The 2010 Cape Town International Jazz Festival hosts the eleventh Duotone Gallery, a showcase dedicated to Winston Mankunku Ngozi with images by Cedric Nunn, William Rasdell - and festival director Rashid Lombard.
 As the Cape Town International Jazz Festival begins the first of its teen years, so too does the showcase of photographic images which accompanies it. Past years have seen the Duotone Gallery hang the work of local photographers like Alf Khumalo, Mike Mzileni and Basil Breakey, and international counterparts such as William Ellis, Rico D'Rozaro and Uli Pschewoschny. This year, the walls of the gallery will chronicle "the life and contribution to jazz in South Africa of legendary saxophonist Winston Mankunku Ngozi", with images by American photographer and visual artist William Rasdell, Durban-born Cedric Nunn, past director of the Market Photography Workshop, and Rashid Lombard who, in addition to being the director of the jazz festival itself, is a celebrated jazz and portrait photographer who established the Cape Town Press Centre and has exhibited both locally and abroad. This eleventh instalment of the Duotone Gallery also sees the publication of "Jazz Rocks", a book of jazz photographs by Lombard.
Jazz music has always inspired visual art and some of the photographic world's most iconic portraits have been of jazz musicians. In South Africa, jazz was also part of the liberation soundtrack in the struggle against apartheid. Here, the music spoke not only of the artistic outpouring of an economic underclass, but was also intertwined with acts of resistance against oppression, or with the celebrations of the lives lost under that oppression. Under apartheid's grip, South African jazz could be heard more often after a political rally or a community funeral than it could in a simple nightclub or restaurant, and Winston Mankunku was a key figure in Western Cape rally and funeral shows, as much as he was in more formalised (and normalised) jazz repertoire settings. Lombard, a long-standing friend of the acclaimed saxophonist and composer, was often there to chronicle these socio-musical outings.
"Looking back at all the images I have after 24 years of taking photographs - almost 1000 images - I kept asking, 'How do I make a selection for a book?'," says Rashid Lombard, taking time off from the last days of organising "Africa's Grandest Gathering" as the Cape Town International Jazz Festival is dubbed. "It has been quite a journey, and memories kept coming back. Here you see a funeral, then we are at The Base (the seminal multi-genre Cape Town music venue in the late '80s and '90s). There are shots from a rally, then pics from the Jazz Den, or a club, or a ghoema. Luckily, I have a good archivist, and my editor, George Hallet."
The selection process for any retrospective is a fraught one, but perhaps even more so when the material is visual, and must stand proud as a technical and artistic exercise, and not just catalogue its subject matter. This proved even more poignant for Lombard since he was close friends with many of the musicians he photographed - and many of them are no longer with us today. "The most strenuous, personally, was that there are so many people that I do not see in the final cut," he says. "I had to say, 'Don't get personal, just edit the pictures.' I had to look at the imagery, the composition and the shot and then decide, but I look at the book and I don't see this one, I don't see that one... I had to remember what my editor said, that there is only so much we can do in a book with 200 pages - it is not an encyclopaedia."
Lombard stresses that, while "Jazz Rocks" offers a chronicle of a time, it is not meant as a historical document. "It's called 'Jazz Rocks' because I'm a bit of an old rocker, and because we wanted to make it a bit fun and let the images speak. There are certain sections that have a bit of prose - like the small tribute to Mankunku, or about my time in Cuba, or the 'Exiles Re-Initiated' project - but it's certainly not a documentary. Each picture just has the name, the date and the place - and then it must stand alone and, hopefully, the jazz will rock."
Lombard worked as an architectural draftsman and then as an industrial photographer for Murray & Roberts before becoming a politically active photo-journalist - and taking jazz profile shots as and where he could. "Working as a news photographer you were there to capture the moment of the day, to be where there's a protest march and all hell breaks loose, or where there are burning barricades and teargas. We had made the decision that we needed to take what was happening in South Africa to the rest of the world, so you had to be there to capture the oppression and the police brutality. Then, hours after leaving the march in Athlone or Gugulethu or wherever, it would be time to chill at The Base or the Jazz Den. There was always that contrast, of coming out of a running battle in the afternoon to working with an art form in the evening. It made you sensitive about the light - to read the shadows and the movement of the artists, and you would automatically look for spontaneous effects in the way you planned your pictures."
Underscoring the link between the music and the politics of the time, Lombard says simply that "it always just went hand in hand". "You would see the activists at the jazz gigs, or the musicians would be playing after a rally, or we would do an exhibition of pictures at structures like Azapo the one week, the End Conscription Campaign the next and then the United Democratic Front after that. We were all over the show as artists and as photo-journalists, and 90 percent of the musicians were people that I was very close to and spent a lot of time with. There was a link between us and, in fact, I could easily have become a musician. They used to try to get me to play the sax, but I was just too lazy to practice..."
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The annual Cape Town International Jazz Festival features over 40 local and international jazz stars on Saturday and Sunday, 3 and 4 April at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, including George Benson with 28-piece orchestra, Jonathan Butler "Greatest Hits", Ronny Jordan Organ Trio, BLK JKS, Charles Lloyd New Quartet, Delft Youth Big Band, McCoy Tyner Trio, Paulo Flores, Judith Sephuma, Mezzoforte, Vusi Mahlasela and TKZee. The Duotone Gallery runs throughout the festival, and in the week prior, when entrance is free. Tickets for the festival are R330 (single day) and R485 (two-day pass), available from Computicket.com and Shoprite-Checkers. See CapeTownJazzFest.com for artists, details and bookings.
This column originally appeared in the Cape Argus 'Tonight; section on 27-28 March 2010. Find out more on Tonight.co.za
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Music journalist, Strategy Director for Stonewall+ and South African music radio DJ extraordinaire.
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