Local music legend mourned
March 23 2011 at 12:18pm
By Latoya Newman (Independent On-line)
Acclaimed South African guitarist, singer and songwriter Syd Kitchen is seen in this file picture with wife (then bride to be) Germaine Barnard in February 2009. At the time they enjoyed a triple celebration on Valentines Day when they exchanged vows, and celebrated Valentine’s Day and Kitchen’s 56th birthday that year. PICTURE: Shelley Kjonstad
The music and entertainment industry is in mourning today after news that well renowned musician Syd Kitchen has died.
Word of his death started filtering through on social media networks Twitter and FaceBook shortly after 11.30pm on Tuesday night.
Kitchen’s wife, Germaine Barnard, confirmed that he died last night at the Highway Hospice. “I was at his side and he had a very peaceful ending. I would like to thank the staff at Highway Hospice for the great care they gave Syd and myself, to all his friends who travelled far to be with him and the amazing love and support that Syd and I have been given, to all our family especially Pete Kitchen, Syd’s only sibling, and his wife June who have been a pillar of strength and support base for me. Syd will always be remembered for his beautiful music that touched the lives of so many, his sharp tongue and eccentric persona. He pursued his music passionately without any compromise and will dearly missed by all who crossed his path,” she said.
A critically acclaimed singer/song writer, Kitchen released a number albums including Waiting for the heave with the Utensils, City Child, Amakoologik with Amakool and Africa’s not for sissies . He is also a known poet and teacher who had a qualification in musicology.
The gifted Durban musician is well known for his free spirit and staying true to his calling. He was also very active in helping to develop younger musicians.
Kitchen was a regular on festival music stages, including Splashy Fen, where he was scheduled to perform again this year. He was also to play at the Durban World Music Festival’s Legends Concert this weekend alongside a list of other international and South African music greats which included the likes of Hugh Masekela, Johnny Clegg, Ronny Jordan. The Flames and more.
Syd Kitchen with his laid back folk style at the Oppikoppi music festival in 2008. Picture: Etienne Creux NL SA
Kitchen is loved, respected and highly appreciated on the local music scene.
Long time music partner and friend, Madala Kunene, said: “I’ve known Syd for 35 years… I was with him last weekend and he said ‘Bafo (brother) I don’t think I can do that show (The Legends Concert) because I haven’t got the power’. He said I must just go on stage and be myself,” Kunene explained as his voice cracked with emotion.
Steve Fataar said he felt a feelings of happiness and overwhelming sadness. “I’m happy because he won’t suffer any longer, but it’s almost impossible to say how I feel,” he said with a lump in his throat, “… Durban has lost a great musician and compassionate person. Syd was an incredible musician and an incredible observer of social circumstances. He had a magnificent ability to put this into his music. I would say he was the best musician this side of Bob Dylan.”
Tony Cox said Kitchen’s contribution to South African music will be “greatly underappreciated for a while” before people realise how important he was. “It often happens like that in the mainstream, when music is not commercial enough. If South African had the guts to put their weight behind such musicians, Syd and other musicians would not live so close to the poverty line. It riles me up the way that someone like Syd has to go off into the beyond having not being properly recognised by his country.”
A documentary film, Fool in a Bubble, which was shot between January 2007 and 2008 and produced by Joshua Sternlicht also documented “the words and music of Syd Kitchen”.
On Sunday (March 20, 2011) ‘Celebrating Syd Kitchens Life and Music’ was held at Zacks on Whilson’s Wharf. Among the performers were Rob Warren, John Ellis, Steve Fataar and Miriam Erasmus.
According to a post on the Syd Kitchen Tribute Event Page on Facebook he was recently diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and a tribute concert was to be held in his honour next week called the Open Strings Tribute for Syd Kitchen.
In a press statement in February Kitchen’s family Kitchen thanked family, friends and well wishers for their support. “Thank you so much, it has been literally overwhelming to have received this level of support,” he was quoted as saying.
In the same statement his brother Peter Kitchen said: “The late stage at which the diagnosis has taken place, leaves little room for treatment except to manage his pain and discomfort as well as we can. A possible treatment option in the States is presently being explored so we will continue to update as this develops.”
Messages poured in from friends, fellow musicians and fans on Kitchen’s Facebook page last night. Among these were a message from Jerome Govender which read: “There are no words to say… only music left unsung, we will continue the legacy you left for us. Shoes we can never fill, but honoured to walk in… until we meet again.”
Michael de Jaager said: “Your spirit and music lives on forever… We never got to do that interview… Another time. RIP Syd.”
George Sax said: “The band in the sky needs you. It was an honour to know you.”
Kitchen has been involved in music for several years, but shot to prominence as a solo act in the late 70s.
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Eulogy for Syd Kitchen.
Saturday 26th March 2011 @ St John the Divine, Clark Road, Glenwood.
Words.
Syd Kitchen was a wordsmith and a poet.
A musician who knew how to use words.
I’ve tried to find some words to describe Syd: spirited, eccentric, honest, outspoken, outrageous, witty, gregarious, courageous, determined, single-minded, and highly gifted – not only as a poet and musician, but also as a teacher and a mentor. Most of us here know Syd’s music well, some have become musicians because of him, and there are many in other parts of the world, who also love his music.
There’s another important word to describe Syd – generous. All of the beautifully crafted recordings he made and that we have enjoyed, were done at his own expense, and without subsidy. He called them “No Budget Productions.” He was born in a country that tends to ignore and neglect its artists, but he persevered, and it was only towards the end of his life that he started to receive the recognition that he deserved. He was deeply pleased to know that John Martyn, one of the great innovators of English folk music, had been listening to his music.
Syd and I have been friends for 42 years. We met in 1969. I was 22 and he was 19. We ended up jamming together. A friend and I wanted Syd to join our band because he brought so much enthusiasm and commitment to the music. At that time he didn’t play guitar at all – he used to contribute by singing and playing percussion. However, he and his brother, Pete, who was a virtuoso guitarist, set off on a musical career as The Kitchen Brothers, writing and performing their own material. Minstrels in the folk tradition they were, and I recall Syd’s own book of poems Scars That Shine, and the spirit of those early versus can be heard in the lyrics of Hole Song:
I see you on the 5;15
Amongst the everyday people
Wearing regulation denim jeans
Wearing Indian cheese cloth
Catch the same bus everyday
With your smile in your pocket…
Words of youthful charm that reveal a compassion for humanity, an eye for local detail, and a love of life. That’s what true poets do – they use their art as the magic to transform daily mundanity into a cohesive vision.
I saw little of Syd during the seventies. He was bringing up his family of two daughters, Jasmine and Sev, though I did get to see him when I visited Syd Kitchen’s Guitar Saloon in the centre of town. It was the hard dark eighties that reconnected us. South Africa was burning, people were being necklaced, and for anyone in the arts it was difficult to sing, or even smile… and we all moved a little closer together. The grim reality was that the whole nation was undergoing severe contractions to slough off the curséd weight of apartheid. While the laws were still on the books, the carcass was still on the hooks. In a timely and prophetic fashion Syd produced the album Waiting for the Heave – which is what we were all doing – waiting to gather sufficient strength to heave the weight of apartheid off our backs.
Here are some words from that album, the song Crossroads
What does it matter
Who really cares
People got bullets
Growing out of their fears
Dreams full of nothing
Palaces of tin
Some people got answers
For the state that we’re in
Crossroads… crossroads
Another place for tears
Syd’s own comment on the song was: ”An observation of how helplessly insignificant we all are in the shadow of bulldozed purpose. Not so much a cry, but a sigh of shame.”
During these years Syd continued to teach every day, while he studied music at the university. His flat was always neat and orderly, a guitar or two at hand. There was no clutter to sway his focus from the discipline of music.
I think sometimes we forget the horror of those days, when people were being necklaced, buildings were burning, and many were emigrating. I remember thinking to myself, ‘how could anyone ever write a song about such times?’
Well, Syd managed it. He was at the Rob Roy hotel above the valley of a thousand hills where he witnessed the torching of people’s huts during a political battle. His sense of helpless despair triggered the song Down Where the Children Play.
I ride my pony through a troubled land
Full of death and disease
I saw a hatred there in every man
That cut me off at my knees.
High on a hill I watched a valley on fire
Flames licked at my heart,
I saw a nation in a burning tyre
The carnage tore it apart
Someone tell me it’s a bad bad dream
Wake me up from this ugly scene
I don’t want to be here no more
It’s a mad day I can’t ignore
Someone tell me that there’s more than this
Tell me I’ve got a right to wish
Maybe there’s another way
Down where the children play.
It takes honesty and courage to face up to and write about such things.
But Syd was not only concerned about political justice, he was also a very astute observer of human behaviour as revealed in the words of When The Boogie Dies
People get so lonesome when the boogie dies
People get so lonesome they decentralise
People get all giddy and strange
Foam at the mouth, half deranged
People get so lonesome when the boogie dies
People get so lonesome when there’s no one there
People get so lazy they forget to care
People get all mortified
Think they’re living when they’re half alive
People get so lonesome when there’s no one there
People get so ugly when they’ve got no love
People get so ugly they become so smug
People get all ké sera,
You are what you is and you is what you are
People get so ugly when they’ve got no love
People get so dangerous when they’ve got no dreams
People get so dangerous they could kill it seems
People get all anti life
Open their mail with a butcher’s knife
People get so dangerous when they’ve got no dreams
In 1994 the thorn of apartheid was removed from out of our flesh. The revolution was over and the forces for justice and democracy had won – or so we thought – but then started a tsunami of crime and corruption such as we could never have believed. The party was over.
Syd then went on to do some of his finest work… mature work… and here I would commend the two albums Amakool Logic and Africa’s Not For Sissies. Both rich in music, poetry and reflection on South Africa.
Also during this time he worked on other projects, namely The Aquarian Quartet, and Bafo Bafo, a duo with Madala Kunene. He performed overseas with Bafo Bafo and with Greig Coetzee in the play Johnny Boskak.
While abroad he started writing the song Fool In A Bubble.
No one comes here
With anger in their eyes
No one’s born with a broken heart,
But the bells of life
Ring louder than the thunder in the sky
And they bring darkness to the eyes
No one comes here with evil in their souls
No one’s born with the damage done
The winds of change blow us
Through these corridors of life
And sometimes cut like a knife
Here I sit like a fool in a bubble
My heart in trouble
And my head in a mess
The games we play to find where we’re going
We loose without knowing
And seldom care less
Sometimes we fly too close to the sun
Sometimes we fly too high
Sometimes its over before its begun
And there’s nothing left but to ask why
No one said there was an easy road to walk
No one gives when they need to take
But in this life all these crazy things
That move us along our way
Give us hope that there’s another day.
Words with meaning.
And then one day he met Germaine, and these were his words:
Then I found you
In the nick of time
You made me care less
Don’t know how to say this
But you blow me away
Maybe it’s the way you look at me
It makes me fear less
I could do anything
But walk away
From you.
Love. The gift of love. He had found an angel… or she had found him.
I believe that humans are often called to be angels – messengers acting for the Lord at specific times and for specific purposes, and for the last years of Syd’s life he has had the comfort of a faithful, kind and beautiful wife.
No one lives forever, and the scriptures say that all flesh is grass. We go back into the hands of the giver of life, and into your hands, Lord of all life, I commend Syd, that spirited, nonchalant and gifted artist, and we thank you for his work, which I believe will endure, and that we had the pleasure and privilege of knowing him.
Rick Andrew.
Aden Hinds from famous Hinds Brothers, a singing duo who often performed with Syd, sent out an SMS saying “Syd left us at 10.30 last night. May his soul rest in peace….”
The Ridge Online
Ace Durban singer, guitarist and songwriter Syd Kitchen has died. Syd faced a tough battle against lung cancer, which had spread to his liver and lymph glands.
Famous for albums such as City Child and Africa’s Not for Sissies, for which he always managed to assemble the very best available musicians, Syd recently released Fool In A Bubble to critical acclaim. He was also known for his ground-breaking collaborations with, among many others, the likes of Madala Kunene, Tony Cox, Greg Georgiades and Steve Newman.
Syd was a hard-working live performer (for three decades), featured at all the major local festivals (he was an absolute legend at Splashy Fen) and regularly toured overseas. He also taught and lectured music, opening up a world of music to many who themselves became talented performers.
Social networking site Facebook was peppered with tributes to Syd today, while music lovers rushed to his Facebook page to post their comments and wishes online. – Staff Reporter
City Press interview with Syd Kitchen: Syd’s no sissy about death