by Justin Thurgur
A while back I was playing in an African music festival in Colston Hall, Bristol.
A double bill with Dele Sosimi’s Afrobeat Orchestra and Soweto Kinch.
Kinch did a satirical rap called “A Jazz Planet”. It imagined a world run by Jazz musicians, where traffic lights are blue to remind everyone to stay cool and fathers are horrified when their daughters come home with a businessman boyfriend who’s clearly never played a bebop lick in his life. Dele, who I’ve worked with now for 20 years, was taken under the wing of the legendary Fela Kuti at 15. By 18 Dele was a regular member of Fela’s band Egypt 80 until he left with Femi Kuti to form Positive Force. Fela of course tried to make Kinch’s humorous vision a reality by declaring his own independent state in Lagos.
Sadly it wasn’t quite the Utopian vision imagined by Kinch. Dele himself is an upbeat character, full of life and vivacity, but despite trying to put a positive energy into his life, the shadow of his past in a turbulent Nigeria sits behind even his most life-affirming songs about dancing together and a world that will be better tomorrow.
…Music continues to progress and reinvent itself because this is the food that nourishes a creative community
Justin Thurgur
I was lucky enough to have been brought up to believe life could be ideal, or at least that it was ok to aspire to it being ideal. Not because we had lots of money, my parents were teachers. So, we weren’t wealthy but we weren’t poor either.
My mother’s parents set up a community called Pilsdon for people who were struggling with the world; everything from people just out of prison who were trying to adjust to normal life, or trying to beat drug addiction; to people who’d had a nervous breakdown or had other mental health issues and needed a safe space.
The community was self-sufficient. The people staying helped with the growing of food and looking after livestock, and rotated things like washing and cooking. If other things were needed they would barter, using excess produce, with local farmers or shops. The idea behind the community was simple; if people were in an environment where they felt accepted and useful they could achieve some level of contentment.
My mother grew up in this community and it’s where she met my father, who went to work there as a volunteer one summer.
The spirit behind Pilsdon informed a lot of my parent’s decisions through life. They worked in progressive boarding schools. As houseparents they had a literal open door policy. As a child I was surrounded by sixth formers* some of whom added strongly to my sense of the person I wanted to be. Most of my schooling was in a progressive independent school called St Christopher’s in Letchworth, where my parents taught. The underlying principal of the school was that of self government. Students were encouraged to be independent and questioning, with the idea that you respect because you’re respected; trust because you’re trusted; with a low emphasis on hierarchy and discipline. Teachers and students were on first name basis. There were no uniforms. I thrived in this environment.
*In the education systems of England, Northern Ireland, Wales and some other Commonwealth countries, sixth form represents the final 1-3 years of high school, where students (typically between 16 and 18 years of age) prepare for their A-level examinations.
For reasons I can’t remember I wanted to play the trombone from when I was around 3 or 4 years old. After a false start on trumpet (because the then brass teacher said I was too small for a trombone when I was 8… wrongly in my opinion) I eventually took it up aged 10. I was like a duck to water.
I was surrounded by music. My mother is a singing teacher and my father a keen amateur pianist and singer who avidly consumes music. The turning-point moment in my life though came in my third year of high school. The school had a practice of bringing in post-graduate musicians for a year. When I was 14 a trombonist came named Trevor Ap Simon. He was the first teacher I’d had who was a really inspirational trombonist. I still play the same instrument as he did, and model my tone on his. More importantly, he introduced me to improvising and playing in jazz and world music ensembles.
Who knows what would have happened if Trevor hadn’t come to the school, but certainly after he came I was hooked. When he left the Head of Music hired a new trombone teacher to continue the Jazz group, almost solely for me. I’ve never looked back. A couple of my close friends at school played piano and sax. With them and some local musicians we formed our own jazz group and started gigging.
Jump on a few beautiful years of amazing musical discovery, with a slight detour to do my degree in Classical Music and History, and in 1995 I landed up in London looking to play professionally.
Photo Credit: Jurgen Dhont © muziekclub N9′.
At this time most of my experience was in Jazz. My biggest inspirations were the likes of Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan, John Coltrane, and the community of musicians around them. I loved their spirit of creativity, progress and discovery. When I moved to London and was trying to get on the scene, the more straight-ahead jazz jams that I went to didn’t call to me. These jams felt retrospective and I was interested in being creative, not just recreating what those giants had already done. Then one day a saxophonist friend of mine invited me to a jam. I walked into a basement bar in Soho to the sounds of the band leader Kishon Khan soloing on Rhodes over a heavily African infused modal jazz track and said, “This is where I want to be”.
The ‘St Moritz’ jam was a truly international affair. We were playing grooves from Africa, Brazil, Cuba, India, Reggae, Funk, Jazz, and mixing it all up with some incredible musicians from all over the world. This music did call to me. It had the creative energy I was searching for and a real sense of shared purpose. It was my first true experience of such a multi-cultural community. I instantly felt at home. After a month sitting in on the jam Kishon asked me to join the house band. That was the start of a musical collaboration that continues to this day.
Around this time I discovered, by chance, a jam run by Dele Sosimi. He’d fairly recently arrived in London and set up an Afrobeat jam as a way to bring together some of the players he already knew in London, and to meet new ones. Shortly after, he decided to put together a band and his Afrobeat Orchestra was born.
Dele is a larger than life character who tries to spread positive vibes wherever he goes. Being on the road with him is never dull. One time, touring Austria, we were taking a train from Innsbruck to Vienna. As we stepped on to the train you could feel the trepidation amongst some of the passengers. Before we’d even sat down the police were on the train asking to see the passports of the black members of the band. Dele pretended he couldn’t find his and proceeded to put on a comedy show attempt at looking for it. Before long the police were laughing. After they’d left Dele danced down the aisle of the train singing “I feel good…der-na-ner-na-ner-ner… I found my passport”. The journey was five hours long and he didn’t let up, sitting next to a very game 90-year old nun he goofed around with big exaggerated gestures until the whole carriage, many of whom had initially been reticent to say the least, were in hysterics. His skill is that he behaves this way with such a spirit of generosity and humility that people are drawn in to his good will and not affronted by it.
On another occasion we took a ferry to Terschelling Island. Within minutes of boarding Dele finds the intercom and starts announcing to everyone, “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Afrobeat Captain speaking, please fasten your seatbelts and get ready for the ride”. He went on for awhile and what amazed me was that the stewardess standing nearby just stood there laughing. As we left the boat the actual captain stood at the gangway to shake everyone’s hands as they left. Dele stood next to him and did the same.
Photo Credit: Pascal Rohner – pascalrohner.com
Dele, Kishon and the musicians around us have been my musical family for over twenty years. We share a commitment to borderless music, to celebrating the multi-cultural community that surrounds us.
After a year St Moritz and The Bonobo Orchestra ended and Kishon and I threw ourselves into expanding our knowledge of different musical languages. That’s seen me working with the likes of Afrobeat drum legend Tony Allen, Cuban giants Giraldo Piloto, Julito Padron, and Changuito, Indian percussion master Pandit Dinesh, and I was a member of the seminal English Folk group Bellowhead. Our projects together though have continued trying to represent the multi-cultural nature of London.
Photo Credit: Simone Sultana
Most recently that has been in Kishon’s project Lokkhi Terra, my ‘Afro-Jazz’ project and with our record label, ‘Funkiwala’. Lokkhi Terra is a project mixing Cuban, African, Brazillian, Reggae and Jazz music with Bengali folk songs (Kishon is of Bangladeshi origin). A series of ‘Lokkhi Terra meets…’ albums has included a dub Reggae EP featuring the incredible Baul singers Baby Akhtar and Rob Fakir. Our latest one, ‘Cubafrobeat’, is a coming together of Lokkhi Terra and Dele’s band, drawing on the shared musical heritage of Cuban Rumba and Afrobeat. My Afro-Jazz project is similarly eclectic in its influences, despite the band’s name.
An idea I’ve been pondering lately is how dominant cultures frame our understanding of the world. If I wear an African shirt it is noteworthy, but no one thinks twice about an African person wearing a pair of Jeans, or me wearing them, yet I’m no more American than I am African. In the UK black people are still largely perceived as being from somewhere else even though their families may have been here for thousands of years, but no one thinks of me as Norwegian despite my Viking heritage. Similarly with music, for me to play Cuban music or Reggae brings up more questions than if I choose to play Mozart. Yet culturally, I’m no closer to an 18th century Austrian than a 21st century Cuban. Everyone’s allowed to use influences of Rock music. It runs deep into our everyday thinking. I named one of the tracks on my album ‘Mr. Perceptionalization is King’; what is considered a truth is often only a perception.
The notion of musical ‘tradition’ is also interesting, the implication is a time when music stood still. In reality most music in the world is a fusion because globalization has been going on for thousands of years. There are moments in time when a particular sound might become consolidated and recognizable as being from a particular area, but generally music continues to progress and reinvent itself because this is the food that nourishes a creative community.
My album’s title is ‘No Confusion’. It is inspired by my community. I’m proud that the album manages to sound like me and you still can hear the character of all my friends in it.
It’s funny because on the surface I appear to be a quintessential, introverted English man, yet my wife is a chatty, vibrant South African woman and my friends are all the colours of the rainbow. And, despite the cerebral observations I’ve made above, I don’t live and play the music I do from any political or philosophical social standpoint. It just feels to me that this is the way it’s supposed to be.
Learn more about Justin
funkiwala.com
justinthurgur.bandcamp.com
facebook.com/Funkiwala
facebook.com/justin.thurgur