Obituary: Zayn Adam, jazz singer who gave the world a lot of love

1947-2015: Zayn Adam, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 67, was a legendary jazz singer whose greatest hit, Give a Little Love, swept through a divided South Africa in the '70s and continued to bring audiences to their feet until days before his death.

He had been due to perform with his band, Pacific Express, at Jazz on the Rocks this weekend and at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival at the end of the month.

Adam was born in Salt River on July 7 1947 and began playing the guitar when he was 11. His father and brother captained a Cape Malay choir and Adam turned "pro" at the age of 15 when he joined the Golden City Dixies carnival show.

His break came while he was standing on a ladder washing windows one day. Someone gave him a phone number to call and three weeks later he was on a train to Johannesburg, where he joined a calypso trio.

He was invited to join Pacific Express, a band formed out of the soul group Pacifics in the '60s by jazz guitarist Issy Ariefdien and bass player Paul Abrahams.

The Pacifics played popular commercial numbers, but Ariefdien and Abrahams wanted to turn it into an authentic jazz band.

They renamed it Pacific Express, but battled to get gigs. Clubs complained that the jazz was chasing away their clients.

They decided they needed a good-looking lead singer with the X factor, someone who dressed elegantly and had class and charisma. Ariefdien had seen Adam perform and had no doubt that he was their man. The fact that he possessed such an extraordinarily seductive voice to go with his suave good looks also helped.

In 1975, they were joined by Chris Schilder, who composed the song that turned Adam into a star. He wrote Give a Little Love with a female vocalist, who was working with the band, in mind.

"I was trying to sing in a woman's high register as I composed," he remembered. "But then Zayn said: 'Let me try it.' And voom! It worked."

Even with someone as instantly appealing as Adam in front of the microphone, Pacific Express did not exactly storm ahead like the locomotive it was named after. The group struggled to make a living.

Jazz was still a long way from taking off in Cape Town, as it subsequently did thanks to groups such as Pacific Express. In addition, apartheid made it difficult for them to get gigs in "white" areas.

They played a cat-and-mouse game with the police and tried to keep under the radar as much as possible, but managers at "white" clubs were reluctant to hire them because of the political risks.

Every now and then the police would pounce and read managers the riot act if they did not have the necessary permit, then demand that the band be evicted - often in the middle of a show.

They were sometimes forced to take extraordinary measures, like when they were asked to provide backing for the US vocal duo Peaches & Herb. They needed a bigger group with saxophones and horns to support them and brought in the all-white, and, as it happened, aptly named, Peanut Butter Conspiracy.

Sharing a stage with whites was illegal. So when they played at the Luxurama in Cape Town they erected a thin curtain across the stage and hid the Peanut Butter Conspiracy behind it, while they performed in front with Peaches & Herb.

Then they played at Athlone Stadium, where there was no stage and no curtain. The Peanut Butter Conspiracy had to wear black wigs and paint their faces. The police in the audience were none the wiser.

Finding recording venues was another constant battle. In October 1976, Pacific Express recorded their debut album, Black Fire, which made passing reference to the struggle against apartheid. They tended to avoid overtly political themes as a matter of survival.

When the band broke up in the '80s, Adam continued on his own, releasing several hits in Germany and the UK. He also sang with Gerry Bosman's big band at the Nico Malan Theatre (now Artscape) in Cape Town in the late '80s and early '90s, and at the SABC.

Pacific Express got back together last year to huge popular acclaim. Adam could never quite believe how popular they still were after an absence of 25 years. The audience response left him in tears on more than once occasion.

There were many bleak patches, however. None more so than in 2003 when he and his family were evicted from a posh house in upmarket Marina da Gama after failing to pay the R9000 a month rent.

This was a fortune in those days and how he thought he would be able to afford it was never explained.

According to newspaper reports, he played his guitar and sang "a defiant tune" on the pavement outside while he and his family waited for the removal van.

Adam died after a heart attack.

He is survived by his wife, Yadeema, and two children.