Live at the Belly Up: Johnny Clegg Band (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 29) I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode, rerun from 2017 (though it was the first episode in quite a while which I didn’t have a previous entry on at moviemagg) featuring a musician whom I’d vaguely heard of but turned out to have had a quite important and ground-breaking career – not just musically but politically as well. His name was Johnny Clegg and he was from South Africa, though he was born in Bacup, Lancashire, England on June 7, 1953 (making him just three months older than I am!). He was the product of a marriage between a British man and a woman who was born in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. Clegg’s parents broke up when he was six and his mother first took him back to Rhodesia and then moved him to Johannesburg, South Africa. In his early teens Clegg discovered the music of Black South Africa, particularly the Zulu people. As Clegg’s Wikipedia page explains, “Under the tutelage of Charlie Mzila, a flat cleaner by day and musician by night, Clegg mastered both the Zulu language and the maskandi guitar and the isishameni dance styles of the migrants.” Clegg formed his first band, Juluka, in 1969 with a Black musical partner, Sipho Mchunu, when he was just 16. The band soon grew to a six-piece, with three white and three Black members, and with apartheid in full force most of Juluka’s concerts were given in private homes, hostels, universities and churches. Juluka broke up in 1985 and Clegg founded another interracial band, Savuka, with another Black musical partner, singer and dancer Dudu Zulu.

Savuka’s first album, Third World Child (1987), was a best seller in Europe and generated some of the songs Clegg played on his Live at the Belly Up program, including “Giyani,” “Asimbonanga” (a tribute song to Nelson Mandela written while the South African government was still holding him in prison), and “Great Heart” (later covered by Jimmy Buffett, though his live version was deliberately left off Buffett’s live album). Savuka broke up in 1993 after Dudu Zulu was shot and killed while trying to mediate a dispute among taxi drivers. Clegg continued his career as a solo artist, and got his songs in some unusual films: “Scatterlings of Africa” appeared in Rain Man (1988), “Life is a Magic Thing” was in Ferngully: The Rain Forest (1992), “Great Heart” was used in both Jock of the Bushveld (1986) and Whispers: An Elephant’s Tale (2000), “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World” was in Opportunity Knocks (1990) and Career Opportunities (1991), and his hauntingly beautiful ballad “Dela” – which closed his Live at the Belly Up appearance – appeared in the Tarzan spoof George of the Jungle (1997) and its 2003 sequel. “Dela” was also covered by an Australian roots-rock group called The Beautiful Girls (even though all its members are male). The band Clegg brought to Live at the Belly Up in 2017 – two years before his death from pancreatic cancer on July 16, 2019 – featured four white musicians and two Black ones, a percussionist who wore a shapeless African dress (it was only once the camera got close enough to show his face, including a beard, that he was “outed” as male) and a bass player. The white musicians included Clegg himself on vocals, acoustic guitar, concertina and mouthbow (umhubhe), a traditional Zulu instrument that looks like the sort of bow arrows are shot with and consists of a single string attached to a long tube. The player blows air into the tube and simultaneously bows the string to determine pitch.

The others were an electric lead guitarist, a keyboard player who doubled on soprano and alto saxes (my husband Charles questioned whether soprano sax is really a “world music” instrument, but I figured it’s an honorary one since John Coltrane incorporated many traditional and indigenous instruments into his bands, especially in the last three years of his life), and a drummer. The songs Clegg and company played were “Rolling Ocean,” “Africa,” “Giyani,” “Malonjeni,” “The Crossing,” “Digging for Some Birds” (a political song protesting environmental devastation), “I Call Your Name” (which Clegg introduced with a long solo on the mouthbow), “Great Heart,” “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World,” “Asimbonanga” and “Dela.” Though the songs sounded pretty similar to each other, almost all in medium-fast dance tempi, the show as a whole worked much better than other Live at the Belly Up programs have because Clegg’s forces achieved a variety of textures and rhythms despite the similar tempi. That’s a total of 11 songs, and since I’ve taken to judging Live at the Belly Up programs largely on the number of songs the band plays (the number usually runs from eight to 15, and since the time slot is an invariable 52 minutes the number of songs they can crowd into the time period indicates whether they’re a jam band or one that tightly crafts and controls their own songs), at 11 songs Clegg’s band was in the middle, allowing the members some freedom to jam but within relatively strict limits. Clegg’s music is infectious enough, with its fusion of white pop and Black South African township jive, that the program stayed interesting throughout and didn’t flag or lose energy as previous Live at the Belly Up shows have done. And Clegg was also an excellent dancer; his free rhythmic stage moves added excitement to the show. Though he’d had his first surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2015, two years before this Live at the Belly Up episode was filmed, he certainly didn’t look like a man who’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness; he moved with the sheer energy and power of a man in his 30’s and seemed in excellent physical shape overall.