The 1960s. Exiled South African Jazz stars on the international scene.

From the early days of colonisation western missionaries began to exert their influence on African culture. In 1960, Henry Weman, a scholar of Christian music overseas expressed with sadness the rapid intrusion of missionary music into Southern Africa. Weman details some stages of this process: ‘The replacement of African parallel melodies by a single European melody plus rudimentary harmony; the introduction of 4 part harmonies and standard 4-bar phrase in place of Africa’s freer musical phraseology; the substitution of western tonality, major and minor, from the traditional; African tones; plus the introduction of limited harmonic range, giving African choirs three basic chords, the tonic, dominant, subdominant’.

1960 is the year that saw the Cold Castle National Jazz Festival, which brought additional attention to South African jazz. Cold Castle became an annual event for a few years, and brought out more musicians, especially Dudu Pukwana, Gideon Nxumalo and Chris McGregor. The 1963 festival produced an LP called Jazz The African Sound, but government oppression soon ended the jazz scene. Again, many musicians emigrated to the UK or other countries.