For the Blue Notes 

The Louis Moholo-Moholo Unit

(Westbrook Records CD and DVD)

IT IS now half a century since six South African jazz musicians, five black and one white, left their homeland to escape the apartheid laws that forbade them to make music together.

The Blue Notes, comprising saxophonists Dudu Pukwana and Nick Moyake, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, pianist Chris McGregor, bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo came to London and created storms of change in British jazz, eventually influencing a whole generation of young, free players who owed their musical genesis to them. 

Now, the one Blue Note survivor is Moholo-Moholo — born in Cape Town in 1940. Five decades on he leads a stellar band which remembers his old bandmates and their astonishing music.

Trumpeter Henry Lowther, trombonist Alan Tomlinson and bassist John Edwards are British veterans, altoist Jason Yarde and Martiniquan vocalist Francine Luce have Caribbean roots, Ntshuks Bonga is a Johannesburg-born, Birmingham-based altoist and Alex Hawkins a prodigious young British pianist who plays in many jazz styles and formations.

Together they recreate an amalgam of lost sounds found again, producing an entirely new music played in another era.

The live album For the Blue Notes was recorded at a Sunday morning concert at Milan’s Theatre Manzoni.

Luce’s frequently wordless, sometimes Creole, vocals were to the forefront of this concert, an amalgam of elegy and discovery which never entirely strays from a spirit of remembrance and tribute to those departed troubadours of defiance, comrades of music who leapt continents to continue to make their sounds in unity, and — with the exception of Moholo-Moholo — never returned to the country they loved and which first formed their music.

The opener, Lost Opportunities, begins with a sad alto sequence over Moholo-Moholo’s flickering drums before Luce’s voice laments over Lowther’s mournful brass.

The alto returns — is it Bonga or Yarde who spills out the evocative notes of brilliant lives lost much too early, much too estranged, like millions of other South Africans?

The title track, For the Blue Notes, is a stomping ensemble piece with all horns blazing over Hawkins’s chirping piano and Edwards’s monumental pulse.

Hawkins’s youth and powerful exuberance recreates McGregor’s uncanny union of church, Monk, township dance and brilliant invention.

Tomlinson’s hymnal slides stake out the theme of the funereal opening of Ismite is Might before Hawkins’s full-handed chorus strikes its own might over the horns’ harmony.

Edwards’s pulsating bass delves below Luce’s Caribbean words in Creole, with Lowther’s obbligatos never leaving her.

She moves straight into Dikeledi — is it a praise song to musicians who showed the way? It is sung with huge beauty and feeling with gradually ascending repeated riffs after a brief but intensely moving alto preface.

There is a sense of sonic wonder about Thank U 4 2Day, its horn harmonies wrapped around the simplest of melodies, floating in the Italian air that Sunday morning and followed by Luce leading with B My Dear, a wordless love song, before Bonga takes a rhapsodic chorus, remembering the marvellous Pukwana.

The rhythmic impetus tightens with Edwards’s twanging strings for Sonke, which Luce half-sings, half-laughs in a colloquy with the saxophones before Hawkins’s pathfinding chorus and the horns’ harmonic unity.

Tomlinson’s deep notes are the foundation for Zanele, and Moholo-Moholo joins Luce for the single reiterated word which forms the vocal, before he moves directly into naming his bandmates.

But it was one of his erstwhile confreres, the astonishing Mongezi Feza, who wrote the theme of You Ain’t Gonna Know Me Cos You Think You Know Me.

We only hear less than one-and-a-half minutes of its pure melody, but it is enough to remember his puckish brilliance.

As the last Blue Note’s pounding skins unlatch the final track, The Tag, 50 years have passed in an hour and musical and political epochs have been struck and remembered.