So, I got safely onto the plane. Straight onto the entertainment centre to find a playlist that I can settle into for the rest of the flight, and I landed on Earth Wind & Fire. And then high school memory lane hit me like a million tiny bricks!
I fell in love with Earth, Wind & Fire when I was in high school at just 16 years old. I fall in love with songs chronologically in reverse, like the opposite of someone who hears their new latest favourite song on the radio. I’m a super old school millennial like that. I like going back in time and listening to songs that were released in the same decade I was born, and even before that. I’ll be like “I found another old favourite that is now my new favourite!”
So ja, it was with my school’s choir and jazz band at Livingstone High School during the years 2007, 2008 and 2009 – that’s when I fell in love with In the Stone. Up until then I had truly not heard these songs because Mamma only played The Stylistics and Cliff Richard on a Sunday morning. The school music department was under the leadership at the time of Marvin Booysen, and I joined the choir when I was in Grade 9, singing Anya’s Adiemus and Carly Simon’s Let the River Run at our school’s founding day event, not forgetting Ndinisibono under the facilitation of Carol Zulu – this woman, aside from her phenomenal ability to sing opera, was also impressively the school’s German language teacher!
Choir practice took place – yes, I see the irony for this Muslim girl – on Fridays from 12h45 to 13h30 while the boys went to mosque around the corner. I was raised in a home where I went to mosque, but women and girls going to mosque was not the norm in general society, so ja, what you gonna do, you just ma stay on the school premises during this long 2nd interval and go sing some joy into your heart while you were also going through your first break up at 14. Plustens, I wasn’t gonna sit and brôm for 45mins and let the joy of that choir room go to waste, the sound of the piano that echoed through the school halls, the soprano group I sang with and Mr Booysen’s musical direction that just made me come alive.
A year later, the choir discontinued and then recruitment started – we heard the announcement on the intercom – that we must meet in the music room if we are interested in joining the up-and-coming jazz band. The Earth, Wind & Fire obsessed version of me now can’t for the life of me believe at the time I was not a fan of jazz, so I didn’t join immediately. I had no point of reference for jazz music. Until DAN DAN DAAAAAN The UCT Jazz band came to perform for us one afternoon in the school hall! I will never forget how blood-red the face of the band’s saxophone player was when he took to his solo that day. Mr Booysen was also a saxophone player, and I still think inviting that band to perform for us was a little genius move on his part to bring someone like me closer to the jazz genre PLUSTENS we could have Friday last period free, so win-win for all of us!
Once the big performance ended, and we were dismissed for the day, I walked past Mr Booysen in the school quad enthusiastically telling him I’ll be there for the next jazz band practice, once again singing with the sopranos!
Of course, joining the jazz band is no small feat – it was so very different from singing Adiemus with the choir. With the school choir we sang in school uniform, but with the jazz band I was wearing black, blue jeans, my silver pumps and big round silver hoops in my ears! By then I was in Grade 10 and my academic workload had increased. Grade 10 sucked! My parents forced me to do number subjects and the musical artist in me was very suppressed while competing with the pressures of Physics, Accounting & Maths, which meant that I couldn’t comfortably attend jazz band practice after school because I had to also attend Maths tuition (what a surprise I was failing Maths!). One day I even bunked one hour of tuition to attend band practice and Daddy was not happy with me when he came to fetch me at my tutor’s house.
But I wasn’t gonna let go. And despite how badly that year was going at school academically I made it to a few gigs singing back-up vocals with Incognito’s Still a Friend of Mine, Toto’s Georgy Porgy and, yes, In the Stone by Earth, Wind & Fire (thank you Lucia, Ryan and Lance for leading us in those songs!), one of them for an evening hotel performance in town and then also for the Matric valedictory event that year in the school hall. My triumphant end to the school year!
Seriously, I mean I wasn’t even a formal Music student in Mr Booysen’s class. Though by the time I reached Grade 11, I convinced Mamma to enrol me for Saturday piano and theory lessons at the Athlone Academy of Music, where I met Lauren and Ree, my first ever real music teachers. I still have the theory test that I passed in Lauren’s class with 96% and, ja, needless to say that I did not need tuition to thrive in this subject! There was a deep craving for musical literacy in me and it got so leqqa satisfied with these classes, but as fate would have it, I wasn’t allowed to stay in these classes because my parents were not happy that I was failing my number subjects. Way to measure a fish by their ability to climb a tree!
But then just 2 years after that DAN DAN DAAAAAAN, I gave fate a run for its money. I was on a gap year after passing matric – goodbye forever Maths, Physics and Accounting! – and I got enrolled for those Saturday classes again with Lauren at the helm. Lauren gave me an alternative curriculum that included learning piano chords for musical composition, and she refused to accept nothing less than me playing in the Athlone Academy of Music’s band “to put a firecracker up your ass” and apply what I was learning with her to the band.
I mean, was I the best keyboard player the school had ever seen? Of course not. It wasn’t possible with my little music experience. But dude, I learnt and still today remember the chords to Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr’s Just the Two of Us. Again, as fate would have it, Lauren ended up teaching Music alongside Mr Booysen in that year, and she invited me to play with Livingstone’s band at a Saturday concert in the park. Boom!
And now it’s Sunday morning. I just moved to South Korea, and I’ve been teaching English as a Foreign Language in Busan for almost 3 weeks, years after doing many cool things in and around the arts and entertainment industry, which includes a How to Make a Musical Masterclass with David Kramer at the Baxter Theatre. I’m listening to that old song I learnt on karaoke, Life by Desiree, and thinking about how I can teach these lyrics to my afterschool class this week (I don’t wanna see a ghost, it’s a sight that I fear most, I’d rather have a piece of toast). And I’m thinking, I wanna be all Mr Schoe from Glee about this. I wanna be all Sister Mary Clarence from Sister Act about this… and yes, I wanna be all Mr Booysen and Lauren about this. I never had a chance to tell Mr Booysen how I was saved by that time in the choir room, and how I was brought to life with Earth, Wind & Fire. And then several years later listening to After the Love Has Gone on YouTube, I cried reading the YouTube comments: “My mom just passed away. Earth Wind and Fire was her favourite band. My dad abused her for a long time, and her parents before that, and she became addicted to drugs and alcohol as a result. Didn’t really get to know the good parts of her. One of the few memories I have during the good days of her life is standing on her feet as a toddler dancing with her to this song. Grateful for Earth Wind & Fire.”
Tasneem’s credits include Miela’s Box and Love in the Time of Labarang Hajj, published work on LitNet and Die Burger, and work done for Suidooster (kykNET), An NUR – The Light (SABC 3), Radio 786 (100.4 FM), the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in collaboration with Bush Radio (89.5 FM), LIVE FM Radio and appearing as guest on Cape Talk Radio (567 AM). Tasneem is about to make her YouTube début with Flamenco a la Cape – Through the Eyes of Bienyameen Camroodien, an original documentary inspired by time spent completing the How to Make a Musical Masterclass with David Kramer at the Baxter Theatre.
