Gideon Nxumalo

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Gideon “Mgibe” Nxumalo (15 June 1929 – 24 December 1970) was a South African jazz pianist and marimba player, known also as a composer and arranger. Born in Kimberley, he came from a musical family and studied classical music at the University of Roma in Lesotho, learning clarinet, viola, guitar and drums. He helped pioneer swing music in South Africa.

From the early 1950s, under the name Mgibe, he hosted the radio show This is Bantu Jazz on the SABC, rising from intern to announcer. He used radio to bring local indigenous music, especially Mbaqanga, to a wider audience and played a key role in organizing famous productions like King Kong and Sponono. After the Sharpeville massacre, his political views cost him his SABC job. He taught piano and music theory at Dorkay House in Johannesburg and also worked as a writer, visual artist and actor.

Nxumalo performed with the Philip Tabane Quartet and appeared with Dorothy Masuka and the Manhattan Brothers. He produced two jazz records that blended swing and big band with African rhythms, and he wrote a String Quartet as well as music for stage productions, musicals, jingles and themes. He arranged African songs for the Broadway musical Sponono (1964), the first South African show to play on Broadway. A jazz score by Nxumalo with Max Roach was used in the film Dilemma (1962), shot secretly in apartheid-era South Africa.

His Jazz Fantasia, arranged for orchestra and big band by Denzil Weale and commissioned by MIAGI, was performed in 2009 by the MIAGI Youth Orchestra in South Africa and Germany. Together with Chris McGregor, he helped shape the pre-exile South African jazz sound. His 1962 album Jazz Fantasia is regarded as a landmark; the 1963 album Jazz: the African Sound fused indigenous instruments like the marimba into jazz and featured Kippie Moeketsi and Dudu Pukwana. Recorded at the Great Hall, Wits University in September 1962 for an arts festival, the album runs about 30 minutes in three parts—Isinto, Chopi Chopsticks and Split Soul—and is now seen as a foundational, albeit rare, work in South African jazz. A limited edition was re-released in 1991 after being rediscovered.