‘I was not yet myself’: representations of Kippie ‘Charlie Parker’ Moeketsi
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Jazz names organise and disseminate significance. Though not my central concern, it follows from their circulation as authenticating imprints on commodities that these names have, perhaps signally, an economic valence. Once vinyl records and now compact discs, turn on the soloist’s printed name; they arrive at the occasion of their consumption sleeved or encased in a name that links the recorded trace, much as the shamanic fetish invokes the body, to the ‘original’ performance and the performer. The name, then, aggregates and organises value, is implicated in and reproduced by the pattern and flow of capital and expenditure. It follows that we need, as we consider the symbolic economy of jazz nomenclature, to remember that it reflects the material processes in which it is embedded, that the movement from ‘creative’ personnel to the managerial, institutional, and societal levels of organization is along an axis of production and consumption that blurs jazz historiography and merchandising, musical evaluation and marketability, politics and purchasing. In mapping the genealogy of ‘double consciousness’ in black Atlantic modernity, Paul Gilroy (1993: 75) traces selected ‘contingent loops and fractal trajectories’ through which the ‘global dissemination of black music’ finds expression in local systems of meaning (1993: 76). Gramophones, later phonographs, and records were, he argues, a signal currency of black Atlantic modernity, a means of disseminating the style, rhetoric, motifs and hence the authority of a politics of black ‘racial authenticity.’ He considers those who participated in these cultural productions to have been ‘organic intellectuals’ (1993: 76) – in the Gramscian sense – who operated ‘without the benefits that flow either from a relationship to the modern state or from secure institutional locations within the cultural industries’ (1993: 76). Implied, though largely unexplored in his analysis, are the appropriation, manipulation and recombination of black Atlantic possibilities in colonial and postcolonial African contexts (see Masilela 1996: 88—96). How, to use Michel de Certeau’s language of everyday practice, local ‘pedestrian’ epistemologies improvised from a swirling global economy of cultural meaning a means of self-representation and, at times, a cogent and persuasive ideological dissonance. It is apparent from the South African and other black Atlantic contexts that local pathways of meaning proliferated through recourse to a black Atlantic symbolic repertoire. Various researchers have mapped the seam at which township music and theatre are sutured to the popular culture of the United States. What remains largely unexplored though is the economy of signification that links these cultural practices to emerging political subjectivities. The diction and semantics of jazz, to return to the particular instance which concerns us, has long been a travelling repository of African American history and hence a repertoire of existential and political possibility. The histories, taxonomies and hagiographies of American jazz served not only, as Erlmann (1999) demonstrates, to buttress far-flung jazz sub-cultures, but provided a discursive matrix for testing new, and on occasion counter-hegemonic, subject positions. Across the black Atlantic, then, along with sound and the means of its production, came this functional argot, a new hierarchy of accomplishment and a list of names that would settle into, and then be endlessly reworked by, among others, the South African imaginary.
This solo maps one ‘contingent loop and fractal trajectory,’ the uses of the name ‘Charlie Parker’ in representations of the South African alto-saxophonist, Kippie ‘Morolong’ Moeketsi. Before we turn to this particular relational representation, though, we need to remind ourselves of the reasons for the centrality of nomenclature in the jazz tradition. Both Ted Gioia (1988: 62—66) and Jed Rasula (1995: 134—162) have demonstrated that, in an art form whose representation in regularly based in myths of spontaneity and expression, most jazz musicians ‘served [their] apprenticeship at the gramophone’ (Gioia 1988: 65). Improvisers, the arguments runs, most commonly acquire a repertoire from an archive of recordings; by listening to and imitating the ways in which others have navigated musical possibilities they develop, much like the speaker of a language, a combinational and later a creative acumen. Eventually the more accomplished player will shrug off, to use Harold Bloom’s phrase, an ‘anxiety of influence’ and ‘discover’ an expressive voice. The record, identified and distributed by name, is, then, the very basis of networks of knowledge and tutelage; one learns first to sound like someone else. The patterned flow of recordings (and gramophones) across the black Atlantic, arguably translates not only individual musical ‘voices,’ but their styles of engaging authority, their modes of expressive subjectivity and, in several instances, their strident assertions of less constricted, less subjugated, black Atlantic identities. ‘Sounding like Charlie Parker’ in Johannesburg in the 1950s and 1960s, to return to the instance we will consider, interpolates into this context a resilient and progressive (musical) subjectivity forged elsewhere, but which opens, in the wake of the commodity’s progress, significant ontological and political possibilities. One potentially gets much more than one pays for.Jazz names, though, do more than establish the terms of an epistemology. Once an improvisational language is acquired and elaborated, it resides in the body of an individual performer. Jazz improvisation, we might recall, consists in what an individual can do under specific musical circumstances. Rather than a canon of works, jazz history is a succession of embodied competencies. The record is only a trace (a remnant) of a musical engagement; it is an acoustic shadow cast by a body fashioned, by years of practice, to come at the surfaces of an instrument with a particular lexical, semantic and syntactic potential. It follows that the notion of an autonomous work of art (in Barthes’s terms, ‘the death of the author’) is probably ill suited to a tradition in which creative capacity lodges thus in particular disciplined and desiring bodies, each with its own idiosyncrasies and possibly its idiopathies, and which is actualised only at the moment of performance. When we listen to jazz, it follows that we listen for a methodical and calculated engagement with musical possibilities at the borders of a performer’s idiolect, at the ways he or she embodies a musical archive and can shape responses to interlocutors both present and implied. The improviser is thus placed at one of countless intersections of a diachronic and synchronic axis. Perhaps it is just this sense of embodiment that would lead Miles Davis to claim that the history of jazz could be summed up in just four words, ‘Louis Armstrong—Charlie Parker.’In jazz discourse communities, the name of an improviser is an index of a particular embodied competence. While musicians and fans might refer to individual performances or recordings, it is the proper noun that both homologises the musician and the music and narrates musical history as embodied genealogy. This might, at least in part, explain the compulsive reiteration of biographical anecdotes in jazz subcultures. Not only do they elaborate the relation between the individual’s music and biography, between performances and the performer’s body, they also situate and explore the music in its cultural and historical context. In other words, by articulating the music and a diversity of practices of a located political subject, anecdotes present the two as inextricably linked. We can imagine the name at the centre of such an anecdotal web and, consequently, as a ‘transcendental signifier’ (to use Jacques Derrida’s term) that functions as an index of a range of tactics of selfhood. This will become clearer as we proceed. For now, we need only keep in mind that when jazz names occur, they are commonly surrounded by an aura of story-telling, a haze of narrative dissemination, and that these stories, in conflating the music and the musician, are simultaneously accounts of sound and a located (historical, cultural and political) subjectivity. We might also suggest that their indexical function, their capacity to gather a complex narrative web beneath a single sign, makes jazz names a persuasive trans-Atlantic currency of identity. They travel, shedding certain valences and accumulating others, but remaining succinct vehicles of culture and history that citizens of the diaspora can deploy in assembling and sounding-out a range of relational identities. We turn now to the symbolic and narrative archive of representations of Kippie ‘Morolong’ Moeketsi. Moeketsi is famously the ‘enfant terrible’ of South African jazz (Weekend World, 5 January 1969: 8). His first professional engagement was with the Band in Blue (under Bob Twala), followed by stints with The Harlem Swingsters and Mackay Davashe’s Shantytown Sextet. Through his association with Davashe, and despite a reputation for alcohol-induced unreliability, he would be appointed as the leading instrumental soloist in, and one of the musical arrangers for, the King Kong band. Many consider his most significant musical contribution as a member of the Jazz Epistles, whose justifiably legendary recording, Verse 1 (Continental 14. ABC 18341), remains a milestone in South African jazz history. Hired to join the King Kong band in London, Moeketsi was severely assaulted by tsotsis just days before his departure. Whether a consequence of this assault, of his alcoholism or a combination of the two, he suffered a ‘breakdown’ while in London, was admitted to Ferreira Hospital and was subjected, by his own account, to at least three ‘sessions’ of electroshock treatment. He returned to South Africa, in the words of Casey Motsisi, ‘drunk and confused … without a penny, still sad and mixed up and looking for booze’ (1961: 69). Although still to do noteworthy service with Abdullah Ibrahim (especially in the sessions culminating in Dollar Brand 3 with Kippie Moeketsi), the Chris McGregor Big Band, Gideon Nxumalo’s Quintet and Pat Matshikiza, Moeketsi’s career faltered (he claims not to have picked up a saxophone between 1964 and 1971) and then ended prematurely in a haze of alcohol and disillusionment. After a concert at Orlando Stadium (Soweto) in 1963, at which at least six people died in a series of drunken brawls, Moeketsi asserted:This is the sort of thing that kills us completely for we live our music and to entertain. For my part it’s the last festival I take part in. I feel insulted and hollow. (Drum October 1963: 20—21)It was a sense of alienation and ennui that was to live with him until his death in 1983.Writing in The Wire in 1993, Luke Alfred describes Moeketsi as ‘a man in the shadows of memory’ (1993: 30). He has, Alfred suggests, ‘been transformed from a real, historical figure into an archetypal, almost allegorical suffering artist, a move which—curiously—obscures his contribution even as it celebrates it’ (1993: 30). South Africa, in the political crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, faced ‘the need to fashion alternative heroes and alternative canons ’ and it was in this context that Moeketsi was canonised as the ‘jazz martyr, the paradigmatic suffering jazzman’ (1993: 32). His life had, though, diverged significantly from the emerging paradigm of the South African jazz biography. Most members of the King Kong band had chosen European exile over return, establishing a network that would facilitate the departure of many of the country’s pre-eminent jazz musicians during the 1960s. His return from ‘the London fiasco when Kippie ruined his chance of hitting the big time’ (Motsisi 1961: 69) was to set him apart. In the reportage of two decades he came to embody a declining domestic jazz scene and the tragedy of unrecognised and thwarted talent in an occlusive racist context. It is to the narratives of this decline, and the terms of the nostalgic cultural ‘recovery’ in the 1980s described by Alfred, that we now turn. As early as the ‘Masterpiece in Bronze’ profile, ‘Problem Child of Music,’ which appeared in Drum in January 1958 (47—51), Moeketsi is represented as an alienated modernist angry at ‘his lack of education, his unhappy life with women, his [inevitable] war with commercial and unprogressive musicians, and at the world’ (1958; 49). The rigours of avant-garde creativity are summed up in the photograph that concludes the profile. Moeketsi, his shoulders hunched, holding his clarinet case in one hand and his alto case in the other, is walking passed rows of empty chairs. The caption reads: ‘Each show takes so much out of him that he often leaves the emptying halls dead-tired and dejected’ (1958: 51). Depictions of a ‘solitary little man’ (Matshikiza in Modisane 1958: 51) or the ‘sad man of jazz’ (Motsisi 1951: 68) would appear over the next years interwoven with anecdotes describing his anti-social behaviour. Not only was Moeketsi charged in the late-1950s with raping a 12-year-old girl (Motsisi 1961: 69), but, on at least two occasions, expressed an inarticulate anger by urinating on antagonists during arguments (Alfred 1993: 31; 32). Through acts like this, and an adopted stylised arrogance of an aesthete, Moeketsi’s was to sour his relationship with several bands and musicians. One of the important exceptions was Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim). In 1968, Aggrey Klaaste would describe Moeketsi’s existential stasis following the departure of Brand for exile in Switzerland. The article, ‘‘Morolong’—He Waits for Dollar’ (Weekend World Sunday, 15 September 1968: 11) is illustrated with a photograph in which Moeketsi sits, head in hands, eyes dejectedly downcast. It is an image of desertion. Aggrey Klaaste’s article resonates with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. When we pulled him out from his bed this week "Morolong" told me with a big yawn that he was waiting for Dollar Brand [who was by then in exile]. "Dollar did not write to me nor tell me that he was coming over. But I love that man […]. I’ve got passport difficulties," Kippie told me with another walloping yawn. "I might stay [in Lesotho] for keeps, DEPENDING." That is Kiepie.The photograph in question would be used again in a montage in the Weekend World on Sunday, 19 April 1969. In the accompanying article, Klaaste, again, describes listening to a recording of Moeketsi playing clarinet in a 1963 Chris McGregor arrangement—of the Moeketsi composition ‘Kippie’—for the Castle Larger Big Band. Moeketsi is, as in so many instances, memorialised as a living absence; he is presented as an example of creative accomplishment existing only in luminescent traces, in the remainder of a damaged and disintegrating sensibility. In the course of ten years, then, Moeketsi’s isolation and belligerent anomie had been differently inflected. What emerges, though, is that representations endlessly imbricate a modernist aesthetic sensibility, the decimation of the South African jazz scene and the political context both in which this had occurred and against the ponderous grain of which the South African jazz avant-garde would be forced to play.It is unsurprising given Moeketsi’s place in the vanguard of South African jazz modernism, the roots of his alto-idiolect in the Charlie Parker records Modisane saw scattered around his house when he interviewed him in 1958 (1958: 47) and his bebop affectations, that those writing about him would persistently inscribe parallels between his music, biography and status and those of Parker. In 1959, following his visit to South Africa, John Mehegan the American jazz scholar and pianist, had written in Downbeat (26(24), 26 November 1959) that he considered Moeketsi ‘one of the great jazz musicians in the world today.’  Mehegan goes on: ‘He is, of course, deeply rooted in Charlie Parker but has a quality of his own melodic sensitivity and melancholy beauty, and a pathos that comes from the very soul of the African’ (1959: 23). In diverse subsequent accounts, Moeketsi would be presented as performing a local version of Parker’s music and as consequently embodying an analogous cultural and political significance. The representational refrain—‘it has been said of Kippie that the ghost of Charlie Parker lives in him’ (1961: 69)—would be repeatedly invoked to express this sense of Parker’s spectral presence speaking through the body of Moeketsi. This notion of a trans-Atlantic relational identity not only extended the reach of the mythological phoenix-like resurrection of Bird—of his immortality, but also suggested that a voice of alienated, progressive blackness could be translated meaningfully from one diasporic context to another. The remainder of my argument dwells on this supposed translation, this ontological and political parallel, and its limitations.From as early as 1961, this country’s pre-eminent alto saxophonist would be commonly known as Kippie ‘Charlie Parker’ Moeketsi (see, among others, Motsisi 1961: 69), a name which, like Ben ‘Satchmo’ Masinga (among others, ‘That Guy Called ‘Satch’’ Drum May 1962: 45—47) and Pamela ‘Mahalia Jackson’ Machinie [also Macinie] (among others, Weekend World Sunday, 5 January 1969: 8), includes a homology reaching across the black Atlantic. In each instance, a local identity at once includes within itself an authenticating signifier (a definitive name that casts an aura of accomplishment) and is identified by a diasporic doubling that presents as a symbolic economy of subjectivity. At one level, these names within names reflect a global politics of authenticity and authority in an art form in which, as we have seen, nomenclature functions indexically both in relation to musical knowledge and history. At another, they imply constitutively articulated identities by suggesting almost interchangeable selves. Moeketsi’s selfhood, we might deduce from this doubling, is represented as simultaneously a tribute to Parker (it is itself a memorialisation), as incorporating and extending Parker’s voice in a process of trans-Atlantic hybridisation, and as implying a homologous history of alienation. The inclusion of Parker’s name in his own operates, then, as more than mere aesthetic genealogy or musical taxonomy. It is as if one jazz identity, in this instance disseminating a history of both musical innovation and belligerent individualism, can be deferentially embodied by another engaged in extrapolating into his own context an analogous aesthetics of isolation and abjection. With sounding like Charlie Parker comes a repertoire of relational identification and self-representation. Through a process of isomorphic symbolic mapping, Moeketsi comes to include within the very syntax of his identity, as if parenthetically, the legacy, embedding and reverberation of another human subjectivity. This fork-tongued self manifests varying relations between the two ‘voices’ it comprises. At times, for instance, Parker’s spectral presence is assumed to animate Moeketsi (not unlike Benjamin’s (1992: 245) ‘small hunchback’ inside the chess-playing puppet); at others the two selves are merged in collaboration and mutual recognition. They imply, though, irrespective of the micro-political relation between the two identities, a black Atlantic consonance. Jazz identities in the South African popular imagination, it seems, are enabled at the seam at which the local and global converge—the African American Parker empowers the transactional selfhood of the South African Moeketsi, lending it aesthetic authenticity, cultural authority and, to the jazzophile, even an aura of canonised significance. We saw earlier that jazz subjectification commonly entails shedding influence, acquiring step-by-step an individual voice. Subaltern colonial or postcolonial identities such as Moeketsi’s may be compelled to incorporate authority by any means necessary, even if by coupling an emergent ‘voice’ to another diasporic locus of power. Coupled-names can be understood as a compromise in an art form based in an individual embodied aesthetic potential. They are, though, a tactic of relational sacralisation in a context in which modernist artists are barely recognised, in which the grain of culture endlessly occludes the value of a heuristic engagement with the structures of modernity. Janus-like, then, the ‘two faces’ of this hybrid self face both global legitimacy and local contingency, casting the aura of a distant origin across the tenuous status of a local artist. It is necessary not to limit an analysis of this symbolic economy to only explicit relational representations. In diverse accounts, consonant black Atlantic identities are embedded in shared figural archives without being explicitly connected. Howard Lawrence, for instance, writing for The New African in 1964 (18 January 1964: 10—11), would propose that, if Moeketsi ‘ sticks to stable influences such as Chris [McGregor], even if only for recording sessions and City Hall concerts, then we can all go around town and paint slogans on the wall heralding the fact that ‘Kippie Lives!’ (1964: 10). This refers to the graffito, ‘Bird Lives!’ that famously appeared on the walls of several American cities only days after Parker’s death. With similar indirection, Klaaste would suggest that Moeketsi ‘plays ‘Birdland’ when he really gets religion’ (Weekend World Sunday, 5 January 1969: 8). Both of these characterisations depend on a migrated web of argot and anecdote. It is, then, not only in the explicit assemblage of relational chains of signification, but also in these oblique inscriptions of a black Atlantic jazz episteme that pathways of meaning proliferate. Whether relations are asserted or implied, though, jazz discourse functions as a mobile ensemble of possibilities which the ‘pedestrian’ intellectual is able to appropriate and manipulate in the interpolation of an identity. We need to recall, as Erlmann (1991) demonstrates, that historically these interpolations have improvised South African identities in fluid relations to the dominant social order. ‘Kippie ‘Charlie Parker’ Moeketsi,’ in its diasporic reach, engages the politics and poetics of modernism in a way that contradicts both the choked parochialism of apartheid’s version of ‘traditional African culture’ and the mythologies of black South African urbanisation. The very formulation of the name is a subversive statement of identification in a context at once invested in racial essentialisation and the ideologies of a narrow nationalism . We need, though, to be cautious in celebrating the seemingly infinite potential of improvised relational identities. While constructions of compound or bifurcated selves engage social hope, the subaltern quotidian, if jazz lives are anything to go by, comprises a series of dead-ends. In counterpoint to the potential of consonance, we can hear a persistent dissonance that reveals the divergence of black Atlantic lives and their contexts. Identities facing particular limitations and radically located terrors cannot be readily substituted for others. A modernist in Harlem, for instance, and one in George Goch, the Johannesburg township in which Moeketsi lived, clearly inhabit different regimes of marginalisation, different orders of threat. Translating an identity from one to the other potentially produces as much ontological discord as it does symbolic potential. Suffering and alienation are, for all of their universality, profoundly circumstantial and particular. We need, therefore, to consider ways in which placing lives in counterpoint raises the possibility of a Fanonian ‘nervous condition’ of alienation, of split subjectivity. This is not to imply that black Atlantic hybridity is inevitably a version of cultural schizophrenia, but that divergences can induce instabilities and slippages that place subaltern identities in particular modes of danger. ‘Double-consciousness’ is, at some level, based in a capacity to appropriate, manipulate and reconfigure (i.e., to improvise), and the intrinsic instability of this process has consequences for the subject.An example will illustrate something of what is at stake. Both Parker and Moeketsi abused alcohol and both were prone to versions of cognitive and emotional disorder. Parker was hospitalised, after an interrupted suicide attempt, in Bellevue Hospital where the admitting diagnosis was ‘acute alcoholism and undifferentiated schizophrenia’ (Russell 1976: 334). He was saved from electroshock therapy, in the interests of his creativity, by the intervention of Chan, his wife. Moeketsi was not so lucky. His account of his breakdown and ‘treatment’ warrants quotation at length for it poignantly describes a vulnerable subjectivity, a nervous system placed on the line by compulsive improvisation.About a month after my arrival in London, something happened to my brain. I became beserk and I had to be taken to a mental asylum in London—Ferreira Hospital. […] I stayed for a month at the hospital. Then, one day one of the doctors took me to a concert in London where pianist Oscar Peterson and Trio were playing, including Ella Fitzgerald and her group. I sat there. You know the doctor wanted to find out if I was awright, because they suspected that I thought too much, musically, if you understand what I mean. They thought that my liking of music could have been one of the causes of my sudden illness that made me not to be quite normal. […]And from there, the doctor said to me, ‘No Kippie, I think you’re still not awright. You’ll have to stay another two weeks in the hospital.’ After two weeks I was discharged, having been given treatment—like electric shock—three times. That thing can make you stupid man. It makes you to become forgetful. I have this tendency of forgetting things—I can hold a pen and forget where I put it.But the doctor said it would do me good. He told me that if one nerve in my brain snapped, I had had it and would eventually become insane, if I kept thinking too much about music. He said electric shock treatment was the best for me. (in Mutloatse 1987: 105—106).Moeketsi’s was, as we have seen, a marginal and vulnerable life in which personal, aesthetic and cultural rebellion would exact a high price indeed. By his account, his improvisational ability, far from consolidating a sense of self, was the cause of its disintegration. The endless proliferation of possibility induced, he suggests, a signally pathological aspect to his perception and to his sense of self. Perhaps his ‘nervous condition’ suggests that an imaginative reach is, when it encounters the limit-experience of subalterneity, potentially less a consolation than a threat. Improvisation, whether musical or ontological, both reflects and places the individual on trial. To single-mindedly exalt identity-in-process is to underrate the dangers that inhere in fluid and liminal subject positions. Relational identities such as Moeketsi’s, we might deduce from his self-representation, may be responses to a crisis of self-representation in an alienating context. Gilroy’s ‘contingent loops and fractal trajectories,’ we should add, are seldom leisured processes of creative integration. Often they are desperate attempts to become oneself in a context that, in its investment in fixed subject positions, opposes the potential of improvised identities. We need, then, to dwell on the rupture—the space between the names—that potentially dislocates the human subject with the effect that he is neither here nor there. Moeketsi’s greatest achievement, reaching across that space both musically and ontologically, also relates directly to his disorder and eventual silence.Coda Without diminishing Charlie Parker’s suffering, we should recall that he has been canonised through various hagiographies and collected recordings. He has, at least, been recognised and honoured, his aesthetic diligently reconstructed and remembered. Moeketsi, on the other hand, has never been the subject of a thoroughgoing biography, nor did he ever record as the leader of a group. Despite his reputation, he died a pauper. All attempts to ‘recover’ and memorialise Moeketsi have quickly become mired in nostalgia; the traces that remain of his life and music are simply inadequate to recover anything approximating to a meaningful portrait of the jazzman and his performances. These are the particular dead-ends and silences of a South African subaltern ontological disorder. Moeketsi’s amnesia prefigures, at some level, a loss that would frame both his history and that of South African jazz more generally. We can, in a strange black Atlantic consolation, draw at least some comfort from the legitimate and timely memorialisation of Charlie Parker. ‘Kippie Moeketsi’ will always signify a definitive silence in black South African modernism. The symbolic economy that has concerned us is, if we consider these practices of memory, unbalanced.Prior to being hospitalised in London, Moeketsi encountered the legendary British jazzman Tubby Hayes. Moeketsi recounted the occasion.But I met Tubby when I was drunk. I even fought him. He was playing you see. He inspired me. I wanted to play. But he didn’t want me to play at all. I was mad, man. I got up there and started to play. But I was not yet myself. You know how it is […] (Motsisi 1961: 69)In an important sense, Moeketsi was never, and will never be, him self. His identity will circulate forever in unconnected and inaccurate fragments. A tribute to ‘Kiepie’ [sic] Moeketsi appeared in Sechaba (March 1985: 30), the publication of the ANC in exile, in 1985. It stages itself as reclaiming an oppressed cultural history. It has an evangelical tone. Not only is Moeketsi’s name misspelled and the year of his death given erroneously as 1982, but apocryphal details and biographical clichés are irresponsibly assembled. The final line reads, ‘When Kiepie joins his old buddy Mackay Makhwenkwe Davashe, what a great reunion it is going to be of two tenor sax maniacs’ (1985: 30). Moeketsi played the alto.Works citedAlfred, Luke. 1993. Remembering Kippie. The Wire, 117 Nov.: 30—32.Ballantine, Christopher. 1993. Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville. Johannesburg: Ravan.Benjamin, Walter. 1992. ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’ in Illuminations (trans. Harry Zorn). London: Fontana: 245—255.Coplan, David. 1985. In Township Tonight!: South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre. Johannesburg: Ravan.De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Randall). Berkeley: University of California Press.Dyer, Geoff. 1991. But Beautiful … A Book about Jazz. London: Vintage.Ellison, Ralph. 1995. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage.Erlmann, Veit. 1991. African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.____________ . 1999. Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West. New York: Oxford University Press.‘Gazelle.’ 1985. A Tribute to Kippie Moeketsi: ‘Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro.’ Sechaba, March: 30.Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.Gioia, Ted. 1988. The Imperfect Art: Reflections of Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University.Klaaste, Aggrey.—all Weekend World ‘Show Pages’ are referenced in situ.Lawrence, Howard. 1964. Jazz Epistle. The New African, 18 January: 10—11.Mackenzie, Ian. 2000. Improvisation, Creativity and Formulaic Language. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58(2), Spring: 173—179. Masilela, Ntongela. 1996. The ‘Black Atlantic’ and African Modernity in South Africa. Research in African Literatures, 27: 88—95.Mehegan, John. 1959. Report from Africa. Downbeat, 26(24), 26 November: 22—24.Modisane, Bloke (?). 1958. Masterpiece in Bronze: Problem Child of Music. Drum, January: 47—49; 51.Moeketsi, Kippie ‘Morolong’ (interviewed by Mothobi Mutloatse). 1987. ‘Roll ‘Em Morolong’ in Umhlaba Wethu: A Historical Indictment, edited by Mothobi Mutloatse. Johannesburg: Skotaville: 99—108.Motsisi, Casey. 1961. Kippie—Sad Man of Jazz (photographs by Peter Mugabane). Drum, December: 68—71.Perlman, A. M. and Greenblatt, D. ‘Miles Davis Meets Noam Chomsky: Some Observations on Jazz Improvisation and Language Structure’ in The Sign in Music and Literature, edited by Wendy Steiner. Austin: University of Texas Press: 169—183.Rasula, Jed. 1995. ‘The Media of Memory: The Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History’ in Jazz Among the Discourses, edited by Krin Gabbard. Durham: Duke University Press: 134 —162.Russell, Ross. 1976. Bird Lives! London: Quartet.Titlestad, Michael. 2000. Jazz Bodies: In Process, on Trial and Instrumental. Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap 16(2): 1—22.
[Drum correspondent interviewing Moeketsi]. 1963. Brawlin’, Lovin’, Boozin’ Orgy—says Kippie. Drum, October: 18—23.

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