Sharing the human spirit

By Dan Hilborn
Published Aug. 6, 2005


When apartheid ruled in South Africa, and black and white people were segregated into different cities, different parks and even different concert halls, Johnny Clegg was just a colourblind young lad with a passion for the guitar.

Throughout his rebellious youth and during his time with the bands Juluka and Savuka, Clegg helped to forge a new road in South Africa, bringing together black and white musicians and often having his shows shut down by the police or having his signature brand of up-tempo, danceable music banned from the radio.

But Clegg always believed that the good in his music would win out. And today, more than 34 years after he first performed in front of an audience, he is known around the world as one of the true creators of fusion music. Next weekend, the man often described as the White Zulu will be coming to Deer Lake Park to play at the Burnaby Blues and Roots Festival.

"I'm not trying to spread culture," Clegg said Wednesday in a telephone interview from a hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, his first North American stop after a four-month tour of South Africa and Europe. "I'm trying to find a meeting point between cultures."

Clegg's own brand of world music is born out of his experience of having lived under the constant threat of being arrested and having his concerts shut down simply because white people were performing on stage with black people.

While activism has clearly played a huge role in his life, Johnny Clegg said his mission has been to create a new and unique brand of lively, danceable and rhythmic music out of both his African and Western experiences.

"World music?" Clegg asked himself rhetorically. "I think generally what makes it different from all other kinds of western music is that it speaks with the voice of the Other - with a capital O.

"When you hear it, you get a sense of evidence that there are people in other strange lands who are living their lives and who have made sense of the universe and of their world in a unique way," he said. "There's something quite mysterious about that and something quite fascinating. At the same time, some people find it a little threatening - especially people from closed communities who have very fixed ideas about the world and human behaviour."

Clegg said it is not his goal to bring African music to the rest of the world. Instead, he is creating a whole new kind of music that Africans and people in the West can both recognize and call their own.

"World music tells you that the canvas of the human spirit is much vaster than you can imagine," he said. And when Clegg speaks about his music, the unmistakable underlying message is one of hope, growth and unity.

"As with all things, world music has a special place," Clegg said. "It reminds us of the incredible broadness of the human experience - and there might be one or two things that we don't truly understand. When you hear it, it's very evocative."

Unlike Western music, which focuses on melody, Clegg's brand of fusion places a greater emphasis on complex rhythms.

"Africa is famous for having a very strong, well-developed esthetic around rhythm," he said.

"In the West, rhythm is just a minimal skeleton to which you hang complex melodies and chords onto.

"But in Africa, rhythm is a means to make rhythmic patterns stand out. It's that aspect of world music that keeps reminding you that you don't necessarily have 'the' solution, you have 'a' solution. It may be dominant for some time, but all cultures pass - they go through a useful period and mid-life and then an old-age period. Then they die."

In fact, Clegg admits that, when writing music, he approaches each new song as if it were a musical "problem" that requires solving.

"When you have a cyclical traditional structure and you want to fit it into a linear, Western one, it's a fascinating problem. I love addressing those things," he said. "It's like a mathematical formula. You can apply it to a complex set of questions and eventually you'll hit the right answer - sometimes you don't.

"Yeah, the creation of a hybrid is the musical puzzle I'm hooked on."

But his music also has a political edge, born out of his experience as a stick-fighting young white man who spent his days learning to play music in and around the black townships of segregated South Africa.

"We came out of the period of apartheid, so we had to deal with those issues and a lot of our songs refer to that experience," he said. "And that makes you very resilient. Either you believe in what you do or you fall by the wayside."

Clegg said most bands typically only have to deal with the vagaries of the marketplace. "But if you overlay that with political censorship, you have to really hang in to survive. That was my own experience, and that's what's given me my resilience.

"Yeah, we had shows closed down and police show up because of the cultural segregation laws that were in place. There was a geographical segregation of race groups and that was a problem because we were a mixed band playing in black townships and white areas. When the police saw that we were not succumbing to the censorship, they started to come around. About 20 per cent of our shows in one year were closed down."

But when asked if he feels a sense of accomplishment with all that he's been through, Clegg pauses before he answers. "Yeah, I do," he said haltingly. "For my own country, yeah I do."