During the 1947-48 season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier was performed. The next season, the Met performed his Salome.
It took more than 70 years before another living composer had different operas staged at the Met in back-to-back seasons. This remarkable feat was achieved again earlier this month with the performance of renowned jazz musician and composer Terence Blanchard’s Champion, about the real-life story of tragic boxer Emile Griffith:
Last season, the Met performed his Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which was the first opera by a Black composer staged by the Metropolitan Opera.
Blanchard’s Champion, under a slightly different name: Champion: An Opera in Jazz, had its world premiere in June 2013 at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.
Sixty-four years earlier, King Kong - All African Jazz Opera, another landmark opera written by a jazz musician and composer about the tragic real-life story of boxer Ezekiel Dlamini, opened not in New York City, but in apartheid-torn Johannesburg, South Africa. However, what made King Kong really important was that it was the first All-African opera in South Africa and opened up exciting new possibilities.
I originally wrote about King Kong in October 2021 (we’ll get back to Chet Baker in Italy next week). I’m sending it now to pay homage to Blanchard’s Champion AND that first Jazz Opera, King Kong, an important step that paved the way for the development of excellent, thought-provoking, and relevant Black musical theatre.
On February 2, 1959, the African jazz opera, King Kong premiered at the Great Hall on Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa.
King Kong’s narrative follows the life story of 1950s heavyweight boxer Ezekiel Dlamini, a Zulu from Vryheid, who was better known by his ring name “King Kong”.
Dlamini was something of a township hero by rising to boxing stardom in the darkening days of apartheid. His star dwindled quickly into lost bouts, drunkenness, off-ring violence, and finally murder. He knifed his girlfriend when she arrived at a club surrounded by rival gangsters. He asked for the death sentence but was given 14 years of hard labor. He drowned himself a few weeks later.
The production was sponsored by the Union of South African Artists and is described as the ultimate achievement and final flowering of Sophiatown multi-racial cultural exploits in the 1950s.
Sophiatown
In the 1920s and 1930s, urban black society was emerging in South Africa and African-American culture played an enormous role in the influence of culture and leisure activities of urban South Africans. Recordings of American music like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and the Mills Brothers were emulated by South African musicians as their music became synonymous with a better standard of life.
The all-African Jazz Opera, King Kong, reflects all the shades, moods, and contrasts of Sophiatown, a shanty town on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The musical score reflects the urban street life, illicit shebeens, and violence of 1950s Sofiatown, a sound that in time became known as “Township Jazz”.
In his 1961 book, King Kong: the superb African jazz opera, Harry Bloom writes: “Modern ‘hit’ –type tunes alternate with penny-whistle blues or road gang chant. Liturgical music drawn from the mission schools, hot barbaric jive from the shebeens, choral harmonies from tribal life, patter numbers, operatic solos – all find a place in a remarkably varied score.”
A Jazz Opera
Although living under oppressive minority rule, on the opening night of King Kong, a black pianist, and composer, Todd Matshikiza; a white creative team; and a 72-strong black cast offered the audience a vision of another kind of country, in which creativity and collaboration prevailed.
Most importantly, I find Matshikiza’s score wonderful and his story fascinating.
Todd Matshikiza was born in 1921 in Queenstown, South Africa. He not only had a musical career, but a literary one as well. He was a musician, teacher, and writer for Drum magazine. I found a little about him from the South African History Online website:
Matshikiza taught for a while at Moroka High School and later established a private music school (the Todd Matshikiza School of Music) to teach the piano. But he was chiefly concerned with Johannesburg's jazz world. In order to survive that precarious existence, he worked for Vanguard Booksellers, and later as a salesman for the Gillette Razor Blade Company. As a jazz musician, his most notable work was as a pianist with the Manhattan Brothers and the Harlem Swingsters. He toured South Africa with both these groups and also travelled to Lorenzo Marques (now Maputo) in neighboring Mozambique.
Matshikiza took the opportunity to leave South Africa with his family in 1960 and to make a new life for himself in England. Although King Kong was a success there, no great musical opportunities opened up for him. He occasionally played the piano in London nightclubs and resumed his career in journalism. He freelanced for various British journals, writing a series called 'Todd in London' for Drum readers back home and broadcasting for the African Service of the BBC. In 1961 he published an autobiographical book, Chocolates for my wife.
In the sparkling prose style he had developed on Drum, he recounted his early years in the Eastern Cape, his musical and other ventures in Johannesburg and the daunting process of the making of King Kong. Interspersed with these anecdotes was an account of his family's struggle to find their feet in the alien environment of England. In 1964 he took up an offer from the fledgling Zambian government to be a newscaster and producer for the Zambian Broadcasting Corporation. He was relieved to be able to take his family back to the African continent.
He was a very popular personality on the airwaves, but he was frustrated by the lack of a creative musical environment. He also missed his native land. He left broadcasting to become music archivist for the Zambian Information Service in 1967, travelling extensively to collect traditional Zambian music. However, he was dispirited by the fact that he could see no early prospects of being able to return to South Africa (where he had become a 'banned' person). He died in 1968.
When King Kong premiered in Johannesburg, it launched the international careers of musical greats Miriam Makeba, who played the female lead role, and Hugh Masekela, who played trumpet in the orchestra. Here she is with James Thompson on the left as Slim and Nathan Mdledle, who played King Kong:
This is a classic, Miriam Makeba singing a popular Back of the Moon from the original cast recording:
Miriam Makeba was in her mid-20s in 1959, when she was cast as Joyce, owner of Back of The Moon, the most famous shebeen in Sophiatown. In his 1985 book, In Township Tonight, which documented three centuries of black South African music, dance, and theatre, David B. Coplan writes that the song celebrated the “final flowering of Sophiatown culture.”
In 1959, South Africa had been under apartheid rule for eleven years, the Sharpsville massacre would take place within a year, and in 1961 the country would become a republic. Based on the huge success in South Africa, that same year, the cast of King Kong toured London’s West End and Matshikiza, Makeba, and Masekela would all flee into exile.
London’s West End
In 1961, the King Kong premiered at the Princes Theatre in London's West End and showed in England for two years.
The liner notes of the London cast recording states
No theatrical venture in South Africa has had the sensational success of King Kong. This musical, capturing the life, colour, and effervescence -- as well as the poignancy and sadness -- of township life, has come as a revelation to many South Africans that art does not recognize racial barriers. King Kong has played to capacity houses in every major city in the Union [of South Africa], and now, the first export of indigenous South African theatre, it will reveal to the rest of the world the peculiar flavour of township life, as well as the hitherto unrecognized talents of its people. The show, as recorded here, opened at the Princes Theatre, London, on February 23, 1961.
It’s interesting to listen to the original King Kong cast recording on the Gallotone label and compare it to the “watered down” London cast recording on the Decca label. I find Jack Hylton’s London cast recording disappointing. I think the choices that were made to accommodate the white musical sensibilities of 1960s London are astounding – and not in a good way.
Here’s one more for the road, another classic from the original cast recording, Strange Things Happen, sung by Miriam Makeba:
Next week, on the Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles into the waters of Piero Umiliani’s musical relationship with Chet Baker in Italy.
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