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Ismail Mohamed-Jan \u2013 better known by South African jazz fans as Pops Mohamed<\/a> \u2013 has passed away<\/a> at the age of 75. His life in music represented a struggle against narrow, oppressive definitions \u2013 of race, instrumental appropriateness and musical genre.<\/p>\n A few days before his death, a remastered version<\/a> of his 2006 album Kalamazoo, Vol. 5 (A Dedication to Sipho Gumede) had been released on digital platforms ahead of an official launch.<\/p>\n Mohamed was born on 10 December 1949 in the working-class gold-mining town of Benoni in South Africa. By his mid-teens, the Group Areas Act<\/a> \u2013 which divided urban areas into racially segregated zones during apartheid<\/a> \u2013 had forced his family to move to Reiger Park (then called Stertonville). <\/p>\n The suburb was allocated to residents of mixed heritage: Mohamed\u2019s father had Indian and Portuguese ancestry; his mother, Xhosa and Khoisan forebears.<\/p>\n Significantly for his musical development, Reiger Park was a stone\u2019s throw from the Black residential area of Vosloorus and the remnants of the historic informal settlement of Kalamazoo<\/a>, where people of all racial classifications had lived side by side. He told me in a radio interview<\/a> about travelling in the area with his father: <\/p>\n I used to witness migrant workers from the East Rand Property Mines coming with traditional instruments to the shebeens (taverns) and playing their mbiras<\/a> (thumb pianos) and their mouth bows<\/a> \u2026 and at the same time you\u2019d have jazz musicians playing Count Basie<\/a> stuff on an old out-of-tune piano \u2026 and these traditional guys would be joining in, jamming on their instruments. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n At home, Mohamed\u2019s family played music from LM Radio<\/a> \u2013 which defied apartheid by broadcasting from Mozambique \u2013 and Springbok Radio<\/a> \u2013 the first commercial station in South Africa, owned by the state (\u201cI got attracted to Cliff Richard<\/a> and the Shadows\u201d). <\/p>\n As he became more interested in music, but still at high school, he\u2019d take trips to central Johannesburg, to Dorkay House<\/a> and the Bantu Men\u2019s Social Centre<\/a>, both famous as cultural centres for Black artists and thinkers. There he found his first guitar teacher, whose name he remembered as Gilbert Strauss. He heard legends like saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi<\/a> rehearsing. <\/p>\n His first teenage band<\/a> was Les Valiants (The Valiants). And by the early 1970s he was with The Dynamics, influenced by the assertive Soweto Soul sound of groups such as The Cannibals and The Beaters (later Harari<\/a>).<\/p>\n <\/a> Partly to pay school fees and partly out of a sense of adventure, those teenage bands sometimes played in white clubs, enduring the bureaucracy of special permits and sometimes playing behind a curtain while white men mimed out front. Apartheid laws prohibited venues from allowing racial mixing. <\/p>\n Something musically very interesting, he suggested, was emerging at that time from \u201chow we copied the Americans and couldn\u2019t get it quite right\u201d. He was teaching himself to play a Yamaha keyboard with a \u2018disco\u2019 pre-set, falling in love with the sounds of Timmy Thomas<\/a> and Marvin Gaye<\/a>. \u201cBut then I was also influenced by Kippie Moeketsi and those melodies\u201d. <\/p>\n Introduced by As-Shams<\/a> label founder Rashid Vally to reedman Basil Manenberg Coetzee<\/a>, and together with an old Dorkay House friend, bassist Sipho Gumede<\/a>, that eclectic mix went down on record as the first album by the band Black Disco, which produced the popular hit Dark Clouds<\/a>. <\/p>\n Mohamed wasn\u2019t yet confident to call himself<\/a> a jazzman, but:<\/p>\n Sipho and Basil told me: just play what your heart is telling you. They were my mentors. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The success of Dark Clouds led to a second album, this time with drummer Peter Morake, called Black Discovery\/Night Express<\/a> \u2013 until the officious white minority apartheid censors blue-pencilled the first two words. <\/p>\nInfluences<\/h2>\n
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\n As-Shams\/The Sun<\/span><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\nChallenging boundaries<\/h2>\n
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