Obituary: Victor Ntoni - revered jazz musician

VICTOR Ntoni, who has died at the age of 66, was one of South Africa's top jazz musicians.

A bassist, composer, singer and arranger of brilliance, he played with jazz legends Dave and Darius Brubeck, Kippie Moeketsi, Abdullah Ibrahim and Nelson Magwaza.

His work is featured in recent recordings by some of South Africa's greatest jazz performers, including Hugh Masekela, Barney Rachabane, Duke Makasi, Abigail Kubeka and DJ Black Coffee. The latter worked with the elderly jazz master, retrieving his hit Usizi from the past for a fresh take in 2011.

The revival focused renewed attention on the slight, bespectacled Ntoni, who was due to headline at this year's Cape Town International Jazz Festival.

Ntoni, whose musical career spanned 40 years, grew up in the rough, poor and unforgiving Cape Town township of Langa and was drawn to music from as far back as he could remember. As a child he spent hours in the company of migrant workers, who lived in camps near his home, and was entranced by their rich, harmonious voices and wonderful musicality.

The traditional sounds taught him valuable lessons in harmony and instilled in him a deep love of the big-band sound that he would later bring to dazzling life in his own music.

His first instrument was his voice and he was still a young teenager when his vibrant solo performances got him an invitation to join the Dollar Brand Trio.

He played the saxophone for them too, as well as for The Uptown. He learnt to play bass in his 20s after teaching himself the guitar, and then only because the bassist in his band did not show up for a gig.

In 1974 he did a Royal Command performance with the musical production Meropa. The Frenchman Maurice Jarre was so impressed with Ntoni's playing that he asked him where he had studied music - and could not believe it when he told him that he never had.

Jarre had a friend who was an administrator at the famous Berklee School of Music in Boston and arranged for Ntoni to study composition and arranging there.

His return to South Africa coincided with US jazz legend Dave Brubeck's first visit to the country in 1976 with his son, Darius. The apartheid government would not allow Brubeck to bring his black bass player, so Brubeck invited Ntoni to fill in for him. Brubeck was a member of Berklee's board of trustees and when he heard that Ntoni had just spent 12 weeks there, he arranged a scholarship for him to return to continue his studies.

When he returned to South Africa, Ntoni was invited to put together a big-band ensemble at the SABC. He found the climate of apartheid - 60% of all music had to be Afrikaans, black musicians were not allowed to drink coffee with their white colleagues and were subjected to racist jibes - and miserly budgets galling and was driven "crazy" by the arrogance of the white head of music, who kept telling him how to play jazz. Feeling one day that he was "ready for the nuthouse", he decided to leave before he went mad.

One of several highlights for him in post-apartheid South Africa was his direction of a landmark production of One Night's Journey Into Jazz at a newly respectable Sun City.

Ntoni, loved and even revered in local jazz circles, never forgot his roots and devoted much time giving free tuition to deprived black musicians during the apartheid era.

He made sure that the memory of South Africa's great jazz stars, such as Todd Matshikiza, Winston Ngozilike and Kippie Moeketsi - whose sound he first heard in the musical King Kong and who taught him one of his first compositions on bass - lived on in his own music.

He was honoured in a tribute concert at Artscape in Cape Town in 2011.

Ntoni, who died of a heart attack after being admitted to hospital, is survived by six children.