Playing the Changes: how Cathy and Darius Brubeck set up South Africa’s first jazz education programme

Pianist Darius Brubeck was in his mid-30s, and enjoying life. He had qualified summa cum laude from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with degrees in Ethnomusicology and the History of Music; had been working with his famous father Dave in the groups Two Generations of Brubeck and the New Dave Brubeck Quartet; and performing with his own bands, Gathering Forces and the Darius Brubeck Ensemble.

But at the back of his mind, one thought kept recurring, usually unbidden, and usually when he least expected it: “When your father’s name is part of what defines a particular era and is known around the world (a fate I share with, among others, Mercer Ellington and Ravi Coltrane in jazz, and Jakob Dylan and Sean Lennon as singer/songwriters), you’re always asking yourself what point you’re making working in the same field.”

Then, in 1981, at a meeting in New York, between Darius, his wife Cathy and Christopher Ballantine, of the Department of Music in the University of Natal – now known as the University of Kwa Zulu-Natal – took place in a bar in Greenwich Village.

“I had always been in touch with Chris Ballentine, he had been a longtime friend of mine and he kind of initiated the idea his Department might be able to create a teaching post for which Darius could apply so that he could establish Africa’s first ever university degree in Jazz Studies,” says Cathy.

It would take, as Ballantine later asserted, “Not just sleight of hand to create this ‘jazz post’, but creative improvisation and a long line of schemes, subterfuges, and manoeuvres to make the jazz programme a reality.”

But first there was the anti-apartheid boycott initiated by the African National Congress (ANC) and adopted by the United Nations to negotiate.

“We did make a number of trips to speak to activists both in the ANC and the Pan African Congress to get their view on it and they were supportive of that,” says Cathy, a long time anti-apartheid activist.

Finally, in 1983, the path was cleared to make the move: “Darius, I know, certainly enjoyed playing with his family, so it was really something to come out from under the Brubeck name in America and do something for himself. I was working as well, and while we were enjoying it, it didn’t seem enough. So leaving that behind wasn’t perhaps as traumatic as you might think, because we were both wanting to do something different, and Chris Ballantine asking about whether he’d apply for the job, set us really thinking.”

The path Darius and Cathy were about to embark was, as Ballantine later recounted, “Long, hazardous and full of obstacles, but the many obstacles notwithstanding, the jazz programme delivered remarkable successes at astonishing speed.”

However, what Darius and Cathy did not expect was that potential students did not see the University as a place that had anything to offer them.

“African students were surprised that there was something for them at University, that there could be something relevant to learn on a practical level, and relevant to their culture, they didn’t know they could do this, that they could apply to learn,” says Darius. It was one of the unexpected consequences of apartheid which had to be overcome: “They were not stopped by legislation, but it just wasn’t encouraged, economic and educational barriers just meant it was kind of irrelevant.”

But as Cathy explains, “Our programme kind of entrenched the idea that there were black role models in jazz, that many famous jazz musicians were black, and that was inspirational to them in terms of belonging to something important and although it was subtle, it was also a challenge to apartheid.”

Word soon spread and the jazz programme quickly began to attract more students, including semi-professional and professional musicians eager to learn.

“It seemed that the music there really mattered so much to them,” observes Darius. “So here is this other musical world, which was very accessible to me in terms of what I already knew technically, but it was still a different musical world and one that was one loaded with social and political meaning and it was felt passionately and personally, and the musicians playing it certainly weren’t experimenting, they were expressing something that was already there. They were not figuring out what to do with music, it was figuring out what to do in life.”

What Darius quickly realised is that in devising a syllabus for his students he needed to learn what was relevant to the students’ needs and requirements, rather than the other way around; that the students adapt to syllabus of the institution.

“I had to kind of invent – again it was the great advantage of being the first to do it, I liked to do it my own way! – I didn’t have a North Texas State or Berklee or Indiana University syllabus," he explains. "I had to discover the musical world that my students lived in, and through that encourage them to develop a bit beyond it. I later found out, I mean much later, that there’s a word for what I was doing, there was no word for it back then, and that is ‘Practice Based Pedagogy’.

"That meant having a very close relationship with students, playing with them all the time, rehearsing as much as teaching, fixing things that didn’t work, explaining why they didn’t work, the outcome was to get through something in a way that was musically effective.

"As far as awareness of Township music and all that sort of thing – I went there in all humility, knowing that in fact there was jazz education, it was just there was no formal way to do that, there was no institutional framework for it.”

For Cathy Brubeck, it meant creating the role of administrator for the jazz course, but also something much bigger... so was she prepared for the size of the role she was taking on?

“I pretty much expected to become involved because of my former connections with South African musicians and politicians,” she reflects. “So I knew I’d have to make a lot of contacts, help build the programme for Darius, but of course once the Centre [for Jazz and Popular Music] opened, I was like a project manager, so I would have to do all kinds of things to keep the programme having a high profile.”

She also did a lot of work behind the scenes: some students experienced extreme poverty, so she made sure they had a square meal daily. Others, from squatter camps, might have lost their home, so the Brubecks would tide them over in their own home until alternative accommodation could be found. This was less 'a job', more a '24/7 calling'.

“Cathy’s experience from working with Mercer Ellington and my father and as a conference organiser in the US was obviously more than most South African residents, wherever they were based, whatever their background, were able to deal with," says Darius.

In 1987, the fourth year of the official jazz course at Natal University, Darius and Cathy were at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and Cathy discovered that the President and executive director of the American National Association of Jazz Educators were staying at the same hotel; she engineered an invitation for a South African student band to play at their next annual conference – in Detroit in January 1988. And while it is one thing to get an invitation to this celebrated gathering, it is another to raise the funds to transport the band from South Africa to America and back and pay for their accommodation.

Through a series of fund raising events organised by Cathy, they achieved their target, and Cathy obtained the necessary endorsements in South Africa from the United Democratic Front; and in America a similar endorsement from the Black Caucus followed. Because the South African government had become desperate to improve its image abroad, it did not try to stop the Jazzanians tour, something which the regime might have done a couple of years earlier.

There was, however, the small matter of passports. The band’s main spark plug, trumpeter Johnny Mekoa, was without one, and in the Christmas break applied for one. As Darius points out, in apartheid South Africa, “Johnny didn’t see himself as victim, he triumphed as a wily Odysseus, aware of his opponents' blindness and vulnerabilities.”

Mekoa started visiting the local Native Affairs Office, which issued passports, taking care always to see the same official, whom he saw ,smoked Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes.

“So Johnny left an unopened pack on the counter after completing some petty transaction,” says Darius. “The next time he was greeted with a smile of recognition and they moved on the exchanging pleasantries. On a further occasion, Mokoa wordlessly handed over a carton of Peter Stuyvesant. On the next occasion, Johnny boldly greeted the official by name saying, ‘I have got something for you.’ The official ushered him into his private office where Johnny handed him a bottle of brandy. A passport was on the desk. ‘I’ll do this for you, but you must remember always I am the boss, you are the caffer.’ Johnny nodded. The battle was won. Johnny had access to the world.

“As far as the presentation at the jazz educators conference,” continues Darius, “it was such a build-up, we were so up for it, and so pleased that drew such a large audience – like 5,000 or 6,000 people – mostly musicians, industry people, a lot of academics, a lot students, and all of them want to be there and you’re there on a competitive basis. Just having the invitation was an honour and we were a hit, we went over really well and bear in mind the audience we’re talking about. However, we were anxious not to convey an ‘all is fine in South Africa’ message, but demonstrate hope and racial integration.”

The effect of the Jazzanians' success was immediately felt back at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

“Before that we were kind of operating out of practice rooms, our house and wherever we could find space and time together, rehearse and do the logistic work behind it,” says Darius. “In a way it was the climax of the first phase. I was offered a position and a big raise to come to the University of Cape Town, which houses the South African Conservatory of Music, so that was perceived as an upgrade; that was terrific because then the University of Natal had to compete to keep me! And we thought about it, and we said, ‘Well, let’s not walk away from what we built here, let’s make it bigger and better, rather than just making a career move that would mean starting again.’

"So I got promoted to the rank of professor and started the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music, and was able to be a lot freer in who we could bring into the programme. All this followed the big impact of the Jazzanians, it was the first of the five student groups we took to big conferences and on tour, and it really had a huge domino effect. The sudden fame of the Jazzanians elevated jazz education to flagship status at the university [of Natal] and made other institutions eager to add jazz courses.”

The Jazzanians, whose album We Have Waited Too Long – recorded in 1988 – was recently released by Ubuntu Music, documents this important band in the evolution of South African jazz. It is vital, energetic music performed with poise and authority that could only come from South Africa. The Jazzanians’ success also supercharged the jazz programme at the University, and after the inevitable bumps in the programme had been ironed out, Darius was able to reflect that, “We had reached a point – it’s difficult to say this – but it was kind of like, ‘This is as good as it gets.’ We are cruising along with a programme that’s really happening, firing on all cylinders, and looking around unless some magnificent endowment came along that allowed us to hire more faculty staff – something completely unlikely to happen – we had reached a level where everything was working and it was fine and we could replicate year after year after year".

In 2005, Darius and Cathy decided they had taken the programme as far as they could, and looked to hand it over.

“We definitely felt South Africans could run the programme now," continues Darius. “Which they hadn’t been previously so that was also a strong factor, there was also a strong Africanisation in the country and certainly at the university. People were looking to see who was running everything. It was hard because we wanted to go, but we didn’t want to go! So we withdrew our energies from a system that had been running a long time, and now there is kind of a new musical life going on – we came to South Africa at a time when giving students a sense of the jazz cannon and how to approach it, how to perform standards and playing changes and all that kind of stuff.

"That’s what they wanted to know, then there was a period of people being not so certain of what they wanted to become, essentially because they had learned that, and now there are new appointments on the faculty, for example, Nduduzo Makhathini, a former student of Neil Gonsalves – who in turn was a former student of mine – are making really interesting different musics, and maybe that wouldn’t have happened if I had just stayed there.”

Cathy and Darius Brubeck’s new book, Playing the Changes: Jazz at an African University and On The Road (University of Illinois Press) is published on 9 July, while screenings of the documentary film Playing the Changes: Tracking Darius Brubeck (Red Cloak Films) are planned for the end of the year - see www.dariusbrubeck.com for updates and additional showings worldwide

This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Jazzwise today