Sometimes a piece of music deserves an endtire book, writes Tymon SmithJazz heads. You can see them coming a mile away.Maybe it's the old-school jackets or the berets or the feathers in their homburgs.Perhaps it's the way they pick up vinyls, immediately turn them over, look at the personnel list for a recording and then start telling you how the line-up that recorded the track was not as good as the one which performed it at a legendary dark bistro in Paris, New York, Chicago, Newtown or Durban.Whatever it is, there are characteristics that jazz listeners seem to develop irrespective of their age or background.Percy Mabandu is an unashamed jazz head and arts writer who has just completed a labour of love about the iconic 1968 album Yakhal'inkomo recorded by Cape Town-born saxophonist Winston Mankunku Ngozi.For those who know the album and in particular its hauntingly beautiful title track, the idea of a book devoted to it doesn't seem strange - it's a song that, once heard, is impossible to forget. Deceptively simple, the anthemic title tune, writes Mabandu "has grown to embody both the despair of what it meant to be black at the height of apartheid, and the hope it delivers to live through darkness of any kind".As he explains, it was logical for him to focus on this album because its title track "was a song that I'd been hearing since I was a child. Even before I knew what it was, it was part of my existence."When he first decided to write a monograph on the album three years ago, Mabandu was surprised by the paucity of information available about it and hindered by the fact that all the personnel on the recording were no longer alive.He sees this as indicative of "the South African problem - our generational challenge is to recover memory before we start saying new shit. These are stories that are sitting somewhere in the heads of old timers who are telling them in shebeens or when they are chilling."While he could have made the book an academic exercise for jazz heads, Mabandu wanted to use the investigation of the album and its creation to try and "locate the man, the song, the time and to try and get a perception of the variables at play and understand them for what they are."While the journey took him to many places and involved encounters with many people who remembered the music and the men who made it, it was surprising to Mabandu to find "the extent to which people were unwilling to talk.The song was not overtly political but by being beautiful it was a statement against the ugliness of the regime. I found that people remember the pain they suffered, not just from the politics at the time but also from the abuse by the recording industry."Helped by a small grant from the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors' Association of SA Grant Scheme for Authors, the book was a passion project that Mabandu is publishing and distributing himself and which he hopes will appeal to jazz heads and to a society that is "discourse savvy".He says: ''Even those South Africans who are pedestrian in their approach love to argue and debate - but I hope that anybody can pick up the book and have some hold on the subject matter." ..