Rashid Vally: South African visionary whose indie record labels shaped the jazz scene

In the era of intensely repressive white minority rule, Vally became the first South African of colour to establish his own independent record label. His releases gave a platform to musically experimental and often politically outspoken artists, including pianist Abdullah Ibrahim. Their work implicitly and explicitly challenged the regime’s cultural segregation and its dismissal of Black culture as simplistic and unchanging.

Vally gave a voice to the new Black jazz of the 1970s on a shoestring, at first just from a corner shelf in his father’s store. He sustained his project of identifying and releasing new jazz talent right up until his death. In my work as a researcher documenting South African jazz, his name and output have been an essential thread holding the story together.

Who was Rashid Vally?

Born in Johannesburg in 1939, Vally was a child of South Africa’s Indian-heritage Muslim community. His father owned a modest downtown general trading store, Koh-i-Noor; the schoolboy Vally sometimes waited tables at a neighbouring restaurant and was captivated by the music on their jukebox. He told jazz historian Denis-Constant Martin:

It all started in my father’s shop. It was a grocery, but there was a small shelf of records where he sold Indian music. At that time I was listening to (US jazz artists) Louis Armstrong, Louis Jordan, that sort of music. I would bring the records to the shop to play them for my own pleasure, but people would come in and want to buy them. So I started selling some so as to be able to buy new ones. By the time I left school, in 1956-7, I suppose you could say I had started in the record business.

Three or four years later, Vally was hiring recording facilities to cut langarm (long arm) discs. This was dance-band music, popular with the mixed-heritage community, which apartheid classified “coloured”. Aware of the growing popularity of American soul music with all South Africa’s communities of colour, he extended his recording stable to include township soul bands and the Soultown imprint was established in 1970 to accommodate both genres.

Jazz came slightly later. Vally was avidly attending jam sessions in Johannesburg convened by city jazzmen at places such as Dorkay House and Club Pelican in Soweto. He was impressed by the quality of musicianship he encountered from musicians such as pianist Gideon Nxumalo and drummer Early Mabuza.

Cape Town-born pianist Dollar Brand (later Abdullah Ibrahim), at that time working in New York, got word of the label and was excited. Nxumalo’s 1970 Early Mart and three albums from Dollar Brand (Peace, Dollar Brand + 3 and Underground in Africa) were the first jazz recordings Vally released.

A global hit

On one of Dollar Brand’s brief trips home, in 1974, he worked with saxophonist Basil Coetzee and recorded what was to be his first massive national hit. Mannenberg was also the first hit for Vally’s new jazz imprint, As-Shams/The Sun. With a jangling, deliberately retro piano line, and defiantly South African character – including a hypnotic groove well suited to the dance fashion of the time, “bump jive” – Mannenberg sold more than 50 000 copies.

Vally had offered its distribution to major South African labels, but they refused to pay a (very modest) advance for South African musicians of colour. So he initially took the task on himself.

It was Dollar Brand who suggested a new record imprint was needed, to reflect the turbulent times preceding the 1976 Soweto Uprising. The new name, As-Shams (“the sun” in Arabic), spoke of both a shared Islamic faith and the aspiration that the sun would one day rise on a liberated nation.

Vally’s brother-in-law created the distinctive red sun logo. Mannenberg began to be played at the rallies of the United Democratic Front and an “unofficial anthem for the anti-apartheid struggle” had been born.

Rebel music

The As-Shams catalogue of that period could serve equally well as a catalogue for South Africa’s musical fashions and political currents of the day. From the radical pan-Africanist pop of Harari/The Beaters through the avant-garde explorations of Batsumi to the rebel music of Movement in the City and the occasional international collaboration such as the Kippie Moeketsi/Hal Singer Blues Stompin’.

The Beaters was another outfit turned away by a major label who instantly turned to As-Shams. Vally recalled the occasion when I interviewed him for the sleeve notes of the Beaters reissue:

The three young lads were enthusiastic and brash. I think it was Selby (Ntuli) who first asked that I should record them, as Gallo had insisted the (already successful young stars) first pass through a talent scout. Talent scout! Apparently they marched straight out of the Gallo offices on President Street and came to us.

That, in turn, led to collaborations between the young pop stars of Harari and established jazzmen who worked with As-Shams such as Kippie Moeketsi.

Breaking boundaries

Such breaching of boundaries – of generation, genre and race – was part of the As-Shams ethos. Multi-instrumentalist Pops Mohamed, when I interviewed him for the reissue of his own Black Disco album (a collaboration including musicians from Black and Coloured communities), said it had been very important “not to stay inside the [racial] classification”.

At the time, apartheid and its state broadcaster, the SABC, wanted only music that apartheid ideology could classify as the “pure” product of a single ethnic group.

Vally also commissioned daring young Black visual artists such as Hargreaves Ntukwana to create cover art for his jazz albums. That open-mindedness was something the label boss retained into his senior years.

He worked with Cape Town label Sharp-Flat on both a programme of extensive archival research to support reissuing better documented versions of historic albums, and plans for new As-Shams releases.

The first, in 2020, was Imvuselelo, from dynamic young trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni with a team of north European musical collaborators. And, again, artwork from a rising Black artist, Baba Tjeko.

There was no visionary-minded record executive quite like Vally, and no label quite like As-Shams/The Sun on the South African music scene, then or now. It’s vital that its work of exploration – of both the archive and the new – does not end with his passing. It told and continues to tell a vital part of the story of who South Africans are.

Gwen Ansell is an associate of the Gordon Institute for Business Science, University of Pretoria. This article first appeared in The Conversation.