Johnny Dyani was, as you know, a remarkable human being.

While doing
my morning ½ hour of skipping rope I thought how can I tell you in writing
some of the impressions I want to share regarding this fellow who was my
friend and my teacher.

The trouble begins with the fact that they are filled with vocal oddities and
facial expressions and of course the variety of sounds he coaxed out of all
available objects in his environment.

Therefore I am going to type as fast as I can and let the associations flow
and leave it to your choice to edit the materials as you see fit.

I first met Johnny Mbizo Dyani in 1970 at Dartmouth College in Hanover,

New Hampshire where he had come to help Don Cherry teach courses in
both ethnomusicology and jazz composition and orchestration. The third
member of Don’s then current trio, Turkish drummer Okay Temiz was also
on hand for the classes.

My first impression of Johnny was that he was not much older than I. This
was true since I was 18 and he was 24. However, I was still leading the
sheltered life of a college student and he was making his way in the world
based only on his talents and his belief in himself and his music.

Johnny was about 5’5” and he moved very gracefully like a fighter or a
dancer. Also, immediately noticeable was his voice, which in speech and
even more so in singing had a very rich and yet exceedingly subtle quality of
overtones and harmonics about it -- kind of like some of the chanting that
Tibetan monks do. You can hear this quality easily on the opening cut on
“Good News from Africa” the early 1970s duet album with Abdullah
Ibrahim.

He used to delight in pretending that he was very primitive and couldn’t

understand modern conveniences. This led to many comical moments where
he would be with students at Dartmouth and he might feign complete
ignorance of how to use a snack vending machine or even a pay telephone.
What was amazing was how often he actually convinced students to try to
teach him to use these things.

Johnny’s commitment to his instrument was complete. His fingers showed

the calluses of a fanatic contrabass devotee. I remember one night sitting
with him in Slugs <a jazz club in New York> and he borrowed someone’s
cigarette to light his own. He held the lit one in his right hand and put his
index finger tip against the glowing end while he held it up to light his own
cigarette. It was a very deliberate method of showing me that the heat from
the burning tobacco was not as much as the heat from the friction constantly
plucking and strumming on the strings of his bass.

Johnny was a natural mimic. Don Cherry used to introduce Johnny to new
people by saying that Johnny had spent the past few years living in London.
Then when people would ask Johnny how he liked London or what he
thought of London he would tilt his head up a little and nod from side to side
a little like a very proper Englishman and say in a perfectly crisp upper class
British accent, “Indeed… indeed. What is this chap doing?” or some other
such riff.

During a 2 week break between semesters Johnny went to visit Abdullah

and Satima in Brooklyn and was invited to play bass in McCoy Tyner’s trio
at a small festival. On returning to New Hampshire he would respond to
questions of how he liked Brooklyn with a 5 second long, totally in focus
rendition of, “You sho’ you from Sout’ Africa… Maaaaan?”

This story loses so much without the inflections and the body language that
it may be rendered incomprehensible in print. Suffice it to say it was as if --
for 5 seconds -- a Brooklyn street kid with a tough guy attitude had
materialized in our midst. The main thing was that he didn’t use these riffs
to supplement a story. They were his entire answer.

Johnny was very proud of his African heritage. One reason for his refreshing
jazz sound is that when he heard hoof beats he thought of zebras.

When I visited him at his home north of Copenhagen in 1973 he played me a

recording called “Music for XABA” <the X pronounced sort of like a click
in the mouth made by the tongue on the palate same as in XHOSA which
was his tribe>. This record included Dudu Pakwane on reeds Okay Temiz
on percussion.

XABA is the god of music he explained and we don’t really “play” music…
we “sound” the music that is already there on the subtle levels of reality.
Because of this, Johnny told me, the European ideas of music are never able
to actually connect the musician properly to his real role in life.
He picked up the bass and played for a while making all kinds of sounds
come out using the bow. Music including bird whistles and loud screeching
similar to a wildly overblown conch trumpet sound.

He always told me that to learn your instrument means: <a> to find every
sound on it, <b> how to get the sound when you want it, and <c> most
important what the sound means to you.

That was when he told me the story about sitting in with Charlie Mingus's
band at Jazzhaus Montmartre. Johnny was giving his all, playing what he
perceived as his contribution to expressing the realities of Mingus's
composition. Bowed birdcalls, different rhythm grooves in counterpoint to
the rest of the ensemble and whole new tonal flavors from Africa. Having
Johnny in a "rhythm section" is like having Elvin Jones playing in your
band. His sound can be very uncompromising and demanding of attention.
Charlie just got angrier and angrier because Johnny insisted on playing at
pitches that were tonally incorrect to the European trained ear. Mingus was
drunk and kept yelling at him, "You're sharp... you're sharp" in front of
everyone as if Johnny couldn't hear properly or didn't know any better.
Johnny told me that the Mingus vocal < the yelling> made the composition
more honest musically but he realized he wasn’t furthering his career in the
jazz world much by insisting on playing that way when sitting in with
established artists.

One time when I told him I’d be seeing Jimmy Garrison in New York he told
me to give him best regards and the message that he felt Jimmy was the only
jazz bass player who could play African music. Jimmy took it as a real
complement and he was intrigued with Johnny’s suggestion that they should
make an album together with only a group of South African street kids on
pennywhistles, kazoos and jaw-harps as accompanists. Unfortunately they
never got to make it although I’ve heard that heaven is a big place with a lot
of music.

Johnny’s biggest criticism of a lot of the music being played by other

students and myself was that it was, to use his term, “bullshitting”.

He kept after me about knowing what the sounds meant to me. He pointed
out that when some young healthy kid at college played like Coltrane it was
absurd to him. After all Coltrane was a spiritually mature man who was not
incidentally dying of advanced liver dysfunction when he played that stuff.

Everything Johnny touched musically he made his own or he wouldn’t play

it. Riding up with my brother and I to a concert in Boston in 1970 he
became fascinated with Blood, Sweat and Tears’, “Spinning Wheel” on the
radio. Of course when he began singing it the song had a whole new set of
lyrics including, “take all your troubles and throw them in the river”. It had
a South African village flavor and I only wish I had taken all the lyrics
down. He was way ahead of Paul Simon on that particular fusion style.

The last time I hung out with Don Cherry in New York in 1991 I asked him
to tell me about Johnny’s last few years after I’d lost touch with him. Don
put on an exaggerated Scandinavian accent and said,

“You should have heard Johnny Johnny at Baden-Baden”.

I fell in to the game and asked, “Was he good?”

Don replyed, “Very-Very”.