Author: Mr_K
Date: 2014-10-06 03:10
I've been off this board for several years, I had a previous rather erratic incarnation based in Johannesburg. In 2010 I moved back to my real home, the small neighbouring kingdom of Swaziland, and I am now very happily settled back here. As I really feel like a completely different person since leaving South Africa, I've decided to change my "nick" -- not in the least that I'm disowning anything I said, just that it was another time and place. And it was indeed pretty crazy back there.
I am now teaching clarinet (and harmonica) at a big international school here, performing with my own and other bands, and leading a much more sane existence. Swaziland is crazy in its own way, but once you get "down to speed" here, it is a wonderful place.
But I really want to start by looking back, and asking, as did the Godfather of Rap, Gil Scott-Heron: Have you heard, what's the word, from Johannesburg. Because I think you may be surprised at what lurks there, clarinet-wise. And to answer the question posed some years ago on this thread: definitely yes, if you go to Jo'burg, do take your instrument. You really never know what you might find there.
My own playing is mostly African jazz and jive, blues, rock and reggae, and my role models were Kippie Moeketsi and Zacks Nkosi, who both played clari and saxophone. It's nearly impossible to find clarinet recordings of Kippie,one of the greatest musicians SA ever produced. But a friend here in Swaziland had a CD of Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, playing in 1963, and there is Kippie pulling out an incredible clarinet solo, quite the equal of an Artie Shaw, my other great hero. Lyrical, soaring, beautiful stuff. Read this if you want to see under what difficult conditions this recording was made. It is an unbelievable tragedy that so little of his work got recorded. Kippie went to London with the show King Kong, got into trouble there, and was subjected to three rounds of electroshock treatment for his pains. He didn't touch a saxophone for years after that, saying his brain/hand coordination had been messed up.
I never saw Zacks Nkosi live, I did see Kippie playing once in 1981, one of his very last performances (he died in 1983). It was in a black school outside Jo'burg, a classroom with a mud floor. I was just learning sax, and I will never forget how he blew one note from the very bottom of his belly, just this deep sound that reverberated through me, and I thought, this is it, I have to play this instrument.
But we all knew Zacks's famous album, with the picture of him with clarinet tucked under his arm.
Another great player was Big Voice Jack, the pennywhistler whose tune Tom Hark became a worldwide hit. I wrote a long post about Jack for this forum, which mysteriously disappeared without trace. Not quite, actually, one of the moderators caught a Google reference to it, although it had vanished from the board. An accident on the forum where there are no accidents. I will tell Jack's tale again some day, I interviewed him in his last years, and he told me about his clarinet technique. I only heard him play soprano sax, a gorgeous reggae-type tune he had composed. Jack was truly in a class of his own. You may have heard of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Their name was a straight rip of Jack's band, Alexandra Black Mambazo. Alex, aka "Dark City", was a rough place. Mambazo means axe, tomahawk. The musos carried these after gigs, to make sure they weren't mugged. In Johannesburg, when musicians say "axe", they mean "axe".
"Tom Hark" -- which was the theme tune for a BBC drama series on South Africa -- was apparently a mishearing over an international telephone line. The actual name of the song was "Tomahawk".
Then there was Bob Hill, whose clarinet backings on the seminal pennywhistle recordings from Johannesburg that went around the world in the late 1950s gave these street sounds a beautiful polish, without ever trying to take the limelight. Hill played bass for Tony Scott when he visited South Africa, incidentally. When Bob Hill died a few years ago, I discovered he had been playing every single weekend at a little club in the north of Johannesburg. I was a sub-editor on the entertainment pages, and I never saw a word of this, or I would definitely have gone to see him, I was heartbroken to see what I had missed. And this is the main theme of this post: what secrets Johannesburg keeps, even from people who are living there.
Because if there was one player who shaped the clarinet sound of this dark city, it was Mario Trinchero, the principal clarinettist for many decades of the Jo'burg Symphony Orchestra. I heard him many times in my student days, although I was playing violin then, and didn't pay much attention to the woodwinds, more fool me.
Mario Trinchero is a legend, and I've met many of his students, including one Nino, founder of an eponymous chain of Nino's restaurants found around Johannesburg (recommended, if you visit). It was a slightly disconcerting conversation, as this elderly bald Italian gentleman had a gorgeous Thai lady sitting on his lap while we talked. But he told me, Mario Trinchero was just an absolutely world class teacher, and even though Nino was the bassoon player for the JSO, he went to Mario for lessons.
There is almost nothing about Mario Trinchero on the Internet. I will copy-type one story, which for some reason you can't copy and paste, that may give you some idea of his class:
"The Italians have produced many great players, in South Africa, Mario Trinchero (sadly now no longer alive) [NOT TRUE] was regarded by the clarinettists there to be a giant in the history of the instrument for his amazing technique and sense of musicality. I personally sat next to him on one occasion during a recording of a difficult piece by Tschaikovsky. He was transposing down a semitone (for many years he had no A clarinet) and suddenly just before a fiendishly difficult passage he turned to me, winked impishly and proceeded to play the passage using the hands the other way round! (Left-hand for the lower joint, right-hand the top.) It was his amazing party trick -- he played the difficult passage flawlessly like that whilst recording! If anyone out there can do this I would like to hear about it! He also had a legendary command of the double-tongue and could play articulated passages at any speed."
I phoned Mario Trinchero in 2009, trying to see if he would still take students, but he said he was too old now, and referred me to his student Etienne Malan, who gave me the only clarinet lesson I've ever had (I really needed someone to show me around the bass clari). But Trinchero was still very much alive. After reading the above post, I spoke to another of his students, Ceri Moelwyn-Hughes, a very fine saxophonist and historian of music, who plays with various orchestras, and she was very perturbed that someone was saying Mario Trinchero had passed away. Absolutely not true, she said.
I've become obsessed with articulation, so I asked her if she ever got her double-tonguing up to his standard, and she just laughed, saying never in a hundred years, and adding that she was sure his Italian background gave him an inestimable advantage. Do Italians have an edge in this respect?
She also said that Trinchero never used an A clarinet in his whole career, managing everything with the Bb. This has been a tremendous inspiration to me, and to many other Johannesburg clarinettists. I realised long ago that I couldn't make excuses to other musicians, especially heavy metal performers and the like, that oh, I needed to get another clarinet one day to play in that tricky key.
Another of his students -- who gave up a musical career to become a top financial journalist -- is a very good friend. She was a pianist who did a BMus at Wits University, and took up saxophone as a second instrument. She said that Trinchero insisted even with saxophone on double-lip embouchure, but she only used to use this while she was in lessons. Personally, I believe double lip is the only way to go, so I was fascinated to hear this.
But here is the clincher, and something that may even make the most jaded seen-and-heard-it-all member of this forum sit up. I discovered this reference and to my astonishment, read the following:
"Rosanne studied clarinet and voice with world renowned musicians including Mario Trinchero, advisor to Maestro Arturo Toscanini on all matters clarinet."
I must admit, I felt goosebumps reading this. If this is true, and I'm sure it is, then this is an astonishing thought. I took a look around this forum, and saw that Toscanini was known for giving clarinettists a hard time. Now we know why -- they weren't Mario Trinchero.
Toscanini completely revolutionised orchestral music, creating whatever it is we understand of the modern sense of musicianship down there in the pit. And the man who was his early clarinet guru, is still alive and living in retirement in Johannesburg.
I tried to get my journalist pal who studied with him to write a story, but she demurred. I am not an orchestral musician, I decided it was way beyond me to try interview Mario Trinchero for a story, although I've written lots of articles on music. The thought just terrified me too much.
So here is a challenge for this forum, someone with enough sense of the history to take this on. If anyone feels like picking up a telephone and seeing if Mario Trinchero is available for an interview, please, just do it. I'm sure his number is still in the Johannesburg telephone book.
All the best
Mr_K
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