12. Dollar BrandAfrican Space Program
He is really considered by, I think, the jazz fraternity, to have been at the forefront of what was happening. I don’t really know the history properly but I’ve got loads of his albums and I’m not a jazz fan particularly but I know he was considered to be right at the forefront because he was mixing South African-influenced stuff with jazz playing and so forth in the sixties.
He was a remarkable character in the scheme of jazz and a real stand out. He’s made so many albums but an awful lot of them aren’t available and this one’s not available unless you can track down an old vinyl copy which is what happened. An old friend of mine in Berlin who is a bit of a collector had a half-sister that he didn’t even know about and she died a couple of years after he met her but was aware that he was a big record collector so she left him all these jazz albums. She’d left him about a half a dozen vinyl albums of stuff by Dollar Brand that I can’t find anywhere so he digitised them for me.
African Space Program is a really amazing record; it’s just really out there. I hate jazz blowing – when they start blowing I just have to leave the room but this stuff is just something else. The thing with Dollar Brand is that he has these really long, arranged sections and then it gets quite wild and it’s really quite punky and the drumming becomes really aggressive which is just brilliant. I suspect he had a big influence on Charlie Hayden who was John Coltrane’s bassist.
It’s great material and I hope someone gets round to re-issuing these albums or at least getting them up on iTunes. People need to hear it because it’s pretty amazing stuff.
