Harold Rubin, an artist, Jazz musician and architect, left South Africa in 1963, after being charged with blasphemy for one of his paintings. He left behind Johannesburg, where he was born, raised and worked, and moved to Tel Aviv Israel, where he still lives today. "Magnificent Failure" follows Rubin's journey back to Johannesburg 44 years after his hasty departure. In Johannesburg of the 1950's Rubin was a leading artist, with a clear political agenda against the rule of apartheid, which he expressed in his art and music. Despite the prohibition of those days, he played Jazz with top black musicians like Kippie Moeketsi, Hugh Mesakela, and Jonas Ngwangwa. The blasphemy charge, with a pending imprisonment sentence, cut short his diverse and promising career. In Tel Aviv he has continued, for the past four decades, to paint and make music, this time aiming his arrows at mainstream Israeli society, but his audience eludes him. When his 75th birthday approached, his s
Any release featuring South African alto saxophonist
Kippie Moeketsi (1925-1983) is to be warmly welcomed. This is a reissue of a 1977 collaboration with the Paris-based Oklahoma-born tenor saxophonist
Hal Singer (1919-2020) that has been unavailable for 40 years.
Often introduced as ‘Bra Joe from Kilimanjaro’ by his close friend Abdullah Ibrahim, Moeketsi was a member of the
Jazz Epistles, the trailblazing 1950s band, alongside Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa, who all stated many years later that Moeketsi was the foremost South African jazz musician of their generation. For someone of such influence and importance, his death in 1983 aged 58 after years of bitter frustration, alcoholism and injustice for him and his fellow musicians is a tragedy.