News

On 8 March 2025, Chimurenga presents ‘MBIZO! a gathering for Johnny Dyani’, a LIVE concert performance at CONSTELLATION (3111 N Western Ave, Chicago) from 8:30pm (CST) / 4:30 (SAST).

Conducted by Ben LaMar Gay and Adam Zanolini

Featuring Dee Alexander (voice); Nicole Mitchell (flute, electronics); Adam Zanolini (woodwinds, bass); Fred Jackson and Ernest Dawkins (woodwinds); Ben LaMar Gay (cornet, electronics); Matthew Davis (trombone); Sharon Udoh (piano); Ivan Taylor (bass); Jovia Armstrong (percussion); Naydja Bruton (drums)

TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE or tune in on PASS for the LIVE stream.

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By the time 39-year-old Johnny “Mbizo” Dyani collapsed and died, backstage, following a performance at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1986, he’d been seeking freedom, relentlessly, for over two decades. From the day the youngster jumped on stage in Duncan Village, South Africa, to jam with Chris McGregor’s Blue Notes on a borrowed bass, through exile in Europe from 1964, and through dozens of boundary-breaking collaborations, Dyani’s mission was to set the music and his people free. Refusing to bow to apartheid and colonialism, “jumping a bass-line like humping a landmine” (Lesego Rampolokeng).

In various configurations of the Blue Notes, from the classic quintet to the trio Music for Xaba to the Brotherhood of Breath collective, Dyani and his comrades sought to establish new paths for Black spiritualism, liberation and experimentation. Departing from iingoma zasemaXhoseni (musical traditions of the Xhosa people), while blending the blues and the harmonies of bop with the grammar of marabi.

Through platforms such as Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society, Abdullah Ibrahim’s African Space Program and Pierre Dorge’s New Jungle Orchestra, and in collaboration with the first wave of Chicago’s AACM expatriates in Europe in the late 1960s, Dyani articulated his conception of the “sk’enge”, an all-world (tout-monde) sound, akin to the AACM’s quest for “Great Black Music – from ancient to future”. His last group, Witchdoctor’s Son, which performed that fateful autumn evening in Berlin, was dedicated to taking us, in the words of the late, great poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, “out there”,

where we gasp silently
amidst a bombardment of sound
in the spell of the witchdoctor’s son
where I cannot even ponder
how a witch and a doctor paradox
could be one entity.