GLORIOUS GLORIA

Music, magic and mystery

The minute I heard of Gloria “Ntombikayise” Bosman’s death, memories of a raucous and carefree youth blasted me back to what neither the most audacious of wills nor longing will reclaim. Ever. I will not claim that by the time she died the gifted, genrebusting vocalist, composer and, of late, guitarist and I were as thick as thieves. Nonetheless I kept a committed, if distant, watch on her career. On Sunday, Bosman had just returned from what was reported to be a riveting performance in East London on Saturday.

A mutual friend tells me: “Knowing Gloria, she would not say what was ailing her. She kept her private life exactly that: private. But I know she wrestled with high blood pressure and anxiety,” before adding: “But these days, who doesn’t?”

Her musical journey commenced early in her teens in a choir with which she sang her lungs out in Mofolo, once Soweto’s melting pot of the arts. She later won a scholarship to study opera and classical music at

Pretoria Technikon, then the highest-regarded music conservatory in the land.

I remember, as a young buck on the come, reading about her in weekend rags. We were almost the same age.

One image has stuck with me — a Siphiwe Mhlambi photograph of her and another “bird” shot in 1993.

On the left is songstress and activist Jennifer Ferguson in black, pearls-decorated, sleeveless top and tight pencil skirt.

Her hair is in a bun and her gaze is cast downwards, her head tilted slightly sideways as though she is leaning, at least in gesture, on the taller black woman to her right.

Beaming, almost reluctantly, is an Afro-ed Gloria in black ankle-length evening dress and sheer, lace opera gloves. It is beguiling.

In a silent way.

A MOMENT IN TIME

It could have been shot anywhere. Perhaps the legendary Club Pelican in Soweto or at Berns Salonger in Stockholm. In another age, the “sparrow” on the left could have been Edith Piaf, the beanstalk on her right, her alter-negro Lady Day. We would have been just as enchanted.

Seeing it for the first time I wondered about life under the ritzy lights of show business. Looking at it again, as I typed these words three decades later, I couldn’t get a grip on myself. The keyboard quickly resembled a puddle.

Handkerchief, please!

I met Gloria Bosman in the unlikeliest of ways, though nothing was “unlikeliest” in Yeoville, our 1990s Yeoville.

“Hey, Ndoda,” a tenorish voice coursed through the line after my flat’s buzzer rang. “Vuka, Ndoda, we came to pick you up.” A solid but giggly voice. I had never heard that voice, at least not this early. I thought: “Weird.”

But that is how Gloria introduced herself that winter morning. She was with Lucia Mthiyane, the actress and singer with a gorgeous coarse voice compared with Gloria’s sublime, smooth, dynamic, soul-drenched, jazzmeets-classic wailing timbre.

Lucia brought her to my place with the sole intention of giving me an advance listen to Gloria’s then-soon-tobe-released debut album.

The first time I saw her “in the flesh”, she wore faded denims, hung Hip Hop baggy style, a men’s dress shirt and a bomber jacket.

She had unruly “baby locks” that looked like mopani worms on a national shutdown protest front line and wore a huge smile. There was something simultaneously butch and terribly cute about her. I took a liking to her.

Alas, the listening session, as it were, would take months to materialise. In the meantime, an acquaintanceship bloomed. Carried by nothing but a shared love for music.

Gloria, Lucia and I soon developed a side friendship. Though Lucia and I did not drive, the trio’s favourite way to listen to music was doing so with the windows open, playing tune after tune.

She had unruly ‘baby locks’ that looked like mopani worms on a national shutdown protest front line and wore a huge smile. There was something simultaneously butch and terribly cute about her. I instantly took to her

NAUGHTY LAUG HTER

Once in a while we’d visit Gloria’s folks in Pimville, Soweto. Somewhere along the road the “sisters” would summon a tune out of the blue and before long the car would be filled with voices and naughty laughter. In Yeoville, we laughed and ran around like fools.

Though singing mbaqanga tunes and escaping into Maria Callas’s repertoire when the mood swayed her — laughing, poking fun and making faces, yet in awe that music is a gift from the gods, genre be damned — she had a wide, discerning ear for what might be thought of as obscure musical arcana.

I remember she loved the Pedro Almodóvar soundtrack from the Spanish film Hable Con Ella,

‘She was more than the sum of her parts: opera, Soweto streets, sometimes theatrical actor, Yeoville’s La Bohème, jazz singer, soul singer, blues singer, folk singer, she was all those and more’

featuring Cucurrucucu Paloma, a song sung with an almost teary, conspiratorial tone, and arranged at the decibel of a whisper.

Performed by Brazilian heart-throb Caetano Veloso, it was overwrought, a bittersoet thing of shocking beauty. Listening to it with Gloria Bosman felt like we were musical outlaws.

Ten years later I heard the song in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona and welled up.

In a silent way.

At some point during the course of attending the theatre, lounging at Lucia’s place or driving to God knows where, Gloria’s album Tranquility finally dropped. The producer, Paul Hanmer, went for the sublime and wondrous. The mission was clear: invite seasoned talent, easy enough within their skins, to allow the “fledgling jazz singer” to chart her course.

Helping to cook up this stew of new and experimental music were Louis Mhlanga on acoustic guitar, Menyatso Mathole on electric guitar, Hanmer on keys, McCoy Mrubata on tenor saxophone, Herbie Tsoaeli on acoustic bass, Basi Mahlasela on shakers, wood blocks, vibraslap and “sweets”, Rob Watson on drums and Lawrence Matshiza on kora.

Once again, Lucia was in the house, adding a frisson of gospel and spectral otherworldliness with that river-deep, mountain-high voice of hers. Technical producers charged the recording with so much electrical power that its crystal clarity sounded like the winds up on the Hindu Kush.

EVERY TRACK IS A WORLD

Little wonder the feeling is best described as “vibrational”. It feeds off and re-churns the vibes before cyclically blowing them back into the ether. And that’s just production, let alone the music.

The beauty of the album is that every track is a whole world and an entry point into the journey with Gloria. Until you lock yourself in a room and listen to Remembering Thami Mnyele, a chilling ode to the slain leading figure in the ANC’s cultural wing.

There is no reason to believe Gloria met Mnyele, at least not physically. Yet with just orchestrated humming, yodelling even, and strings upon strings of electrical bliss, she liquefies his spectral aura and breaks it into the tiniest particles, as though to alchemy born, before blowing his memory into the air we breathe. That orchestrated piece of emotional outpouring and tight, taut craftsmanship elevates not only the album, but your listening experience of it. Gloria is tentative and “flighty”, gun-shy and gung-ho, especially in her interpretation of Xhosa folklore.

The nine-track album, bookended by allusions to time (the opening track is entitled Time Will Tell, its closing offering Timeless), is nothing less than enchanting, with emphasis on “chanting ”— an offering that portended an extraordinary talent.

Until that album dropped, at the tail-end of the decade and century, South Africa’s “adult” musical map was, and to an extent still is, dotted with acts riding ticket-free on the coattails of storied 1950s and 1960s Sophiatown and District Six jazz greats.

To be clear, Gloria also stood on and sang from the shoulders of musical forebears. She also demonstrated, while at it, that appropriation is not always the best compliment.

IT FELT SO REFRESHING

How did she do it? Rarely did she cover the requisite South African standards such as Pata Pata, Nomeva, Meadowlands or the Doornfontein slum yards’ ding-dingdong old piano stride Ntebejane Ufana Ne Mfene. But when she did, she rose above all their Sophiatown swing time so only the skeletal lyrics remained.

For that reason, at least on her debut album, when she left Miriam Makeba, Dolly Rathebe, the Skylarks, Thandi Klaasen and Nancy Jacobs’s discographies and gave Busi Mhlongo’s repertoire a wide berth, it felt so refreshing. And though also classically trained, she and Sibongile Khumalo couldn’t have been more distinct. Though her phrasing is undeniably influenced by Dianne Reeves, if there’s any vocalist and writer she could have gestured towards, simply because we are all channelling someone, even unawares, it might have been Sophie Mgcina.

Parallel traces.

Perhaps a pattern is emerging. Mgcina, like legendary bassist Victor Ntoni, was a music conservatory product as much as she was of the Reef’s streets, which inevitably left impressions on her “jive”.

Gloria brought Western musical training to bear on her work. She claimed its discipline/s as her rightful human inheritance: that too was who she was. Even though she was more than the sum of her parts: opera, Soweto streets, sometimes theatrical actor, Yeoville’s La Bohème, jazz singer, soul singer, blues singer, folk singer, she was all those and more.

At best, Gloria was an uncurated receptacle for experimental and exacting, sometimes unfair one might feel, artistic gods, for whom the price of avoidance is steep and the price of embracing steeper still.

She was, in her singularity, not unlike the oracular J

Dilla, “the beautiful one” born to the art of Hip Hop. These are artists who live, wrestle with and, if need be, perish for their art.

Though her career was marked more by milestones than misses, it often felt like, particularly in the last decade of her life, the commercial star-making machine succeeded in engendering heavy bouts of doubt in her. Withdrawals, sulking and occasional trips in and out of depression wove themselves into the seams of her soul, it seemed.

As for me, I choose to stay with the young, vibrant, optimistic artist at the departure point of the journey: the young woman in whose orbit many of her peers not only wished to know, but glimpsed, how it would feel to be free.

But also the Gloria who would tip-toe from behind to startle you, trip and trick you, and burst out laughing, never at you, always with you: naughty by nature.

Our “collaboration” took on its own tenor and direction. I was always aware that the relationship between a young music critic and an equally new recording musician, if not altogether new performing artist, was useful and, therefore, mutually beneficial. Access in exchange for a sympathetic audience and perhaps good press. An understanding Gloria, Lucia and I shared.

In a silent way.

My first book featured a chapter on Tranquility. I never knew whether she loved it. But when she asked me for my thoughts on her song Abantu with kwaito artist Sbu Ntshangase, I beamed.

For a “jazz artist” to go on wax with a kwaito artist, I thought: Sistergal has balls. Again, the tyre hit the tar and I wrote about it too. From 1997 to 2003 we were tight, but by the late 1990s I was married and less available to my artist sisters. Yet Gloria’s music swirled all over our house.

SHIPS IN THE NIGHT

Then life happened.

Stardom beckoned her just as Lucia blew up in theatre and received television roles, and I prepared myself for a literary career. The world did not end in 1999. Things were blowing up and blowing fast. Friends and friendships were rearranged.

Gloria had a long-standing residency at Unisa, where she was a performer-in-residence, I believe. Years flicked by before we saw each other again. So much our Yeoville had changed. It was no longer ours. By the end of 2003 I had moved out of the “village”. We were like ships in the night. Lucia was gone, no longer around to convey our airsmooches to each other.

A few years later I found myself MCing the Johannesburg memorial service for poet, activist and author Amiri Baraka at Museum Africa in Johannesburg. Again, that word: enchanting. It was a spirited evening, if only hiding the sombreness threatening to enshroud us all in a blanket of gloom. Arts and culture luminaries such as Duma ka

Ndlovu stepped on to the stage to render a poem or two.

Gloria was not on the programme, but someone, I believe ka Ndlovu, asked me to squeeze her in for an impromptu blues/jazz tribute.

She tore the roof down. She needed to do a full set. The organiser slipped me a note to accommodate only one more song. The programme proceeded swimmingly, until we all retired to Nikki’s, the speakeasy in Newtown, for a raucous night of tears, gossip and, as things go in those spaces, updates on each other’s projects and journeys.

THE GLORIA I KNEW

It would be the last time I saw the Gloria I knew.

Three years later I bumped into her in Soweto on my way to Mofolo’s Abantu Book Festival. Gloria had an appointment with one of the writers we were travelling with. She was incredibly nasty and gave me an evil eye. I was so disturbed, distraught even: how could my 1990s friend and fellow “fool” give me an evil eye?

What could have happened? What’s so vile, so complex, so malignant between old(ish) friends who once rushed into the blast of morning spring days, singing at the top of our voices.

The question weighed a hundred stones on my soul and generated acid leaks in my head, leaving me a wreck. I never really asked anyone.

For a while I carried the question within me, unaware that whenever I thought of Gloria my posture became hunched like a question mark no-one knew the reason for. I guess some relationships are destined to be frozen in punctuation marks.