Gideon Nxumalo

Gideon Mgibe Nxumalo was born on 15 June 1929 in Kimberley and came to music through the most natural of routes. Both his mother and father played piano, and his father taught him to play SABC radio jingles as a small boy. That early introduction to both music and broadcasting would prove prophetic. Nxumalo went on to receive formal classical training at the University of Roma in Lesotho, emerging fluent on piano, clarinet, viola, guitar and drums, a multi-instrumental range that reflected the breadth of a mind that was never content with a single answer to any musical question.

He has been rightly described as perhaps one of South Africa's greatest unsung musical and cultural heroes, and the life bears that out across every dimension. From the early 1950s he joined the SABC, initially as a young intern valued for his ability to write and type, and worked his way up to become the host of ‘This Is Bantu Jazz’, the corporation's premier jazz programme, where under his beloved nickname ‘Mgibe’, he championed local indigenous music and popularised mbaqanga at a time when radio was the most powerful cultural force in the country. He was also a key figure in the orchestration of the landmark musicals King Kong and Sponono, the latter becoming the first South African production to play on Broadway. He taught piano and music theory at Dorkay House in Johannesburg, and played in the Philip Tabane Quartet. His fingerprints are, in short, across the foundational architecture of South African jazz.

In the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre, his declared political commitment cost him his position at the SABC, a loss that said as much about the state of the country as it did about the man.

His recording legacy, though frustratingly small, is of extraordinary quality. Jazz Fantasia, recorded at the Great Hall at Wits University in September 1962 and commissioned as part of an arts festival, featured Kippie Moeketsi and a then very young Dudu Pukwana, and stands as the first South African jazz recording to incorporate traditional African musical sources and instruments. It marked Moeketsi's last major commercial success before his personal difficulties took hold, and it remains one of the crucial small group recordings of the early 1960s anywhere in the world. In 2009, an arrangement of the work by Denzil Weale for symphony orchestra and big band was performed by the MIAGI Youth Orchestra in South Africa and on tour in Germany.

His second and final album as leader, Gideon Plays, recorded in 1968 with Mackay Davashe, Denny Nene, Gordon Mjandu and Maurice NTO Mgudlwa, is considered the most mythologised and sought-after record in the entire South African jazz canon. A sophisticated bop excursion with a distinctive African edge, it vanished almost immediately after its pressing and was only reissued by Matsuli Music in 2021, introducing it to the global audience it had always deserved.

Gideon Nxumalo died on 24 December 1970. He was 41. The smallness of his recorded output relative to the scale of his contribution remains one of the great injustices of South African music history.