Saxophonist and flutist Zim Ngqawana, among the most accomplished South African jazz musicians of his generation – and a musician with special ties to Chicago, including a long working relationship with saxophonist Ernest Dawkins – died Monday evening in Johannesburg, after suffering a stroke earlier that afternoon. He was 52.
Early reports say that although Ngqawana was rushed to the emergency room at 3:30 PM, a problem with the CAT scan machine at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Hospital delayed his examination by almost eight hours. According to Ngqawana’s manager, the musician was placed on a ventilator early Tuesday morning but was removed around 10 AM (local time).
Ngqawana – whose name, derived from one of Africa’s “click languages,” required a distinctive glottal vocalization in its second syllable – had established a strong reputation in his native land, which has arguably the richest jazz tradition of any African country: in 2002 he received five nominations in the South African Music Awards, which is still the record for nominations in a single year.
Born in the city of Port Elizabeth in 1959, Ngqawana dropped out of high school but still gained admission to Rhodes University; afterwards, he studied jazz at the University of Natal, in the large coastal city of Durban. Ngqawana subsequently earned a scholarship to the University of Massachusetts, where he studied with famed saxophonists Archie Shepp and Yusef Lateef.
Ngqawana first visited Chicago in 1995 (an encounter that was perhaps inevitable, given the fact that Port Elizabeth carries the nickname “The Windy City” in South Africa). The occasion was a Black History festival at Northwestern University, recalls Brice Rosenbloom, then an NU sophomore working with the student concert committee, and now a prominent jazz presenter in New York.
“The African Studies Department proposed bringing Zim in for a weeklong residency,” Rosenbloom told me Tuesday afternoon. “The concert committee turned down the proposal, but I got involved on my own,” coordinating all the details of Ngqawana’s week at Northwestern. During that time, Rosenbloom forged a strong friendship with the saxophonist – a relationship that deepened when Rosenbloom, at Ngqawana’s urging, took his junior year abroad in South Africa.
In 1997, Rosenbloom worked with Michael Orlove at the Cultural Center to bring Ngqawana back to the midwest for a performance with one of jazz’s great elder statesmen, drummer Max Roach. Their concert was the centerpiece of a series of events commemorating the signing of a sister-city agreement between Chicago and Durban.
Speaking alongside diplomatic officials from South Africa (including the mayor of Durban), Ngqawana charmed the Cultural Center audience with gentle wit, along with his heartfelt amazement at sharing the stage with Roach. (After all, Roach’s 1960 Freedom Now Suite, a jazz anthem of the civil rights movement here, had been incendiary material in South Africa during apartheid; Ngqawana was able to hear it clandestinely, if at all.) And then he headed off to jam with his jazz brethren in Chicago.
Armed with a kilowatt smile and a boundless curiosity, Ngqawana made friends easily, whether instructing young musicians or patiently tutoring a radio host (yours truly) in the proper pronunciation of his last name. His music kept both feet on the ground – entwining the relaxed shuffle of South African roots music – but its head in the clouds, with references to the impassioned celerity of American hard-bop and avant-garde jazz.
During his first Chicago visits, Ngqawana met and established a firm musical bond with Chicago saxist and bandleader Dawkins, strengthened by their mutual respect for the work of John Coltrane. Dawkins first performed with Ngqawana on a visit to South Africa in 1997, and continued to work with him, both there and in Chicago, for the next decade.
“He was a great figure, particularly in relation to South African jazz,” Dawkins said after hearing of Ngqawana’s death. “Right at the end of the apartheid, he was one of the younger spearheads of the music and the anti-apartheid movement. He really had the cultural traditions, and then he infused those into the music.
“And it wasn’t just for art’s sake; his music had a therapeutic, and spiritual, and participatory kind of focus as well.”
Ngqawana last played with Dawkins in Chicago five years ago, as a guest with Dawkins’s New Horizons Ensemble at Millennium Park for the debut of Dawkins’s Azania Suite, a dedication to South Africa. Ngqawana final Chicago appearance came in July 2008, when he performed as guest soloist in the premiere of Hope In Action, Orbert Davis’s multi-genre musical tribute to Nelson Mandela.
At the time of his death, Ngqawana was rehearsing at his home in the Johannesburg suburb of Troyeville for a show scheduled this coming weekend. A devout Muslim, he was buried within 24 hours, without ceremony, in accordance with religious law.
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