Mankunku Quartet: Yakhal’ Inkomo (1968) World Record Co./ 2022 Mr Bongo

Selection: Dedication (to Daddy Trane and Brother Shorter) 10:15

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Track List

A1. Yakhal’ Inkomo 08:51 ( which translates as Bellowing Bull)
A2. Dedication (To Daddy Trane And Brother Shorter) 10:07
B1. Doodlin’ (H Silver) 06:01
B2. Bessie’s Blues (Coltrane) 07:36

Artists

Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi, tenor saxophone; Lionel Pillay, piano; Agrippa Magwaza, bass; Early Mabuza, drums; recorded 23rd July 1968 ; engineer Dave Challen at Manley van Niekerk Studios, Johannesburg, S.A., produced by Ray Nkwe. 

Listen out for Lionel Pillay piano – even if his name elicits blank looks, his piano contribution here stands comparison with the very best in America and Europe –  ” an exemplary technique and a fine feel for swing, combined with a comprehensive understanding of harmony and style”.

Music

Critical acclaim: “The Mankunku Quartet’s 1968 album Yakhal’ Inkomo offers 30 minutes of jazz perfection. This compact, and to-the-point, album would sit comfortably in amongst some of the best works in the catalogues of any of the quintessential jazz labels such as Blue Note, Prestige and Impulse”.

“Rate Your Music” commenter:

“Ngozi’s tenor is what puts this album in its own tier for me. Although certainly inspired by the hard bop sounds of the early 60s, Ngozi is resolutely his own man, an impassioned and original voice on his instrument. Technically brilliant (he proves he can shred like Trane on his “Bessie’s Blues”), he makes his long, flowing lines sound so effortless that it took me a couple listens to really notice the complexity of what he’s doing. His sound is joyous and free, inspired and uninhibited, soulful and intricate, and enduringly memorable”

About says it for me. Great stuff I knew nothing about, happy to admit my ignorance, an album here worth following up. 

Vinyl: WRC ORL 6022/ Mr Bongo Special Edition (2022)

David Buttle (aka Mr Bongo) commissioned renowned Abbey Road Studios mastering and lacquer-cutting engineer Miles Showell. The carefully worded description of source: “half-speed master from the audio taken off the original master tapes” – wtf is “. . from the audio taken off . .  ” mean? No proof of custody of an original tape offered. I speculate the weasel-wording means a copy of the original tape – 2nd generation copy tape, or high-res digital copy, and not “lacquer cut from the original tapes”, which is the only wording that means anything. 

The Mr Bongo edition is one of seventeen entries on Discogs, including rarest of the rare, a test pressing of the original World Record Co. release, which reveals the engineering pedigree, the South African subsidiary of EMI. The 1968 original  edition is ranked “Holy Grail” status, other vintage African reissues date from 1974 and 1986, also South African issues.

Modern Reissue Production

Modern British DJ cognoscenti editions have been produced by Gerald “Jazzman” Short (2017 reissue, engineering by Colin Young Audio) and more recently by David “Mr Bongo” Buttle (2022 reissue, engineering by Miles Showell). Both are highly knowledgeable record producers, and highly conscientious about sources and engineering reproduction quality – and I don’t give that compliment lightly.

Below is the Jazzman Holy Grail Series edition limited edition, pre-owned market rate currently around double the price of OBI-draped Mr Bongo edition. Limited editions become more scarce over the years, and expensive.

Reissue production is a story in itself, in some cases glossed over to hide shaky foundations – cut from twenty year old low-res 16/44.1 digital file intended for CD. However there are proper studio recordings in the hands of modern skilled engineers, who cut a new lacquer, for the audiophile demographic (that’s me, if you were wondering)

What exactly are “Original Tapes”?

Set aside the notion there is one tape box, labelled “the original tape“. Tape comes in different stages according to purpose. Original tape could be the actual fifty year old physical studio session tape (songs in a different order to the final LP, false starts and all), or a back-up safety copy of the studio session (often running half the speed of the master tape), or the final remixed tape used to cut the commercial lacquer; a multi-track tape or two track tape fold down; a 2nd or 3rd generation tape copy of the Master tape, or high resolution 24/96 digital copy from the original tape, or some other source entirely. Licensing is no guarantee of access to original tape, though unlicensed certainly isn’t. 

If you held an actual original session tape, which is irreplaceable, would you post it off to a studio thousands of miles away, and just hope you get it back, in good condition?  An “original tape” may be in poor condition, oxide falling off, stretched by repeated overtight winding or degraded by repeated baking, not capable of delivering required quality source, and a secondary source may actually sound better. 

 All you can do is judge the sound quality of what you hear. If it’s good or good enough, for some recordings, provenance is moot. 

Half Speed Mastering

Abbey Road Studios claim four restored vintage 1980s Neumann VMS80 cutting lathes, one of which is modified for half-speed mastering. Lathe-trolls, isn’t it beautiful?:

The Mr Bongo “Special Edition” credits an acknowledged expert in half speed mastering, Abbey engineer Miles Showell. In Showell’s own words: “By reducing the speed of the tape and the cutting lathe to half (16.66 rpm), the lathe cutting stylus has twice the time to carve the intricate groove into the master lacquer. Any difficult to cut high-frequency information becomes fairly easy to cut mid-range. The result is a record that is capable of extremely clean and un-forced high-frequency response as well as a detailed and solid stereo image.“

Showell argues half speed mastering produces better results than regular speed mastering, provided you have a quality source to begin with, and you have ample time and budget to do it. I argue half-speed mastering produces better sounding results than the opposite technique of doubling everything up to 2x45rpm LPs, a trend which gripped the industry a decade ago.

Collector’s Corner

Yakhal’ Inkomo was originally released in 1968 on the South African record label World Record Co., which resulted in it becoming an elusive and sought-after piece for American and European jazz collectors. First pressing copies can fetch over £1,000 on the collectors’ market. “It has been long regarded as one of the finest South African jazz albums”

An original pressing being “super rare”, and pursued by collectors, does not mean it is musically any good, it just means it’s rare. Some collectors are motivated by having something that few others have, and there is also sentiment, owning a piece of history. Some collectors never play their prized “sealed” record investment. There are many reasons why the original artefact is desirable, none of them “wrong”.  My reason is the performance merit of the original pressing  sounding better than later reissues, if you have a revealing TT, cartridge and tube system.

A sighting weeks back in a London store of a 1974 second issue of this album first caught my interest due to the eyewatering price being asked – just short of $300 USD. Who is this Mankunku, an African tenor player I had never heard of, whose album commanded such a princely sum for a 2nd edition? 

A little homework unearthed Mankunku’s full name, Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi, which did not add any salience. You have to know your way around jazz history in this part of the world, and I confess my ignorance, aside from the expatriate South Africans we Europeans are familiar with – Abdullah Ibrahim/Dollar Brand, Chris McGregor/Brotherhood of Breath, Johnny Dyani, Hugh Masekela… that’s about it for me.

There are, of course, distinctly South African regional jazz forms, the carnival music of the townships with their emphasis on instruments of  marching parades, and drum/percussion-led Zulu collective dance rhythms. But that is not the territory of the Mankunku Quartet.

Putting the Mankunku name and Yakhal’ Inkomo into Search quickly revealed a massively revered artist from exactly the right spot in jazz history: 1968. The DJ cognoscenti knew this including DJ Spell-check, Gilles Peterson, just not me. It also threw light on the different paths taken by musicians who departed Africa for more conducive Western shores like Abdullah Ibrahim, and those like Winston Ngozi, who stood their ground in their homeland and all of its troubles and indignities, and as a result, remained relatively unknown in the West.

A second insight was the remarkable musical connection between Afro-American musicians in America, framing jazz in the context of their African roots, and all the time actual Africans were drawing on the music being produced by their American offspring – like Coltrane.  They were speaking a common language which was neither American nor African, nor African regional forms. Suddenly, the Mankunku Quartet album made sense, not as I first thought, South African Jazz, but the common expression of jazz, by equally talented musicians.

“Coltrane was looking towards Africa and India, while Winston and South African saxophonists Duke Makasi and Ezra Ngcukana were looking towards Coltrane. You can almost hear a cycle starting to happen between these musicians.”

Yakhal’ Inkomo may well be, as described, the “one of the best records in the history of South African Jazz”; it may well be “a symbol of the struggle against an oppressive racial system”; those things are important, but simply as music, does it stand up against the high bar of the best American Jazz? I think Mankunku passes that acid test head on, just listen to the music.

The Collector’s Dilemma

Original unobtainable $1,000 plus, $300 for a 2nd edition pressed in South Africa – a year into the Oil Crisis, vinyl quality unknown, less than perfect condition; or a modern audiophile reissue off the shelf. Between the two DJ cogniscenti candidate reissues I settled for Mr Bongo. At $30 you can’t go wrong, I have favourable experience of  half speed mastering by Mr Bongo, and I’m very pleased with the result: a very fine music performance that sounds very very good.

Or at least good enough. I think there is something to this half-speed mastering treatment that works very well with the timbre of acoustic instrumental jazz and their strong presence in the upper frequency range. How well it works with Guns and Roses, The Doors, Velvet Underground, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, I’ll leave that to the Hoffperson posters to argue about. 

LJC