Obituary: Only death could mute Thandi Klaasen's voice of golden jazz

Thandi Klaasen defied apartheid and a horrific acid attack to follow her passion, writes Chris Barron

Thandi Klaasen was one of South Africa's most legendary jazz and blues singers.

As well as an unforgettable voice she had an irrepressible gutsiness that refused to be kept down by apartheid or anything else. She died in Johannesburg at the age of 85 last Sunday.

She kept singing and defiantly appearing on stage after a devastating ordeal in 1973 when a jealous rival hired young thugs to throw acid in her face, leaving her badly scarred.

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She was back on stage a year later, still wearing bandages over the wounds.

"They can burn my face but not my voice," she said.

Klaasen was born in Sophiatown on September 18 1931 and grew up listening to marabi and hymns.

In her trademark tsotsitaal she would tell how as a girl she crept into homemade tents where exotically dressed young mothers swayed and jived on earthen floors by candlelight to marabi played on an accordion with a bass made from an old tin drum, drinking beer brewed by the women ("Our beer. How could we drink the white people's beer?"), all while keeping one eye cocked for the police.

Her mother was a domestic worker, her father a shoemaker and Bible-thumper. Both had fine voices and loved singing hymns in the church choir.

Often these choirs would take to the street where their hymns segued easily into jazz, blues and rhythm and blues.

Following them, Klaasen would hear the voices of Ella Fitzgerald and others from the era of the American big bands and swing of the time ringing out from radios and record players in the houses they passed. She was transfixed and vowed to sing that kind of music.

Sophiatown was a bubbling cauldron of musical creativity in the late 1940s and '50s. Close-harmony male groups such as the Manhattan Brothers and the Cuban Brothers competed with each other on stage. It occurred to Klaasen that there were no equivalent female groups, and she decided, "No, man, we have to challenge these men!"

So she formed the Quad Sisters vocal quartet. Their first challengers were the Manhattan Brothers and they faced off before a packed audience at the Bantu Men's Social Centre in Johannesburg.

Asked who won, she laughed as uproariously as only she could. It wasn't that kind of competition, she said. "But of course, my dear, the women did."

The Quad Sisters influenced other female groups, like the Skylarks, in which Miriam Makeba sang in the late '50s.

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On their way to the station after playing at places such as the Bantu Men's Social Club - or by invitation in the white suburbs - black artists found without the right papers late at night would be forced by raw young white policemen to sing to avoid being thrown into jail.

Klaasen recalled being made to sing Suikerbossie while trying to get home after a gig.

"I start singing - I don't have my pass, so I'm singing. I'll be arrested, so I'm singing. And they were smiling and laughing, and I'm singing - but inside me I'm just swearing and crying, telling them what I think of them," she was quoted as saying in Gwen Ansell's book Soweto Blues.

Klaasen sang for the SABC too, which made its own recordings, trading on the naivety of young black performers like her.

She was not paid but she did not care as long as she was on the radio the next day. "We didn't know that we were supposed to be paid."

In the early '50s she, along with the likes of Dolly Rathebe and Dorothy Masuka, performed in promoter Alfred Herbert's first African Jazz and Variety Show at the Windmill Theatre in Johannesburg, and thereafter toured the country with him.

He made them wear such short skirts that he had to provide bodyguards. But he paid them relatively well and organised the necessary passes so they could travel.

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His mother, Sarah Sylvia, had a touring Yiddish theatre company and taught Klaasen and Rathebe to sing Yiddish songs. As a result they became big names in the Jewish community.

Klaasen met jazz legend Kippie Moeketsi at the Bantu Men's Social Club and he taught her the different keys.

He would tell her to sing a song like Stella by Starlight in E flat. She did not know what that was, so he would go to the piano and demonstrate.

She liked him because, unlike others who were eager to teach her, he did not expect sex in return.

A number of her fellow performers - artists like Makeba, Masuka, Jonas Gwangwa and Hugh Masekela - left South Africa in the late '50s and early '60s, some of them to perform overseas with the jazz musical King Kong and not returning.

When "Pinocchio" Mokaleng, founder of the Odin Cinema modern jazz sessions in Sophiatown, was denied a passport to leave, Klaasen helped smuggle him to Cape Town so he could escape. When the police approached their car she sat on the diminutive Mokaleng with a blanket wrapped round them, pretending she was pregnant.

She met up with him again in London when she went there with King Kong in 1961. She was a member of the cast of the extraordinarily successful musical for its overseas premiere in the West End of London.

Unlike many of her peers, she chose to return to South Africa.

Klaasen played cabaret at the Pelican in Orlando, the first, finest and most durable (it survived almost weekly police raids and arrests from 1972 to the mid-'80s) of the unlicensed nightclubs that opened in Johannesburg. Many of the country's most talented musicians and singers performed there on Sunday evenings.

Klaasen, who had pancreatic cancer, is survived by her daughter Lorraine, a singer based in Montreal, Canada.

Klaasen's marriage to Lucas Klaasen ended in the early '70s.

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