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Mail & Guardian
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Mail & Guardian
Blue Notes for Bra Louis: The final beat of a jazz revolutionary
Louis Moholo-Moholo performing at The Orbit in Johannesburg on 25 May 2017. Photo by Siphiwe Mhlambi. Free jazz flowed through the streets of Langa when visiting the Moholo family home. Outside in the courtyard facing the street, Louis Tebogo Moholo-Moholo and his late wife Ma Mpumi would sit with visitors armed with a sound system and a speaker blasting some of the wildest avant-garde music at high volumes. People walking in the street would come in to greet, while children were in and out of the yard, often being handed sweets. The drummer — revolutionary, mentor and friend to many — died on the morning of Friday 13 June at the age of 85, sending sadness echoing throughout the jazz world. Bra Louis, or Bra Tebz as he was often fondly referred to, was one of the greatest musicians in the world. He lived with energy; a vibrant and fiery spirit that never stopped fighting for freedom and for uplifting the people of South Africa. Those lucky enough to watch him perform over seven decades witnessed an intense passion that embodied freedom in every way. 'Yes baby, no baby!' he would often shout while playing, which audiences would shout back. He was also very stylish with his Fedora hats and cool T-shirts (some of which he painted himself). 'We love you, we love you, you don't have to love us, but we love you!' was another famous saying. These signature chants were known worldwide, as Moholo's reach was far beyond what we might imagine. He lived and breathed music, in every possible way. Louis Moholo-Moholo performing at Guga S'thebe in his community of Langa in 2018. Photo: Terence Visagie. The Blue Notes 'That band was made in heaven,' is what Moholo would say when talking about The Blue Notes, one of the finest bands in South African history, the members of which all died in exile. He was the last remaining one. Moholo was born on 10 March 1940 in Langa, Cape Town. The street where the family lived was home to several musicians, including the great Christopher 'Columbus' Ngcukana. Langa is one of the oldest townships in the country, which bred many great artists, such as Brenda Fassie. He started playing drums as a child, after being inspired by marching bands, and later joined the Young Rhythm Chordettes. Moholo was mentored by musicians like Cups Nkanuka, who also lived in Langa and took many musicians in the 1950s under his wing. Apartheid laws oppressed black musicians, and in That same year, he left South Africa with The Blue Notes, made up of bassist Johnny Dyani, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, pianist Chris McGregor, and saxophonists Nikele Moyake and Dudu Pukwana. The band was invited to play at the Antibes Festival in France and what was initially a temporary departure became permanent exile. They moved to Zürich in Switzerland and played at the Club Africana, assisted by Abdullah Ibrahim and Sathima Bea Benjamin. The Blue Notes playing at the Antibes Festival in France in 1964, after first leaving South Africa. The band then moved to London, after an invitation to appear at Ronnie Scott's. They were hugely influential on the British jazz scene. The The Blue Notes embodied an attitude of revolution — it showed through their music and the way they lived. Moholo later continued with Brotherhood of Breath (led by Chris McGregor), and was the bandleader of The Dedication Orchestra, Viva La Black and 4 Blokes. In her biography, influential Swiss free jazz pianist Irène Schweizer —who died last year — describes at length Moholo's influence on her. She met him at Club Africana in 1964, when the Blue Notes landed in Zürich, and performed with him throughout his life. In the book, Moholo is quoted as saying on arriving in Zürich, 'We gave the audience the satisfaction of that high-level music, because this band was made in heaven. So unlucky that they all died; it's like I have been fired from the band and I think maybe they're having a big, big show in heaven!' A life well lived Life in exile was tough, with setbacks such as surviving without a passport or having a drumkit lost. But Moholo had a champion spirit and kept playing through the struggle. He has played on hundreds of records — the true figure is not known. Every time we sat together to listen to music, he would pull out a new album that he had recorded with someone somewhere in the world. Throughout his career, he played with celebrated musicians of the free jazz world like Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Keith Tippett, Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker, Stan Tracey, Alexander Hawkins, Irène Schweizer, Enrico Rava, Roswell Rudd, Peter Brötzmann, Derek Bailey, John Tchicai, Saadet Türköz and more. In October 1969, jam session with Frank Zappa, Philly Joe Jones, Earl Freeman, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Johnny Dyani, Grachan Moncur and Archie Shepp at the Festival Actuel in Amougies, Belgium. Photo: Jacques Bisceglia (Supplied by family). A programme for the UK's Bracknell Festival from 1979 quotes British music journalist Steve Lake saying, 'Louis draws rhythms out of nowhere, brings a sense of cohesion and righteous logic to the most uncompromising free blowing, even while stoking the excitement to almost unbelievable plateaux of intensity. His intuitive balance — between control and intensity — is very rare: most drummers possess either one quality or the other.' Moholo played mostly in the UK, but also all over Europe, and even lived in Argentina. A friend in Italy, Riccardo Bergerone, describes that once, while on tour with Viva La Black in 1989 in Turin, Moholo had a heart attack on stage. He had health issues over the years but was not one to dwell on serious things. In September 2005, he returned to South Africa with Ma Mpumi, and though the couple could live in an upmarket suburb in Cape Town, they missed Langa and opted to return. It was through visits to his home that we cemented a friendship that would last for his remaining years. He loved drinking rooibos tea and had a penchant for sweet things like chocolate cake and peanut butter. Ma Mpumi and Louis Moholo-Moholo at a performance. Photo: Supplied by the family. One of the most captivating things about watching Moholo on stage was how he did not care who musicians were or how old you were, as long as you could play. 'Play, man! Play!' he would sometimes urge younger band members, insisting that they give everything they had to the music — a defiant spirit dedicated to the sound. In 2019, Moholo played one of his last gigs at Guga S'thebe in Langa. For many years after, he struggled to walk and could no longer play, but in his head, he was always composing or singing, and always listening. In times when he was bed-ridden, we would gather, just like in the courtyard but now in his bedroom, where he would listen to many albums — very loudly. Musicians from all over the world would come to visit him. On his playlist often were free jazz tunes, and repeatedly music by Abbey Lincoln, in particular the songs They Call it Jazz, Skylark and Through the Years (composed by Bheki Mseleku). And often, accompanied by a spliff of sorts, Moholo would sing and croon the words. It is impossible to capture Moholo's life in one article — he lived large and beautifully — and will be remembered by all who knew him. UK musician Shabaka Hutchings says: 'We've lost a giant of creative music in the passing of Louis Moholo-Moholo, one of those elders who have lived a life in service of sound and energy and feeling…I learnt so much from this man that it's difficult to fully articulate the lessons passed down…I remember the last tour we did with him, supporting him as he walked onto stage whispering, 'Yes baby, no baby, yes baby, no baby,' as he hyped us all into that subtle dance we were preparing to engage.' Shabaka Hutchings, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Tumi Mogorosi and Siyabonga Mthembu performing with Shabaka and the Ancestors in 2017, Photo: Eitan Prince. For his contributions to music, he received several awards including a What happened to the Blue Notes in the end? Moyake had returned to South Africa in 1965, and died a year later. Feza died in London in 1975 (at only 30 years old), and the remaining band members recorded the tribute album, Blue Notes for Mongezi. Dyani died in 1986 in Berlin, Germany, and another tribute album was made titled Blue Notes for Johnny. McGregor died in 1990 and a month later, Pukwana. For all his bandmates, Moholo released an album, For the Blue Notes, in 2014. Now with his death as the final note, we can honour his life, music, humour and long-standing influence as Blue Notes for Louis Moholo-Moholo. Bra Louis's death is a massive loss for us but there is comfort in knowing that he is reunited with his family, Ma Mpumi and his beautiful band — all of whom he loved so much. ____________ **Louis Moholo-Moholo's funeral will be held on 28 June 2025.
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
S/He Is Still Her/e review: Genesis P-Orridge film offers invaluable glimpses into a radical life
S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary Director : David Charles Rodrigues Cert : 18 Genre : Documentary Starring : Genesis P-Orridge, Lady Jaye Breyer P'Orridge, William S Burroughs, Alice Genese, David J, Caresse P'Orridge Balpazari Running Time : 1 hr 38 mins The challenge of distilling the life of the occultist, performance artist, avant-garde musician and pioneering pandrogynyst Genesis Breyer P-Orridge into a single documentary is akin to bottling lightning. Until s/he – their preferred pronoun – died, in 2020, P-Orridge lived not just many lives but many selves, spanning punk rebellion, gender reinvention, occult philosophy and tender parenthood. David Charles Rodrigues' S/He Is Still Her/e arrives with the blessing of P-Orridge's daughters and access to personal archives. Yet for a film about an artist so defiantly experimental, the final cut is surprisingly conventional. Rodrigues structures the film around a late interview with P-Orridge during treatment for leukaemia, marrying archival footage with bursts of DIY psychedelia. The result is reverent and heartfelt but stylistically conventional and unlikely to be mistaken for a transgressive mirror of its subject. READ MORE Taking (some) cues from Brion Gysin's cut-up aesthetic, the film's rhythm falls into familiar talking-heads territory, a binding form ill suited to an artist who believed the body was a prison and gender a fiction. But S/He Is Still Her/e nevertheless provides invaluable glimpses into a life that collided with everyone from William S Burroughs to Timothy Leary, and from Psychic TV to Nepalese monks. Most striking is the film's treatment of the Pandrogeny Project, P-Orridge's radical partnership with Lady Jaye Breyer, in which the pair surgically altered their bodies to become one 'pandrogynous' entity. It's a concept far ahead of its time, less about trans identity than about dissolving identity altogether. Allegations of manipulation and abuse by Cosey Fanni Tutti (aka Christine Carol Newby), P-Orridge's former creative and domestic partner, are glossed over in an intertitle. We get the Scottish Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn's description of P-Orridge and Tutti as 'wreckers of civilisation'. But not nearly enough space is afforded to the music or to the absurd Channel 4 Dispatches documentary that alleged, in 1992, that s/he had been involved in satanic ritual abuse. The fallout was serious enough for P-Orridge and family to remain in exile in – wait for it – Winona Ryder's old bedroom. The footage was later revealed to have come from a 1980s art project that turned out to have been partly funded by Channel 4 .
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It was love at first sight, again': Prague exhibition celebrates work of pair at heart of Europe's avant garde
They created some of the most riveting abstract art of the 20th century, fought Nazis with the gun and the pen, married, divorced and married again. Now the continent-spanning and nigh-forgotten love story of the Burton-Tayloresque couple at the heart of the European avant garde is finally being given its due at a major art institution. And We'll Never Be Parted, exhibiting at Prague's Kunsthalle gallery, is the first show to reunite the Norwegian painter Anna-Eva Bergman and German-born Hans Hartung. Consisting of 350 items across two floors, the exhibition features paintings, photographs, tools – and the extraordinary breakup letter that spelled the pair's separation but allowed them to remarry as creative equals 15 years later. Born in Stockholm to a Swedish father and a Norwegian mother, Bergman trained as an artist in Oslo and Paris, where she and Hartung met and married in 1929 before moving to Dresden. In the early phase of her career she made a living as an illustrator, including of anti-Nazi cartoons. Hartung, born in Leipzig in 1904, was quicker to hit his stride as a serious artist. His idiosyncratic scribbles, swirls and scratch marks helped him achieve international recognition as a key figure of art informel, a largely European counter-movement to American abstract expressionism. Where the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were often violent in their gestures, Hartung executed his ideas in a more controlled manner, preparing his marks with smaller sketches and a grid system. Though single works by each featured in a 1932 group show in Oslo, it was Hartung who enjoyed most of the limelight. In their reviews, some critics referred to Bergman simply as Mrs Hartung. On 14 April 1937, Bergman announced her separation from Hartung in a bluntly phrased letter sent from Sanremo, Italy. While insisting that 'the cause is not another man', it noted that 'from an erotic point of view, we are simply not a match'. Above all, what motivated her decision to leave their marriage, she wrote, was the need to develop as an artist in her own right. 'I shall thus try to make my way through the world on my own, and I shall succeed. I must be completely free and alone, and above all with a lot of time – no housework and other worries – to focus just on my own work while still having time to rest on the side.' Bergman concludes her breakup note with: 'May your art always come first, just as before. It has been your strength and perhaps also (on a human level) your weakness.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion After moving back to Norway, she studied ecclesiastical art and the use of gilding, making abstract paintings that drew inspiration from the bleak landscape around her, returning again and again to archetypal natural forms such as mountains, rocks and fjords. 'Without the separation, they wouldn't have developed as artists in the way they did,' said Theo Carnegy-Tan, one of the show's curators. 'They needed the time apart.' Having seen communist and Jewish friends 'disappeared' under the Nazis, both artists experienced first-hand the rise of fascism. Bergman went into hiding in the Norwegian countryside to avoid being captured by occupying German forces, while Hartung was interrogated and roughed up by the Gestapo. After war broke out, he refused to serve under the German flag and joined the French foreign legion, later losing a leg after sustaining severe injuries in the Battle of the Vosges in 1944. Confronted with mutilated bodies on the battlefield, and inspired by the Spanish painter Julio González, whose daughter he married after the breakup from Bergman, he returned briefly to more figurative painting. Yet after writing each other a series of cautious letters, the pair met again for the first time after the end of the war, at a González retrospective in Paris in 1952. 'It was love at first sight, again,' said co-curator Pierre Wat. In 1961, the remarried couple acquired a plot of land to house their villa-studio in Antibes, southern France, where they expanded their artistic practices. They died two years apart, Bergman in 1987 and Hartung in 1989. While Hartung's standing as a key figure of abstract expressionism in Europe was advanced immediately after his death, Bergman's work has been rediscovered only over the past five years. Her first major retrospective was at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 2023 and her first solo show at Oslo's National Museum in 2024. 'Bergman stood outside the big artistic movements of her time, and it took some time for her reputation to be elevated,' said Carnegy-Tan. 'It wouldn't have been right for this reunion to take place until they are treated as equals.'
RNZ News
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
New music for the silent Len Lye film, Tusalava
Composer Andrew_Faletau Photo: 2025 Nick George Creative, all rights reserved. Artist Len Lye was known for not only his kinetic sculptures, but also his experimental films. One of his best known films is Tusalava - an animated black and white short form film showing the evolution of a cellular creature. The work was created in 1929 and while the film still exists the sound track has been lost. However Samoan composer Andrew Faleatua has written a new composition to be performed with the film as part of Wellington's midwinter arts festival Lōemis. He joins Kathryn to talk about writing the new music for a piece that heavily features Māori and Pacific motifs. Tusalava will be played along with a number of other silent, avant-garde films, featuring new scores played by the music ensemble Stroma at Wellington's Roxy Cinema, Monday 16 June.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ciara and Her Daughter Sienna Twin in Power Suits at the Inaugural Black Women in Music Dinner
Ciara and her eight-year-old daughter Sienna Wilson made the case for mother-daughter coords on Tuesday at The Connie Orlando Foundation's inaugural Black Women in Music Dinner in Los Angeles. The mononymous singer received the Avant-Garde award at the event. For the red carpet occasion, Ciara opted for suited styling, giving menswear an edgy spin with feminine touches throughout. The 'Level Up' artist opted for tailored black trousers, which coordinated with the singer's structured blazer. More from WWD Aimee Lou Wood Reunites With Patrick Schwarzenegger in New Campaign, Talks Astrology Fashion and Red Carpet Style The Best Beauty Moments at Gotham TV Awards 2025: Carrie Coon, Gabriela Hearst, Julio Torres and More Queen Letizia of Spain Embraces Burgundy Trend in Bleis Madrid Suit for Royal Engagement With King Felipe VI Ciara's blazer jacket featured fabric contrast with a silky sheen fabric for the sharp lapels set against the softer sheath fabric of the blazer. The blazer featured a cinched waist for added silhouette definition and rounded shoulders with long sleeves. Beneath the blazer, Ciara wore a crisp, collared white shirt with a silk black tie and a metallic silver tie clip. The singer's look was recreated in a miniaturized version for her eight-year-old daughter, who wore the exact same suited look with a pair of black kitten heel shoes. Ciara shares Sienna with husband Russell Wilson. Menswear, particularly suited looks, for women reached an apex between 2024 and 2025. Culturally significant figures like former Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as royal women like Queen Letizia of Spain and Kate Middleton, have embraced the power suit to mainstream relevance. Its ripple effect has been felt globally, with London-based brands 'expanding their offerings to cater to women's tailoring, with special care to detail and design,' WWD's Hikmat Mohammed reported in August 2024. For Ciara, the coordinated look with her daughter exemplifies much more than the trendy power suit for women. The coordinated red carpet moment also served as a reminder of the ways in which the singer enriches her daughter's life with fashion to sentimental ends. 'I definitely plan to collect things for her,' the singer told WWD in an interview from March 2018. 'I was in the closet the other day and I was putting on some heels and Russ was like, 'SiSi's [her daughter Sienna] gonna have those.' She was sitting around, so we were joking like, you're gonna have those when I get older — or when she gets older,' she said, adding, 'I definitely plan to keep a lot of cool things for her, especially jewelry pieces.' View Gallery Launch Gallery: Ciara and Russell Wilson's Chic Couple Shoe Style [PHOTOS] Best of WWD Mia Threapleton's Red Carpet Style Through the Years [PHOTOS] Princess Charlene of Monaco's Grand Prix Style Through the Years: Louis Vuitton, Akris and More, Photos Princess Charlene's Monaco Grand Prix Style Evolution at Full Speed: Shades of Blue in Louis Vuitton, Playful Patterning in Akris and More
