Music to meditate on

When the essayist Bongani Madondo was asked to introduce the pianist Maxwell Baloyi at his debut album launch, he opted to “dig” up the new virtuoso from the piano tradition of the Azanian songbook

Listening to Maxwell Baloyi’s debut offering (debut insofar as the product packaging goes; Baloyi is a 20-year veteran on the ebonies and ivories), I'm reminded of the vagaries of this thing called “identity” — the turfs, sounds, styles, culinary choices, traditions, belief systems and other things that, accrued, tell the stories not only of who we are but of who we want to be. The answers are often in the music.

Three decades ago, American neosoul-soul singer Jill Scott released Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1. The record’s slow-burn ripples were felt from Philly to Phnom Penh. Twenty years later, a South African soul-stirrer from Kimberley, relaying the Kalahari nomads’ desert idioms, came out of nowhere to challenge us to ponder the human conundrum: Who am I? As with Scott, Luanga Choba’s Who is Luanga Choba? was a play on art, faith and love as the determinant of the artist, and by extension, the listener’s metaphysical Id. It struck me as fascinating and reassuring, as I was pondering the role that sound plays in invigorating human consciousness, that none of the above artists play jazz.      

True “diggers” know that no-one really plays jazz. Jazz plays you. Charlie Parker once said that bebop is the sound of all of Manhattan’s footsteps hurrying from dawn to dusk, which brings me to the wondrous place that Baloyi occupies in the music scene. He’s not a product of the “music industry” but he’d better step into it soon. The type of art he creates deserves to be heard. Those outside the tight music arena of piano masters — the world in which Baloyi has worked, hiding in plain sight for over a decade — can’t help but wonder: Who is Maxwell Baloyi?    

I can throw in all kinds of hyperbolic adjectives to sell him and I’d be doing him a disservice. Pianist, performer, pedagogue and composer, Baloyi doesn’t need hyping. The sketching of an artist’s biography doesn’t help much, either. If anything, it throws us deeper into an existential critique of the artist’s making. At the album launch, an audience member stood up and asked, “How the hell does a young man from Limpopo’s sticks get to play, let alone master, classical piano?”                                                                   

Though his Kalanga forebears were from present day Zimbabwe, the now 46-year-old Baloyi grew up in Malamulele, which pre-1994 was in the Bantustan Gazankulu. When Baloyi was a child, his homeland was already on the global cultural map for inspiring Harry Belafonte’s solo departure into African folk proper with Paradise in Gazankulu (1988). And for General MD Shirinda & The Gaza Sisters, who featured on Paul Simon’s Graceland.

“The area’s earth is rich and fertile,” he told me once. “Hunger is a mystery there.””                                                                                                     

No, Baloyi needs no hyping. What his music needs is a silent environment in which the listener can appreciate it. His album, Healing Palms, demands a Buddhist type of quietude and an open ear, heart and soul — genre be damned. This much he admitted when I met him at Niki’s Oasis in Newtown a few days before the launch. “My aim was to create music not only for yoga meditation but for all modes of meditation,” he said.

With Healing Palms, Baloyi steps fully into the Azanian piano and synthesisers tradition. He approaches the work as a sonic sculptor and an alchemist. He weaves the art of chamber music’s solo recital with the type of ghetto corner-shop playfulness that defined Abdullah Ibrahim’s early work, along with marabi and aquatic sonic waves.

Seeing Baloyi live — solo, shoulders hunched over the keys, head in the clouds — and hearing the music rather than merely listening to it, it becomes apparent he has a rare gift. As with Moses “Taiwa” Molelekwa and Nduduzo Makhathini, without a need to accommodate hip-seeking, paying jazz audiences, Baloyi is, in the essence of the craft, both an aqua man and a spirit conjuror. The magic man.

Of course, it’s unfair to want to put all pianists into a corner and consider them extensions of each other. Not all pianists sound the same. But there’s a type of rapport, in short hand, often happening unbeknown to the artists themselves. After repeatedly listening to Healing Palms, I found myself combing through my neglected record collection in search of these works: Don Pullen’s Ode to Life; Dollar Brand Orchestra’s African Space Program; Vijay Iyer’s Reimagining; and Bhekie Mseleku doing whatever he  did to the piano to make it wail Hail Mary’s against its will.

Healing Palms, 52 minutes long, is sharp, precise, mathematical in its clarity. It’s almost fascistic in its insistence that not even a quarter of a note be wasted. Yet briefly, always with restraint, it allows for a spacey unfurling and uncoiling of blue notes from the Limpopo, Kalahari and the Indian Ocean — its foundational influences. Taken in one swoop, all seven tracks wash over and under you, threatening to submerge you in their energy force. Not since Molelekwa’s Darkness Pass has a pianist demanded so much of their listener, and promised to give generously more.

Ultimately, it offers an escape, throwing you on the shores of the great South African songbook. He arrives tentatively, as if to appease the gods, into the tradition of a uniquely South African piano composition. In the tradition are ancestors who roamed Doornfontein’s alleyways in the 1920s — such as the meta-mythic Ntebejane, and later Wilfred Sentso of the Jazz Maniacs and the Merry Black Birds. Those who survived the treacherous 60s still talk breathlessly of the young Dollar Brand and of Early Mabuza.

Picking up from the late 1960s into the chaotic 1970s, the Jazz Maniacs and Victor Ndlazilwane and his Woody Woodpeckers created a sonic dough out of shack-land jive and negro blues ingredient to usher in township funk, different from the 1970s synth-attack by The Movers, The Cannibals and The Flames that shocked South Africans into “bump and jive”. This new music style made non-believers out of women of the cloth and turned township knifemen into believers.

Still, for a while, excluding Rex Rabanye and Thelma Segone, the tradition of piano as the king of the strings was undermined by the advent of quick-fold keyboards and, later, computer-generated synths. Awkward to move, rooted and unyielding, demanding of its practitioners, the piano, it seemed, was about done in the evolving South African songbook.                                                                                             

Then a man barely out of his teens, Molelekwa appeared on the scene in the early 1990s and rescued the entire tradition. Two decades later, the piano is back, both as an aural and material cipher — a symbol of freedom larger than itself and rooted in structure and form.

What should we then do with Maxwell Baloyi? Should we entrust him with our hearts? Who the hell is this Maxwell Baloyi anyway? I met him a few years ago, at that formidable dive, Niki’s, and frankly took him for a bum. Nonetheless when this album washed up on my shores, I took a gamble and lived to tell this tale. You'll have to take yours, too. And we'll have a round-the-fire exchange soon, soon, just in time for winter.                                                               

Notes from Bongani Madondo’s talk at Maxwel Baloyi's album launch at Lit. Books, Breeze Block Café. Madondo writes on poetry, photography and politics.