South African Jazz Collective SPAZA Look To The Past To Capture The Present On ‘UPRIZE!’

SPAZA's new album, Uprize! (out on Oct. 16), has a fierce, enthusiastic title, complete with exclamation mark. The cover is similarly joyous; it shows two women raising their arms ecstatically in the air, fists clenched. It makes revolution look like fun.

The music inside that upbeat package, though, is a stark contrast. Uprize! is an album of meditative, solemn, spiritual jazz. Every intimation of joy wreathed in mourning. The opening of the first song, "Bantu Education," starts with deep, agonized notes from Malcolm Jiyane's trombone, and an ambient chorus of worldless gospel moans led by singer Nonku Phiri. The album is less a celebration than an eerie, heartfelt and extended lament.

The mixture of pain and triumph is fitting given the album's subject. The music was recorded in 2016 as the soundtrack for Sifiso Khanyile's 2017 documentary Uprize! The television film tells the history of the June 16, 1976 uprisings in Soweto against the racist apartheid government.

Most older radicals and activist leaders, like the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, had been jailed or killed by the mid-1970s, and older people were understandably terrified of opposing the regime. "Most of our parents in those years were in total fear of government," says 1976 student leader Seth Mazibuko in one of many excerpts from the documentary included on the album. "They'd say to us, 'You don't stand against the government. You don't say things against the government. You'll go to jail for years, like Mandela! You'll go for life!'"

But when the government demanded the Black schools start teaching students in Afrikaans, the language most associated with the apartheid regime, something snapped. Inspired by a new generation of radicalized teachers, high school students went on strike and took to the streets to protest. Bantu Education, the government's program for Black schools, "was a project to keep Black people uneducated, undereducated and basically just a preparation for the labor market, that's all we were good for," the documentary explains. Student protestors were both demanding better instruction, and showing through their own political engagement that Black youth were more than the worker drones the regime was trying to turn them into by force.

The album is a tribute to and celebration of the children's resistance. The uprising was major turning point in South African history, and led eventually to apartheid's repeal in 1991. But the album is also a eulogy for those who died over the grinding decade and a half between rebellion and freedom. Police and government forces may have killed as many as 700 people in the 1976 demonstrations. One of the most harrowing anecdotes in the documentary describes a Black student trying to talk to a Black policeman during the protests. The policeman shoved him away twice. When he returned for a third time, the policeman shot and killed him.

"I remember crying," Malcolm Jiyane said of the first time he saw the documentary. "And while watching a melody came to me. I hummed it to the rest of the band and they added their input. And that's how all the music was composed, from everyone's ideas."

As Jiyane says, the group, including Jiyane, Phiri, bassist Ariel Zamonsky and percussionist Gontse Makhene improvised the music while watching the film. The result is strikingly polished, especially considering that the musicians were not exactly a working band. Makhene and Zamonsky had recorded together as SPAZA before with a number of other performers assembled by the Mushroom Hour Half Hour label. But Phiri and Jiyane were new additions.

Jiyane ran away from home as a child, fleeing parental abuse. "I grew up in a children's home called Kid's Haven," he told me by email. "One December, the home had a Christmas party and Dr Johnny Mekoa, who had a music school in a township called Daveyton, came with his big band to perform for us. It was my first time seeing musical instruments live and hearing music being played live. After the show he asked every child who had interest in learning music to come to his school." Jiyane, who had dropped out of formel education in fifth grade, joined Johny's academy in 1997 at age 13 to learn drums. He eventually switched to piano, and then to what became his main love, the trombone.

Phiri has been an eclectic vocalist from almost as soon as she could talk. "As a toddler apparently I was really good at mimicking Whitney Houston and a whole bunch of other artists," she laughs. More recently, she's recorded in a range of jazz and non-jazz contexts: she's worked with everyone from the classic South African vocal group the Mahotella Queens to Portuguese producer Branko. She says she leaped at the chance to work with the rest of the new SPAZA.

"It was a group of artists that I really respected," Phiri told me. "Collaboration for me, and I mean this in the most innocent way, it's kind of like creating a baby that can't be duplicated with anybody else."

You can hear that new, lovely thing being born on "Sizwile." Phiri's languid vocals sigh and soar up high and then impossibly higher. Gontse Makhene's percussion skitters quietly around the edges of the song, while Zamonsky's bass provides a steady, quiet pulse. Jiyane sometimes responds with vocals in dialogue, or adds piano flourishes, or towards the end of the song solos on trombone while Phiri yodels in response. "Siwile" means "we have heard" in Zulu, and the musicians sound like they're listening not just to the protestors in '76, but to each other, building the song as they go out of responses and silences.

Recording a new soundtrack for the album was a counterintuitive choice. The documentary could have used music from the time, as do most documentaries about the Civil Rights era and its legacy in the U.S. Many interviewees in Uprize! do reference Miriam Makeba, the Beaters, and kwela, as well as international acts like James Brown and Bob Marley, all of whom influenced Black resistance in South Africa.

Having SPAZA on the soundtrack, though, emphasizes the present day's distance from and continuity with, South Africa's past. The music reaches across a gulf, that's both too wide and too present.

Zamonsky's family came from Argentina to South Africa in 2005, when Zamonsky was in high school. "It was already many years, what 10-11 years from democracy," he told me. "It's difficult for me to imagine how it was before—it's unthinkable somehow." And yet, at the same time, much of the inequity and oppression of apartheid-era South Africa persists. "Obviously, everything has changed, but there are the same kind of attitudes. South Arica is one of the most if not the most unequal countries in terms of who how many people make money and who doesn't make money, there's a lot of poverty." Makhene adds, "The leaders are doing the same thing that the leaders that they kicked out of power were doing. White face, black mask, as they say."

The documentary and the album are both ambivalent in tone because the uprising was not exactly victorious. It was crushed by the police, and even today many of its goals have not been won. "We Got a Lot of Work to Do," as the title of the final song on the album puts it. But clips from the documentary in that song also explain that the album itself is part of the work that needs to be done.

"They want us to be sort of the image of what it means to be Black, and we will adopt a different image of what it means to be Black. And in that way you are defeating apartheid," a documentary clip explains, as Zamonsky's bass throbs underneath, and Jiyane's piano explores and probes. Through Bantu Education, South Africa was "putting our minds in a box," the documentary says. The authorities didn't just want to keep Black people in poverty; they wanted to prevent them from thinking or creating. Uprize! the documentary is a chronicle of that history, but Uprize! the album is at least in part a triumph over it.

SPAZA takes pain and the past and makes music out of it together, spontaneously. It's a live demonstration that oppressors can't stop Black people from thinking, or singing. That's why, despite many reasons for sadness, the people on the cover have something to cheer.

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South African Jazz Collective SPAZA Look To The Past To Capture The Present On ‘UPRIZE!’

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