Earlier this month, multi-instrumentalist and visionary composer Pops Mohamed died at the age of 75. He had been battling with the health challenges of an ageing body after a life lived with verve and passion. His passing brings to a close a musical career that spanned more than five eventful decades.
Mohamed was born on December 10 1949 in Benoni, east of Johannesburg, as Ismail Mohamed-Jan, to a Muslim father of Portuguese and Indian heritage and a mother who came from Xhosa and Khoisan parentage. This mixedness and its attendant appeal to being comfortable with difference shaped Mohamed’s lifelong capacity for building bridges.
Musically, he sought to build bridges across genres, styles and tastes from diverse ages. He worked to converge indigenous musical styles with modern and contemporary ideas into a chic sonic polyglot fit for Mzansi’s unique rainbowist reality.
As an elder figure on the South African music scene, he sought to build collaborative partnerships with younger creatives in myriad artistic pursuits. Think about his work with the famous but cantankerous spoken-word jester Ntsiki Mazwai, or his work with Zubs the rapper, and others, to explore fresher potential directions for his creative practice.
To be sure, this penchant for expanding the horizons of his inherited heritage into new youthful possibilities was a mainstay of Mohamed’s creative vision and practice. In the band Kalamazoo from the early 1990s, he worked the keyboards alongside Mzi Khumalo on alto sax, Ian Herman on drums and bassist Sipho Gumede, with whom he worked as Black Disco in the 1970s and as Movement in the City in the 1980s. Kalamazoo took their cue from Abdullah Ibrahim’s runaway hit from 1974, Mannenberg. Like the latter, Kalamazoo was named for a happening township.
Mohamed aimed to capture the poignancy of life in Boksburg’s Reiger Park neighbourhood, Kalamazoo. The song styles of the records they made were built on the then en vogue metal percussive piano sound and the canter pulse of the bum-jive era, along with the infectious humming melodic meander; it’s all in there. Kalamazoo was Mohamed’s way of searching for new sonic futures on the basis of marabi music and township jazz of the 1970s.
The success of Kalamazoo paved the way for Society Vibes with saxophonist McCoy Mrubata, Jabu Magubane on trombone, Prince Lengoasa on trumpet, drummer Tom Thabang, and Sipho Madondo on keyboards. Taking shape amid the hope of the mid-1990s as the country was remaking itself into a model democracy, the music of Society Vibes had a reaching quality that clawed at an idealistic future. It had an anthemic energy and heraldic command.
New possibilities were at hand with a new continentally focused national mission; then deputy president Thabo Mbeki was calling for an African renaissance. Mohamed, like many of his peers, answered the call, just as they had done as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s. High apartheid was being pushed back by the sound and spirit of Black Power politics; the summer of love had become the summer of black pride. This was the age of becoming for young Mohamed. South Africa was awakening to a new wave of thinking. The Black Consciousness movement had just been launched in 1968, with Steve Biko and other young thinkers breaking away from Nusas to form Saso.
South African jazz music, too, was experiencing a flowering of new ideas. On one hand, there were adherents of styles more steeped in hard bop, like Winston Mankunku Ngozi, who had just released his evergreen anthem Yakhal’ Inkomo; then there were those who heard the call of a more pan-African urge, led by the animal hide-clad and drum-drenched Malombo Jazz Makers of Julian Bahula, Philip Tabane and Abby Cindi.
The ideas Mohamed launched in Ancestral Healing earned him a South African Music Awards (Sama) award; however, it was with the 1997 record How Far Have We Come? where they found a proper flowering. This is the record he created following his visit to the Kalahari, where he went to stay, learn and record with the Khoisan people in the desert. The artistic statement of that record went on to define the meaning of his musical mission
This was the high-powered era in which Mohamed was seduced by musical muses. He enrolled at Dorkay House, a crucible of music and intellectual learning in the heart of Joburg. It was here that he would encounter mavericks like Kippie Moeketsi, a musical giant who was one of the earliest modern composers to insist on locating the roots of contemporary South African jazz music in indigenous traditional music.
Think of the sounds Moeketsi pioneered in the 1950s with The Shantytown Sextet, a legendary outfit crucial to the development of modern South African jazz. It featured figures like Dollar Brand (later Abdullah Ibrahim) and Hugh Masekela. The band itself was an evolution of Mackay Davashe’s earlier group that worked with backing vocalists like the Manhattan Brothers. It served as a launchpad for future stars. Mohamed inherited Moeketsi’s pan-Africanist vision.
Arguably his masterwork, Ancestral Healing (from NY to Joburg), released in 1995, is where Mohamed does his best to live up to these lofty ideas. He had just joined MELT2000, an energised label with a focus on new pan-African music coming out of the subcontinent. He got together with American world-rock singer-songwriter Ema, aka Mthakathi, who helped expand the sonic reach into the transatlantic space. They recorded the album in both Joburg and New York.
The music is at once meditative, prayerful and playful too. Mohamed brings together the chants of the !Xam and Kung of the Karoo and the Kalahari with the Qur’anic anasheed — the lilting vocal style of Islam. The brassy bellows of the trombone are also heard washing over the sharp, sparkly sound of the kalimba.
The ideas Mohamed launched in Ancestral Healing earned him a South African Music Awards (Sama) award; however, it was with the 1997 record How Far Have We Come? where they found a proper flowering. This is the record he created following his visit to the Kalahari, where he went to stay, learn and record with the Khoisan people in the desert. The artistic statement of that record went on to define the meaning of his musical mission.
Mohamed, as an artist of mixed-race heritage, became a symbol of a creative daring to explore the power and potential of identifying with Khoisan heritage; this was at a time when many in the coloured community would rather have been called Cape Malay than identify with the wind-bitten brows of the San and Khoi folk of the Kalahari or the Karoo.
As a jazz musician, Mohammed showed us how to make Khoisan heritage a living ingredient of our contemporary creative imagination and the central motif of pan-Africanism; even further, he fashioned himself a new digital music persona, The Futurist, and took that message into house music, opening a hip portal for the youth into his deep well of sonic heritage.
In 2023, Mohamed was honoured with the Sama Lifetime Achievement Award, “celebrating decades of dedication to South Africa’s music industry and his role as a pioneer in preserving and promoting traditional and contemporary African music”, as the official announcements proclaimed. In 2010, he received the Arts & Culture Trust Lifetime Achievement Award in “recognition of his exceptional and lasting impact on South Africa’s arts, culture and heritage”.
As he entered the winter of his years, Mohamed was finding it harder to make a living, and his health was being challenged, too. And so, six days before he was to celebrate his 76th birthday, Mohamed shook off his mortal coil. He is survived by a daughter, Yasmeen, who announced his passing to fans, friends and family.
Mabandu is a writer, artist and communications professional
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