Louis Moholo-Moholo: The Quality of Truth

I come home to find out that Louis Moholo-Moholo died, this Friday 13th, listen to recordings of what I guess was his last band, with Alex Hawkins on piano, John Edwards on bass, the twin saxophones of Jason Yarde and Shabaka Hutchings, on a European tour in 2019.* Free jazz, yes, and music never more free, but freedom, entirely within melody, with the way melody is treated, as, for the first six minutes they do nothing but play the melody, over and over; however many variations are spread around it, how many patches of atonal fights and flurries, at any one point during that time, one person will be playing the melody. And this music above all the music that survives of the twentieth century, perhaps, because of the extremity of its conditions in which it emerged, because of the unshakeable faith and unceasing struggle of the movement with which it was already, whether at home or in exile, in solidarity, this has music has something about it of the quality I can't help name as anything other than truth: where hope is not just an alibi--the fear of facile hope as betrayal--but a present and necessary reality, a utopia and a reality all at once.

 
Moholo-Moholo's is music that knows life because it knows death, and isn't afraid to face up to that, but that finds a way, in itself, in the spirit it is, not in a spirit external to the music, but within the music, and from that, the music can move out into the world, into the (freedom) movement that made it and the movement it maintains. It was like that when I saw Abdullah Ibrahim last year, however old he was and however slowly he played. Each touch of each note weighted with grace. (And in the video we see Alex Hawkins lead the already 80 year old Moholo offstage, up from the drumkit, by the hand, as Ibrahim, too, was guided by the hand, to and from the stage.) So often, as we see in the music of those in their last years, the late performances of Cecil Taylor, say, or, Hal Singer, or whoever you care to name, music strains beyond the limits of a body that would slow down beyond its speed, spirit pushes at the limits where it would usually part from the body. For isn't that what sound and music is, or what we make of it, as it takes on a life of its own and survives its makers? And so often the most moving music played by Ibrahim, Moholo, the Blues Notes--Feza, Dyani, McGregor et al--was a record of loss: most movingly of all, the Blue Notes' records for Mongezi Feza, then later for Johnny Dyani, where the studio becomes a place for a gathering, a wake, a way to put to rest and release the spirit of the individual, collectivized, collectively held in the memory of song. 

So, too, this music from 2019 is lament and celebration at once: it is never not both, the one that cannot exist without the other, their constant dialectic, their co-existence, that struggle of being alive. On Pule Phuto's piece 'Zanele', a Xhosa name meaning "they are enough", they are sufficient, the band hold their instruments and sing Zanele, Zanele, over the piano's gently rocking chords and the crisp crackle and splash of Moholo's snare and cymbals, his whole playing contained, wound-up tight and sharp, propelling the music's hugeness of heart and soaring song precisely through its containment. Music that always exists in and emerges into the condition of singing, the act of singing: to repeat the melody over and over, whether in instrument or to open our mouth and sing it, means we're still alive, we're still alive, we're still alive, and they are enough; and when the band emerge into 'You ain't gonna know me cos you think you know me' and play the melody over and over like a hymn, a benediction, all those words for which the usual designation of 'ballad' is entirely insufficient, for the second time watching the video I burst into tears. What is the point of anything without hope.

(*This is the 'Five Blokes' band that recorded Uplift the People (Ogun, 2018), but to really witness the band's joyous, flowing dynamic, you have to see the videos. Another full-length concert from a few days before the Bimhuis performance above took place at Church of Sound, with Shabaka Hutchings replaced by Byron Wallen and Steve Williamson is here: Part 1, Part 2)