Chris McGregor

Christopher McGregor (24 December 1936 – 26 May 1990) was a South African jazz pianist, bandleader and composer born in Somerset West, South Africa.

McGregor grew up in the then Transkei (now part of the Eastern Cape Province), where his father was headmaster at a Church of Scotland mission institution called Blythswood. Here McGregor was exposed to the music of the local amaXhosa people.

This music is a rich and varied music which pervaded every aspect of life – from formal rituals to the casual activities and encounters of everyday life, such as herding cattle or just walking home in the evening. Music was everywhere. And this music, as explained in Dave Dargie's seminal book Xhosa Music, is complex. Dargie mentions the following as examples of this complexity which might be seen to have influenced McGregor in his own music, both as composer/arranger and as band leader: "...a great number of style characteristics are to be found: relating not only to harmony and scale, but to melody, structure and phrasing, form, rhythm, instrumentation, singing techniques, and so on."

In his book Chasing the Vibration Graham Lock quotes McGregor saying: "I have this strong imaginative reference to African village music, and the thing I know about that music is that it has a strong centre. It builds up, a lot of people do things together that they know."

After school and a stint in the merchant navy training academy The General Botha at Gordon's Bay in the Western Cape in 1952–53, McGregor enrolled at the South African College of Music, then headed by Professor Eric Chisholm. Here McGregor was exposed to a different set of influences, during the day Béla Bartók and Arnold Schoenberg, and at night recordings of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, and the live music of local jazz musicians such as Dollar Brand (now Abdullah Ibrahim), Cecil Barnard (now Hotep Idris Galeta), Christopher Columbus Ngcukana, Vincent Kolbe, "Cup-and-Saucers" Nkanuka, Monty Weber, the Schilder brothers, and many others who were active in the vibrant Cape jazz scene at that time, the mid-1950s. The vibrancy and power of this music has led some to designate the music played around Cape Town as a particular jazz genre called "Cape Jazz." (Miller, 2007).

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