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The
cosmopolitan and international character of Sathima Bea
Benjamin's music is partly a reflection of her family's
roots. Born Beatrice ("Beattie") Benjamin in
Johannesburg, October 17, 1936, her father, Edward Benjamin,
descended from the island of St. Helena off the coast
of West Africa. Her mother, Evelyn Henry, had roots in
Mauritius (an island off the East African coast) as well
as the Philippines. Benjamin's parents had been living
in Cape Town, but job opportunities compelled Edward to
relocate to Johannesburg just months before Beattie's
birth. Her parents divorced soon thereafter, and after
a few years living with her father and his new wife, Beattie
and her sister Joan moved in with their paternal grandmother
in Cape Town.
Benjamin grew up listening to phonograph records, radio,
and her grandmother's humming of the old popular songs
from operettas and early Tin Pan Alley musical theater.
She also built her repertoire watching British and American
movies, and she kept a note pad handy to write down the
words of songs she heard on the radio since she had no
money for songbooks or sheet music. It was through the
radio that she discovered Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday,
Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, and other jazz and pop singers
who would influence her early singing style.
She first performed in public in talent contests held
at the local cinema during intermission. She continued
to develop as a singer, singing in the school choir and
even taking a few voice lessons to learn opera. As a choir
member, however, she never was assigned a solo because
she liked to "scoop" or play around with pitch.
Of course, this became a feature of her personal and unique
style, but for a formal choir in Cape Town such experiments
and embellishments were frowned upon.
At age 16, Benjamin graduated from high school and went
on to complete two years of teacher training. By the late
1950s, soon after securing her first teaching job at an
elementary school in Cape Town, she began to perform at
various nightclubs, community dances and social events.
However, once the principal found out about her 'moonlighting',
he issued an ultimatum - either she stop singing or quit
teaching. Benjamin chose the life of a jazz singer.
So in 1957, at the age of 21, Beattie Benjamin went on
the road with Arthur Klugman's traveling show, ‘Coloured
Jazz and Variety’. While the show gave Sathima experience,
the entire production was a commercial failure and she,
along with friend and fellow band member, Jimmy Adams
were stranded in Mafeking until they were able to make
enough money performing locally to make it to Johannesburg.
There they befriended the great modern alto saxophonist
Kippie Moeketsi, who assisted them financially. The pair
eventually found work with an African band in Maputo,
Mozambique, and traveled wherever they had to in order
to make ends meet.
She returned to Cape Town around 1959, at a moment when
the music scene really flourished but the vice grip of
apartheid tightened. There she met and fell in love with
the young, innovative pianist/composer Dollar Brand (Abdullah
Ibrahim) who even then was reputed to be one of South
Africa's greatest jazz musicians. They began working together
and in that same year, 1959, recorded what should have
been the first jazz LP in South Africa's history. Titled
‘My Songs for You’ with accompaniment by Ibrahim,
Joe Colussi on bass and Donald Staegemann on drums, the
recording of mostly standards was never released. In addition
to working with Ibrahim, she became a regular member of
Harold Jephthah's trio, which included the talented but
virtually unknown pianist Henry February, with whom she
would collaborate on her 1999 release, ‘Cape Town
Love’ .
Benjamin and Ibrahim's life together in the Cape Town
jazz scene was cut short by tragic events in Sharpeville
and Langa on March 21, 1960. In both townships, Africans
had gathered to protest the pass laws by speaking out
and burning their passes. Police violently attacked the
demonstrators, killing 69 Africans and wounding at least
196 in Sharpeville alone. Whatever vestiges of democracy
existed in South Africa were swiftly eliminated after
the Sharpeville massacre. The state passed laws banning
all African organizations and permitting 90-day detentions
without legal process. Activists were jailed, tortured,
and in many cases killed; between 1963-65 alone, at least
190 Africans were hanged.
In the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960,
Benjamin and Ibrahim decided to join the growing South
African exile community in Europe. The couple, along with
Ibrahim's rhythm section - bassist Johnny Gertze and drummer
Makhaya Ntshoko - settled in Zurich, Switzerland, and
worked throughout Germany and Scandinavia. Through various
gigs they met some of the greatest American jazz musicians
either passing through or living in exile, including Don
Byas, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Drew, Ben Webster, Bud Powell,
John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk. The artist who would
have the greatest impact on Benjamin, however, was Duke
Ellington.
Benjamin met Duke Ellington while he was in Zurich for
short engagement in February of 1963. Standing in the
wings during most of the Ellington band's performance,
once the concert ended she insisted that Duke hear her
husband's trio at the Club Africana, one of the few local
jazz spots where the couple could work fairly regularly.
Duke obliged and liked what he heard, but he also insisted
that Benjamin sing for him. He adored her voice and promptly
arranged for the couple to fly to Paris and record separate
albums on the Reprise label (at the time, Ellington was
the A&R man for Reprise Records). Ibrahim's record,
‘Duke Ellington Presents The Dollar Brand Trio’,
was released the following year and subsequently helped
him build a following in Europe and the US. Benjamin's
recording, unfortunately, languished in the vault because
Reprise executives did not think she was "commercial"
enough. It was eventually released under the title ‘A
Morning in Paris’, but not until 1996.
Benjamin continued to maintain a relationship with Ellington,
who remained an enthusiastic supporter of her career.
In 1965, Ellington arranged to have Benjamin perform with
the band at the Newport Jazz Festival. At one point, Ellington
had even asked her to join his band permanently, but she
declined because being on the road would have taken her
away from Ibrahim, whom she married in February of 1965.
Throughout the 1960s Benjamin and Ibrahim moved back and
forth between Europe and New York City, where they struggled
to make it in the jazz world. For Benjamin, who had yet
to release a recording of her own, gigs were few and far
between. She gave birth to her son, Tsakwe, in 1971 and
spent much of her time as a mother and supporter of her
husband.
1976 marked a turning point for Benjamin. She and Ibrahim
returned to South Africa to live, she gave birth to her
daughter Tsidi, and she went into the studio and recorded
‘African Songbird‘, the first album of hers
to be released. The LP, made up entirely of original compositions
by Benjamin, not only unveiled her talent as a composer
but it revealed an interest in the freedom struggle in
South Africa. A few months later, that interest became
a full-blown engagement after the schoolchildren of Soweto
rose up to protest the state's decision to teach math
and social studies in Afrikaans instead of English. Once
again, the police retaliated against the protesters but
the damage this time around was worse than Sharpeville:
at least 575 Africans were killed and 2,389 wounded. This
was enough to convince Benjamin and Ibrahim to go back
into exile. So in 1977 they returned to New York, settled
into the Chelsea Hotel, and they both became politically
active in behalf of the African National Congress. As
a result of their activities as cultural workers for the
liberation movement, the apartheid government of South
Africa revoked their citizenship, thus compelling them
to become US citizens.
Artistically, Benjamin began to take greater control of
her career. In 1979, she launched her own record label,
Ekapa, primarily to produce and distribute her music.
Between 1979 and 2002, she released eight albums: ‘Sathima
Sings Ellington’, ‘Dedications’, ‘Memories
and Dreams’, ‘Windsong’, ‘Lovelight’,
‘Southern Touch’, ‘Cape Town Love’,
and ‘Musical Echoes’. Each of these recordings
received rave reviews, and ‘Dedications’ was
nominated for a Grammy in 1982. A mix of standards, old
Tin Pan Alley songs, and original compositions, these
recordings reveal the full range of her talent as a singer,
songwriter, and bandleader. Indeed, she brought together
some of the most talented musicians on the scene to accompany
her, including pianists Kenny Baron and Onaje Allan Gumbs,
drummers Billy Higgins and Ben Riley, and bassist Buster
Williams. Like other great vocalists in the jazz tradition,
she is a remarkable storyteller, delivering lyrics with
such patience and emotion that listeners are compelled
to hang on to every word. She doesn't rely on vocal acrobatics
or melisma -- just pure, crystalline sound. As New York
Times critic Jon Pareles wrote twenty-two years ago, "In
song after song, Miss Benjamin could make a word cry out
with just a flicker of vibrato."
As a composer, pieces such as ‘Music’, ‘Lady
Day’, ‘Dreams’, and ‘Gift of Love’
(for Duke Ellington) are really poems set to gorgeous,
uncluttered melodies. Her controversial ‘Liberation
Suite’ (1982) comprised of three compositions, ‘New
Nations a Coming’, ‘Children of Soweto’,
and ‘Africa’, marked a departure from most
‘political music’ that attempted to speak
to the conditions of black South Africans. These pieces
point to the future rather than dwell on the current crises,
emphasizing love over conflict and violence. As an arranger,
she made her own mark on the music by incorporating ‘Cape
Town Rhythms’, the distinctive shuffle beat common
in the popular dance music of her native land. She has
recorded songs such as ‘In a Mellow Tone’
and ‘I'm Getting Sentimental Over You’ over
these unique uptempo rhythms and as a result produced
truly original renderings of classic songs.
Bringing together her two worlds - Cape Town and New York
City - has been an essential element of Benjamin's music.
She has recorded in both places and, for the most part,
used American musicians for her US recordings and South
African musicians when in her native land. However, for
her most recent CD, ‘Musical Echoes’, she
decided to bring the outstanding American pianist and
collaborator, Stephen Scott, to Cape Town to record with
South Africans, bassist Basil Moses and drummer Lulu Gontsana.
The result is a true synthesis of both worlds, and one
of her most brilliant records to date.
Sathima Bea Benjamin continues to perform and record when
opportunities arise, and over the past four decades she
has always enjoyed enthusiastic reviews. Recently she
has begun to receive the kinds of accolades deserving
of an artist of her stature. In October of 2004, South
African President Thabo Mbeki bestowed upon her the Order
of Ikhamanga Silver Award in recognition for her "excellent
contribution as a jazz artist" in South Africa and
internationally, as well as for her contribution "to
the struggle against apartheid." And in March of
2005, the prestigious art group, Pen and Brush, Inc.,
presented her with a Certificate of Achievement for her
work as a performer, musician, composer, and "activist
in the struggle for human rights in South Africa."
Finally, she is the subject of a forthcoming documentary
produced and directed by Angelica Mills. It is scheduled
for completion in the Spring of 2006. |
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