Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath - Selftitled (UK 1972)

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The Brotherhood of Breath was a big-band created in the late 1960s by South African pianist/composer Chris McGregor (1936-1990), essentially an extension of McGregor's previous band The Blue Notes.

The Brotherhood of Breath included many members of the South African expatriate community resident in London, including McGregor himself, Louis Moholo, Harry Miller, Mongezi Feza, Dudu Pukwana, (occasionally) Johnny Dyani; and many of the free jazz musicians who were based in London at the same time: Lol Coxhill, Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford, Harry Beckett, Marc Charig, Alan Skidmore, Mike Osborne, Elton Dean, Nick Evans, and John Surman. The personnel was fluid, depending on who was available. The music resembles a mixture of the hard-driving blues of Charles Mingus and the wild experimentalism of Sun Ra, but retains a unique feel due to the South African influences and the intelligent arrangements.

The original Brotherhood Of Breath ended in the late 70's, with the deaths of Mongezi Feza and Harry Miller (whose label, Ogun Records, released some of the Brotherhood's albums.) McGregor formed a second version of the group in France in the early 80's. In 1987, a third edition was formed with African and British musicians such as Annie Whitehead. In this incarnation the music was more tightly arranged and controlled, with less free improvisation.

Early influencesMcGregor grew up in the then Transkei (now part of the Eastern Cape Province) where his father was headmaster at a Church of Scotland mission institution called Blythswood. Here he was exposed to the music of the local amaXhosa people.

This music is a rich and varied music which pervaded every aspect of life - from formal rituals to the casual activities and encounters of everyday life, like herding cattle or just walking home in the evening. Music was everywhere. And this music, as explained in Dave Dargie's seminal book Xhosa Music, is complex. Dargie mentions the following as examples of this complexity which might be seen to have influenced McGregor in his own music, both as composser/arranger and as band leader: "... a great number of style characteristics are to be found: relating not only to harmony and scale, but to melody, structure and phrasing, form, rhythm, instrumentation, singing techniques, and so on."

In his book Chasing the Vibration Graham Lock quotes McGregor saying: "I have this strong imaginative reference to African village music, and the thing I know about that music is that it has a strong centre. It builds up, a lot of people do things together that they know."

Early careerAfter school and a stint in the merchant navy training academy The General Botha at Gordon's Bay in the Western Cape, McGregor enrolled at the South African College of Music, then headed by Professor Eric Chisholm. Here McGregor was exposed to a different set of influences, during the day Bela Bartok and Arnold Schoenberg, and at night recordings of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, and the live music of local jazz musicians like Dollar Brand (now Abdullah Ibrahim), Cecil Barnard (now Hotep Idris Galeta), Christopher Columbus Ngcukana, Vincent Kolbe, "Cup-and-Saucers" Nkanuka, Monty Weber, the Schilder brothers, and many others who were active in the vibrant Cape jazz scene at that time, the middle 1950s. The vibrancy and power of this music has led some to designate the music played around Cape Town as a particular jazz genre called "Cape Jazz." (Miller, 2007).

As McGregor's friend and fellow-student Bruce Arnott wrote in the University of Cape Town's alumni magazine after McGregor's death in 1990: "I am no musicologist, but I believe that Chris was working toward a synthesis of South African black traditional music and the wonderfully evolved black American contribution to jazz." McGregor put together a group to perform at the 1962 Moroka-Jabavu jazz festival in the Johannesburg suburb of Soweto. This group consisted of Mzimkulu "Danayi" Dlova on alto, Chris Ngcukana on baritone, Ronnie Beer on tenor, Willie Netie on trombone, Sammy Maritz on bass and Monty Weber on drums. At the festival, in which the group took second prize, McGregor came into contact with a wider group of musicians such as Dennis Mpali, the legendary altoist Kippie "Morolong" Moeketsi, Churchill Jolobe and the various artists then organised under the banner of the Union of South African Artists, which had put on the famous "jazz opera" King Kong.

These contacts led in the following year to the formation firstly of the now-legendary Blue Notes and secondly of a big band called the Castle Lager Big Band. The Blue Notes at this stage consisted of Mongezi Velelo (and later Sammy Maritz) on bass, Early Mabuza on drums, Dudu Pukwana on alto and Nikele Moyake on tenor. The great young trumpet player Mongezi Feza joined the group soon after. Johnny Dyani replaced Sammy Maritz on bass and Louis Moholo replaced Early Mabuza soon after and the permanent Blue Notes group was complete.

The Castle Lager Big Band was formed after the 1963 Moroka-Jabavu Jazz Festival. This 17-piece group made the album Jazz: The African Sound, which had six tracks, two compositions by Abdullah Ibrahim, two by Kippie Moeketsi and two by McGregor, all in arrangements by McGregor. Apart from the arrangements, one of the most striking things about the album was the wonderful playing by Moeketsi on clarinet, instead of his usual alto. In the band were musicians who had yet to make names for themselves but would become internationally known. Most notable perhaps was Barney Rachabane, who would go on to, among other achievements, play with Paul Simon on the Graceland tour. Simon would describe Rachabane as the "most soulful sax player in the world."

The years in exileMcGregor is perhaps best-known for his foundation and leadership of The Blue Notes, a South African sextet which included collaborators Dudu Pukwana, Nikele Moyake, Louis Moholo, Johnny Dyani and Mongezi Feza. Equally as notable was McGregor's creation of the Brotherhood of Breath in 1969, which branched out from his work as The Blue Notes. He released three albums of solo piano performances, and continued to be a major force in the music after leaving England to live in the French countryside. He also made a contribution to Nick Drake's Bryter Layter album by performing a piano solo on the track "Poor Boy".

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