly begins its work of transforming the listener when the conscious mind finally feels safe to unpack its truths; nest thing you’re humming it first thing in the morning and all day long. “We make music that will make you swing your hips but won't turn off your brain,” Verny says at some point and Money Ain't Funny and Too many Frontlines make that clear – social activism with zest, for sure.


By the time the quartet performs Holy Thursday, a song composed by the pianist and inspired by William Blake's (1757-1827) poem of the same title, our surrender to her presence is complete. In a voice now suddenly sombre, grave and heavy with gloom and free of the mild and easy attitudes of the earlier missives, and backed by Bernd Heitzler's haunting double bass as they contemplate how in a land with so much others can be in such want, there is nothing left for us to doubt. “Is this a holy thing to see in a rich and fruitful land? / Babes reduced to misery / fed of cold and usurious hand.” We may as well be listening to the mature Holiday or Nina Simone rendering Abel Meeropol’s Strange Fruit (sans the growl characteristic of these two masters) or to Nina telling it as it is in Mississippi Goddamn or Holiday imploring in God Bless the Child. Holy Thursday evokes the same responses. 


Even though the German publication ZEIT said of Verny, “At last a singer who doesn't copy either Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday,”  we nevertheless have to force a way of making such comparisons simply on the level of sheer skill (since not in voice quality or style). Yes, Verny's voice is a smooth, refined and trained voice. But whereas such voices usually sound clinical, Verny's is full of passionate expression alongside skillful rendition: this is the same combination that is never missing from vocal jazz masters. In mastery of technique, Verny possesses in equal measure all the skill set perfected by these jazz legends as clearly demonstrated now by her delivery of Holy Thursday. Haunting, disturbing, moving and unrelenting in its misery, but controlled so as not to be melodramatic – this is vocal genius at work and at last we’re certain we’re in the rarefied company of a highly perfected musician. The band members are as formidable an entourage as their leading lady, and together they are doing something outstanding. Someone, anyone, please – throw the wreaths on stage already!


Before the next song. Verny tells us that the pianist and keyboard player Andreas Erchinger was again involved in its composotion. "Andreas writes a lot of songs because he doesn't have a TV at home so he's got to keep busy." We laugh. Andreas probably smiles - he almost has his back to us so we can't be too sure. And The Bitter and the Sweet is sublime. “I’m walking down memory lane. / This time I’m gonna take the blame. / Taking the bitter with the sweet / again to get back on my feet…” It has the same rhythm and melody to it as E. Moilwa and Sibongile Khumalo's Thando's Groove but slower and with lyrics. “Those falling leaves on the side walk, whispering softly, under the soles of my shoes…” When it is over, I hear simultaneous exclamations of 'Whoo!' in various parts of the hall, two emanating from the stranger on my right and from me.


The song, she told us before singing it, had won an award for composition in Germany and it was one of their most popular, “... so we keep singing it and singing it and singing it.” It's no wonder why. Tonight it is perfection live. For it Obi Jenne temporarily abandons his percussion work with the drums for Udu, a vase-like instrument made of burnt clay, and he beats it softly to produce a weak drum-like sound that is the basis of the rhythm of the song from its start to its end. It provides an on-going, steady tempo that together with Erchinger's gently caressed piano slowly develops and brings to life the images formed by Verny's unstressed lyrics. “The leaves are falling down....” When it is over, as if to confront accusers, she makes us all laugh by saying, “I also sing love songs. I'm not all [fist in the air] radical.” At this point, of course, we're patty in her hands; we’re really pathetic. There is no wrong she can commit. There is no wrong we won't be willing to overlook, forgive or conceal. The audiences that saw them before us knew this – all the CDs they brought with them were sold out between Johannesburg and Maseru. We have no other way, therefore, to show our love other than being a scaled version of groupies.

Nothing could have prepared any of us for this. The few bits of information available on the web does not convey the profound experience that these musicians offer in the flesh. Bernd Heitzler solos are magnificent and Andreas Erchinger's keys are are sure but unintrusive, correct without sounding over-rehearsed. I think this is what makes them what they are - there is a build-up of experience between them that manages to remain fresh, like it's been created yesterday. They work with the smallest units of everything (instrumentation, sound, lyrics, rhythm,  etc)  to produce the widest and richest range of sounds and music and emotional expression possible. They bring well-known features of jazz into their music, reconfigure them, to create an unmistakably contemporary and unique but instantly grabbing sound. Their Youtube clips are not seductive enough. These musicians are the kind who yield their bounty at the moment that really matters – in the presence of an audience; true musicians of the highest calibre. For instance, the available video of The Bitter and the Sweet,  though lovely, is a bit old and Verny is a bit young and as such her voice (and confidence in it) had not yet reached the level of maturity – and manipulation – it now boasts of.


Two clips that come the closest to conveying what they can deliver are Part 1 and Part 2 of a recorded performance they did in Lithuania at the Klaipeda Jazz Festival in 2008 available on YouTube. Even though the clips are edited in a manner that is a bit irritating, they are nonetheless the clearest demonstration of their skill.


The official video for the song Love is..., a song they do not perform for us on this night (but from they extracted tonight’s programme title), is another Youtube clip that entices:


Tonight's sweet melody of The Bitter and the Sweet is replaced by the unpredictable rage of the next song, Poison Tree. Like the other songs, its emotional tenor moves unbelievably from lyric (“I was angry with my friend...”) to scat, and this time also to silence, in the process elevating and discarding various emotions in such quick succession that it seems like a protracted series of illusions to think that we saw her (just now!) experiencing and completely embodying these various states of being. Now playful, now sorrowful, then violently angry, only to end up laughing – all in one movement, through lyric, sound and silence. As she sings her way through this very challenging song, in rising and falling tones, whispering, scatting, effortlessly sliding from lyric to sound, sound to lyric to silence and back again, the depth and the range of her voice proves spectacular. 

Scatting is particularly well used in this song, although it is employed amazingly everywhere too. Easily one of the most abused vocal techniques as a shorthand for sounding 'jazzy', in the hands of the less-gifted scatting ends up just being noise pieces strung together. But with this lady, scats tell a story of their own; they continue a narrative, convey feelings, become instruments;  scatting is multi-functional and recognizably so - never decorative or used as a 'space filler' to while away the time or sound impress. There is already too much praise here but I may as well throw it out there: she is one of the most versatile scatters I have ever heard, and I mean ever. In Poison Tree, this perfected ability proves to be an astounding assert in terms of what it can achieve, and the band knows just what to do in this exploration of a vertiginous path in friendship and betrayal.

In between songs she has kept us entertained with narratives that are detailed enough to give the impression of familiar intimacy, but brief enough not to bore or lead us to believe we know her. Before Song for the Loved Ones (another composition from the TV-less Erchinger with lyrics by Verny, penned for her two children when they were still kids but who are now 15 and 13) is a quiet masterpiece on the unbearable simplicity of longing. The lyrics are about the quotidian and the instrumentation (with Heitzler now on an electric guitar) is very slow and sparse but the song succeeds precisely because of these elements to convey a devastating longing of the mother for her children or, as she encouraged us to do, for the loved but absent one/s, whoever they may be for us.
                                    How are you?
                                    Where are you?
                                    Who you talking to?
                                    Do you miss me?

That’s the entire song, but you would not believe it. Together, the quartet is classic jazz material, adorned with all the traditional jazz foibles – scatting (as already mentioned), long instrumental solos, varied tempos, the diva wandering on stage, whispering into each other's ears, jabbing and cheering each other on, breaking out in spontaneous laughter at some (seemingly) surprising twist in rendition, and demonstrating an established and genuine rapport between each other that can only exist amongst friends; it's almost like we've accidentally bumped into a rehearsal in progress and we're eavesdropping on people who are having fun and total disregard for our presence. These guys know what they're about – there's no need for spectacle or fanfare in doing what they do.


Their closing number – interrupted by Verny’s numerous but necessary (and very gracious) thank yous to the  sponsors, the organisers, the lightening guy,  the audience, and of course the band – is a song based on another of Blake's creations, this time a poem from a letter he wrote on August 16, 1803 to his friend Thomas Butts. Verny admits that they are very inspired by Blake. He often felt misunderstood, and as artists they identify with that feeling and with him very well.



In the letter, Blake describes the circumstances which led to his trial for high treason. “Give me your advice in my perilous adventure,” Blake began the letter, and continued to say “burn what I have peevishly written about my friend. I have been very much degraded and injuriously treated; but, if it all arise from my own fault, I ought to blame myself.” The song, To Thomas Butts, unlike the earlier song Holy Thursday, remains very faithful to Blake's original:

  
                                    O! Why was I born with a different face?
                                    Why was I not born like the rest of my race?
                                    When I look, each one starts, when I speak, I offend;
                                    Then I'm silent and passive, and lose every friend.

Blake's next stanza –

                                    Then my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise,
                                    My person degrade, and my temper chastise;
                                    And the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame;
                                    All my talents I bury, and dead is my fame

– continues the songs after the interruption and the last lines of the poem are turned into the chorus of the song:

                                    I am either too low, or too highly priz'd;
                                    When elate I'm envied; when meek I'm despis'd

and what a song it is. It is very upbeat, as if for a marching ensemble or written over a tune borrowed from an African-American spiritual (Blake, with his Swedenborgian inclination of a world of waking visions and very unconventional spirituality – with all what that entailed – might or might not approve). When the song is over we all know church is out! Obi Jenne, after a whole night of waiting, finally gives us his solo, sweating and eyes closed perhaps because of the glare of light shined onto his face. He drums us out, while Cécile Verny blows us kisses, thanks us and waves us goodnight.

The organisers present her with a bunch of deep-orange roses, from which she picks one rose at a time and presents to Heitzler, Jenne and Erchinger. They take a bow, and another, before she disappears through the back door followed by her band.  The clapping does not stop, and soon she re-emerges (this time to a surer applause), bows again and confers with the band to sing another tune. With the same pace as the opening number and like it the only other song in French, it is about a woman about to fall sleep before realising she has left the light on but hopes that her lover will realise this and come and switch it off for her. She imagines how this scene will play out: how he’ll come in and tuck her in, perhaps kiss her gently and tip-toe around the room so as to not wake her up. It is the perfect ending to a perfect evening, and when it is over the audience murmurs sounds of deep satisfaction.

With the evening done, we slowly file outside the hall and mill around in the cold hoping to get a glimpse of the voice, like the Czgowchwz devotees in McCourt’s novel waiting outside the Metropolitan Opera House for their star to emerge and shower her in praise. This is what we are reduced to, huddling outside on a chilly week night waiting for her to emerge. But with no sign of her, slowly the crowd outside dissipates, until five, two and then no one is left. Where is she? What is she doing? With whom is she debriefing the evening’s proceedings? The imagination runs away... Is she smoking, drinking, and already thinking of tomorrow’s schedule to the airport and their flight home? We leave her and her band behind, physically but not in memory; wondering but satisfied, leaving behind the same mystery we had come to see barely understood. Her bravura performance was all she gave us and nothing more. And that was a gift satisfying much.

At some point during the many interruptions of To Thomas Butts Verny had asked that we visit their homepage (www.cvq.de) and leave comments about tonight, so they can go home and be believed when they say they were in South Africa, in Cape Town, performing at Hiddingh Hall. “We need proof that we were here!” We laughed (remember, at that point we were laughing at everything she said to us). Anyway, this here above is my testimony: they were here, dazzled and roused us. This here, too, is my thank you, my expression of how very much I loved them for showing us the art of jazz blooming continuously to life.

                         Bernd Heitzler, Obi Jenne,  Cécile Verny Andreas Erchinger
                                     at Hiddingh Hall, Wednesday 29 August 2012



Only two of the ten albums by the Cécile Verny Quartet are available in South Africa: Keep Some Secrets Within (2010) for R259 and Amourose (2008) for R229Cécile Verny's critically acclaimed solo album, European Songbook (2005) is also available for R229. All 3 CDs can be found at Look and Listen. 

Photo credits: main picture ©  Waldo H. Muller. Other pictures of the quartet at Hiddingh by Ashley Walters © GIPCA. Picture of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Barney Bigard is a still from Arthur Lubin's New Orleans (1947).

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

My Weeks with Monroe – or How if you live long enough everybody’s bad decisions begin to make sense or seem forgivable


Today, at this late hour, perhaps as a result of my own long-accumulating internal turmoil (blogs tend to be about the self in some way or another, aren’t they?), I find myself gravitating towards the figure of Marilyn Monroe, and filled with a combination of feelings for her that I have never felt towards her in this particular manner: acute sadness, sympathy, empathy, and unceasing pain. Normally: the thought of Marilyn conjures up the blonde siren in the iconic bright pink dress, surrounded by odd-looking men carrying kitsch red heart-fans, and with her running up and down the red-carpeted steps and singing Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Sparking with diamonds, of course.


Or I would think of her in the even more iconic ivory pleated tulle dress, blowing up in the wind from the grate at the subway in a still taken from a scene in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955). Just last year (2011) this famous pose was concretised as ‘Forever Marilyn’, a 26-foot-tall sculpture by Seward Johnson on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, Michigan Avenue, and the actual dress that Monroe worn for the film sold for $4.6 million at an auction for Hollywood costumes and props collected by Debbie Reynolds. [1] However, possibly like most people, I just know the picture – I am still to see the film or the sculpture or the dress.


Or more associations still… when I think of Marilyn I would see her as the charming and endearing Sugar ‘Kane’ Kowalczyk, the ‘all-girl’ band vocalist in Billy Wilder’s later film, Some Like it Hot (1959). Her rendition of I Wanna be Loved by You whilst dressed in a backless and almost see-through lace costume is hypnotic, inviting, sexy. I wanna be loved by you, just you/Nobody else but you/I wanna be loved by you, alone – sang in almost a whispering tone, perhaps purred, but simply charmed in its seeming effortlessness and easy sensuality. That same sensuality that Michelle Williams adorably captured in her portrayal of Monroe in the recent film My Week with Marilyn (2011) directed by Simon Curtis. Clearly: 2011 was Marilyn’s year. Anyway, if the over 2 million views on YouTube for that Some Like it Hot scene are not a useful testament to the scene’s enduring appeal, I’m not sure what is:  


Here is this woman, one of the most recognisable of women in 20th century Western popular history, very beautiful (of course), at the top of her game in possibly one of the meanest industries in America, and yet… in full public view – breaking down. Complaining of exhaustion. Taking too many days off work. Work looming nonetheless, overwhelming. Shortly before her death she had been fired by Fox Studios from the set of the last film she was to ever make and never finish, Something’s Gotta Give. For 17 of the 30 shooting days she had called in sick, and cost the company massive amounts of money for the delay in production costs. After a massive scandal, a looming and feasible threat that her career in Hollywood might be over, and then after being re-hired, she was found dead two days later possibly from a suicide by overdose of sleeping pills. (Her physician, however, maintains that an overdose of the amount of pills he had prescribed for her would not have been sufficient.) If suicide, exact reason why: unknown.

All sorts of other things were at play: for one, time passing; the actress known to the whole world for her dazzling beauty, now just past 36, and perhaps growing anxious that in time other youthful purrers will soon replace her. Going out while still at the top. Others: unsuccessful and possibly damaging psychoanalytical treatment. Obviously, depression. Insomnia – hence the sleeping pills. Unsatisfying and increasingly risqué sexual and love relations (if this is the right term) with strangers. Unsuccessful marriages behind her, but still no sense of being ‘at home’ in the world. Some blame the Kennedys. Others the mafia. Some say the mafia in order to spite the Kennedy brothers. Either way, in this woman we have an illustrative case of fame and money not buying you happiness. Whatever the cause, headlines such as ‘MARILYN DEAD’ on 5 August 1962 left the world stunned; of all things that could have happened that day, the death of Monroe (especially by sucide) was the amongst the least expected.

In the documentary Marilyn’s Last Moments about Monroe’s unfinished film, Monroe’s physician, Hyman Engelberg, M.D., says after her death he had received “several phone calls from ordinary women. The general feeling was if they had only known Marilyn was in trouble, they would have done everything they could to help her.” From this rather sad helplessness and irrational sorrow and empathy most people must have felt at her death – and what I, years later, am possibly feeling now – Engleberg draws the rather ludicrous-sounding (but profound) conclusion that “Marilyn didn’t just have appeal for men; women were aware of the lost little girl inside of her and they reacted to that.”[2]

Put differently: women (like the men) loved her too; they saw her as this great happy woman onto whom they could project their fantasies about themselves; the iconic image of the happy, perfect life, only to be shocked that all or most was veneer – behind the picture was a vulnerable, deeply unhappy woman who just wanted someone to save her because he had no ability or time to do so herself. But no one realised that and so no one came to the rescue or with the appropriate methods (everyone gave the love they could but it was the wrong kind of love). Worse:  everybody wanted something from her but no one took the time to think she too might need something (love, care, perhaps affection) from somebody. So afterwards, everybody, but particularly other women, felt bad about it and called her doctor to set the record straight.  The whole thing is just so sad. So sad.

Of course there is no ground for comparison, but her life is instructive – even if in the negative. Today I feel for her because, selfishly and childishly, I suppose, because there is an element of her experience that makes some kind of sense to me, finally, and those last days make sense somehow, finally. I suppose if I knew her this would be the time when I’d say “Marilyn, sweet bird you were, I miss you today.”  

Ella Fitzgerald: "I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt … she personally called the owner of the Mocambo [a popular upmarket, celebrity-frequented but racist nightclub], and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.[3]

Photo credits: Main picture © George Barris, 1962. Film stills © 20th Century Fox, I suppose. Monroe with Fitzgerald © unknown.


[1] http://www.toledoblade.com/Art/2011/07/15/Huge-Marilyn-sculpture-unveiled.html
[2] For the relevant extract from the film see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGfuaBhTslQ&feature=relmfu
[3] For a context of the Fitzgerald-Monroe connection, see Stuart Nicholson's 1993 Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography of the First Lady of Jazz (p. 149) by Da Capo Press. Or see: http://groovenotes.org/2012/03/22/how-ella-fitzgerald-and-marilyn-monroe-changed-each-others-lives/