Date : 31st May 2004
TUT Pretoria
Attendance : 14
Apologies : Graeme Currie,
Kai Horsthemke

14 Present: Martin Simpson, Wesley Chetty, Nippy Cripwell, Gerrie Lubbe, Johann Kruger, Concord Nkabinde, Jesse Mogale, Sizwe Magwaza, Pule Makona, Oupa Mlangeni, Lehlohondo Monangane, Dave Broido, Ernest Mothle & Marc Duby

We started with a photo session of Bassists with their basses, for the web-site. Thanks to Johann.

Welcoming by Concord Nkabinde

Gerrie Lubbe :Shared about the progress of The Guitar Players' Association. He spoke about the importance of interaction between the two ‘collectives’.
Learning from each other's worlds & perspectives -"cross pollination" he called it.
The idea of having one membership fee for both collectives was explored. Which means members of both collectives can benefit from both and attend meetings and workshops by both collectives.

Marc Duby: (Head of Dept. Music, Pretoria Tech) - Welcomed everybody to the Technikon.
Marc shared with the group about the Double Bass Department that has been started at Pretoria Technikon. That department is small but is surely growing.
He also talked about a few issues around difficulties with playing/owning/travelling with an upright bass.

Marc then introduced Ernest Mothle, who was guest speaker for the night. Ernest is also part of the new Double Bass Programme at the Technikon.
In introducing Ernest, Marc gave a bit of background on the Pretoria history of Jazz and what could have been, if segregation laws were not in place. Today we need to be grateful for the strides and sacrifices that have been made by musicians and other South Africans in dealing with those kind of policies.
This led to Marc talking about his connection with Ernest, years ago and briefly spoke of plans they together have.
I will get Ernest Mothle’s impressive biography, and we will put it on the web-site.

Ernest Mothle:
Ernest, who has a great deal of experience from working over-seas with some of the best jazz musicians of all time, shared with us difficulties of not being able to read music when working with musicians overseas. A number of South African musicians who went into exile years ago(of which Ernest was one of them) went through a lot of frustrations by not being able to speak a musical language that European musicians could understand. This limited them when it came to sharing our music with the rest of the world. Bra Ernest (as he is fondly known) spoke of great memories of playing with pianist Chris McGregor. Chris wrote Mbaqanga (South African traditional popular musical style) arrangements and he, Ernest, could not play them because he could not read music. He is concerned about the lack in development of reading skills, particularly among young musicians. Sharing this information and skill with young musicians is something he emphasized. If this is not done, then we are never going to effectively speak to the rest of the world about our lives, nor will we be able to analyse and learn from others’ experiences. These concerns have led Bra Ernest to initiate a programme of 3-months full-time camps for development of reading, harmony & improvisation skills. He will keep us posted as to the developments and how we can get involved.

Bra Ernest’s passion for music education opened an interesting discussion. Some the questions that came up were:
How do western influences, ways of writing & reading music affect the indigenous sound and it’s development. The young musos who are getting western-oriented type of training, are they missing out on ethnic/indigenous development? What is important for them to learn if they will be playing in American-type-jazz bands or R & B or Hip-Hop bands. Is formal training good or not? Is it relevant today to study towards a full degree? Does music education do anything for the muso?

We also had a lengthy discussion on sight reading - the importance of it, the set backs, the fears. He shared stories of musos who struggled overseas because they could not read. In some cases it resulted to frustrations that led to substance/alcohol abuse.

Whatever our thoughts and sentiments around these issues may have been, one point that came out strongly was that, the struggles of musicians of yesterday should give us lessons so that we don’t have to go through them again, at least not in the same way. We should focus and conquer the struggles of today. The process does not end there. It is our responsibility to ensure that the next generation is enlightened by our present struggles, so they as well can deal with challenges of their day. If todays musicians are still not able to confidently express and interact with the world, speak and understand the international musical language, then we are failing somehow, because these were the same struggles that limited our musicians 20 – 30 years ago.

Marc Duby then thanked Bra Ernest and thanked everyone for making an effort of coming to the meeting.

So these are the sort of discussions we have at these monthly meetings. Other times we have performances and workshops. We encourage everyone to come and bring suggestions as to what they would like to see happening in the South African Bass Players Collective.