This blog post is part three of the blog series in which I share my personal and professional journey over the decades. You can find last month’s post about my teenage years here. To start from the beginning, you can read about my early life here.
As you may recall from the previous blog post in this series, my first band “The Youth Marvels” broke up when I was 18. For a number of years, I played random gigs with different groups and I learned a lot from the older musicians that I played with.
Then came a huge turning point in my life, my first job as a professional musician.
In 1959, when I was 25, I was booked to play with Spanish singer Pepe de Santa Cruz and his drummer Pocholo at the Warnborough Night Club in Bulawayo. We were called “The Pepe de Santa Cruz Trio.” Part of the contract was that I had to paint my nails with clear varnish and had to wear a Spanish-themed uniform with a toreador waist coat! That gig lasted for six months. The owner of the Warnborough then asked me to stay on for another 6 months and form my own group. Pocholo the drummer decided to stay with me and not to return to Spain. Then Dutch bass player and accordionist Braam Pieterse became available so he joined us. This was my first Group!
Just a month after the Warnborough gig was finished, I was walking down Main street in Bulawayo with my friend Noel Kidwell ‘from the Youth Marvels’ (who was now playing bass), when a car pulled up alongside us. It was Gerry de Vos, a well-known guitarist/violinist/bandleader from South Africa who was visiting his mother in Bulawayo. Gerry got out of the car and said “Aha….my new band!” That was an exciting moment for me. It felt like fate had brought us together for the next part of my musical journey. It just so happened that Gerry was putting a band together to fulfil a residency at the new Carlton Hotel in Bulawayo. At the same time, I had just completed my apprenticeship as a boilermaker, so I had to make a decision. I could either work as a boilermaker and do the music thing part-time or take the leap into music as a profession. As my music career seemed to be taking off, and that was where my passion lay, I decided then and there to become a professional musician.
Working at the Carlton Hotel in Bulawayo was a Blast
We played a cocktail session from 5 to 7 pm and then dinner and dancing from eight-thirty until midnight six nights a week. After we finished at the Carlton, we would hang out together at fast-food stands that sold pies and mixed grills, and then sometimes head out to parties. My usual bedtime was around 3 am each night, so as you can imagine, I slept in till pretty late. My income had now increased dramatically, so life was good.
We found our drummer in an unconventional way
At one of the cocktail sessions, a young guy suddenly arrived with his bongos, sat on the edge of the bandstand and started to accompany us. Irritated by this, Noel Kidwell, peering over his bass, whispered to me, “tell Gerry to tell this little cat to f**k off!” (Noel had a dry and direct way of communicating his feelings.) During the break, we spoke to the “little cat”. He told us that he was a drummer and wished to join our trio. It just so happened that we were looking for a drummer for the dinner-dance part of the evening. We decided to give him a shot and liked what we heard, and voila, we had a drummer! His name was Eddy van Diermen. Eddy and I would become great friends, and we remain so to this very day.
Eventually, our residency at the Carlton Hotel came to an end. As we had nothing lined up, and opportunities for work in Bulawayo were limited, Gerry, Noel and I decided to drive the 1,500 km trip to Durban, South Africa to search for work.
1,500km was a very long way to drive, and we made stops along the way to eat
Come nightfall, we’d pull into a town and book into an establishment for the night. At times I was worried that we’d run out of money during the journey, but we survived.
Having arrived in Durban, we decided that we would walk into hotels along the Durban beachfront, and while I would look for a piano and start to play, Gerry would speak to the manager, hoping that the manager would like what he was hearing and hire us. Eventually, it worked. After three or four attempts, we landed a gig at the Edenroc hotel on the Snell Parade! At the Edenroc, we played jazz standards and top 40 tunes, and as Jerry DeVos played the violin as well, we also played light classics and show tunes. A month later we landed a gig at a hotel, the name of which I don’t remember, near the beachfront. As we were playing to a dancing crowd, we needed a drummer. A local drummer called Pat Higgins happened to be available, so he joined us.
Those days were so carefree
Durban had incredible beaches and being a lover of the sea, I’d spend the days swimming and lying on the beach. Long days on the beach, playing at night and then hanging out with other musicians in the after-hour nightclubs including the Cosmo Club and the Blue Note was really a great life! After six months at the hotel, our contract was up and we decided to return to Bulawayo.
Generally, when musicians arrived in a town or a city looking for work, they would speak to the local musicians to find out if there were any available gigs. Also, establishments looking for bands, groups or individual players would place listings in the ‘wanted’ columns in the local newspapers. Insofar as accommodation was concerned, there usually were hotels, motels and boarding houses with vacancies.
Upon our return to Bulawayo, I formed a trio with Eddy van Diermen and Noel Kidwell to play a jazz concert in Salisbury (now Harare). The concert was very successful and it consequently led to an offer to put a band into a local restaurant called ‘The Chicken Inn’ at the Punch Bowl Hotel in Salisbury. Noel Kidwell suddenly had to return to Bulawayo so I auditioned and hired local bass player Doug Graham who worked with me thereafter for many years and became a very dear friend.
In my next blog, I’ll talk about Salisbury, our experiences in the Congo in 1961 and my subsequent move to Johannesburg South Africa.
