Freedom's Children With Malombo Jazz Makers – Ourang-Outang

In August 1971, the white wizards of South Africa's psychedelic rock underground shared the stage with the black witchdoctors of the Afro-jazz avant-garde. The event was the Tribal Blues concerts at Wits Great Hall, an unprecedented cross-cultural showcase of independent music hosted by the maverick 3rd Ear Music label. Ourang-Outang (2020) presents rehearsals and jams recorded by 3rd Ear director, producer and engineer David Marks in rural KwaZulu-Natal as this unlikely alliance of musical druids prepared for their concert appearances in Johannesburg.
The Freedom's Children with Malombo Jazz Makers recordings from this Valley of a Thousand Hills retreat were edited and distilled onto an album-length proof-of-concept tape shaped by songwriter Ramsay Mackay's vision of an allegorical South African "tribal musical" entitled Ourang-Outang. The reel was stored in a box scrawled with annotations and accompanied by a skeletal tracklisting with two takes of its catchy main theme and some outstanding jamming. The tape also contained a minute-long false-start that would be used as a coda on Side A of Molombo's 3rd Ear album Music of the Spirit in 1971.
As fate would have it, the unfinished stage concept was shelved and eventually abandoned although the main theme was re-purposed and recorded by other artists over the course of the 1970s. Just shy of 50 years later, the Ourang-Outang tape would emerge to tell it's story under Mackay's guidance and supervision before his passing in December 2018.

Tracklist:
A1 Ourang-Outang I 8:30
A2 Messing About (Vermouth In The Moonlight) 1:39
A3 Ourang-Outang Chant 3:53
A4 If The Day Would Come 2:34
A5 Excerpt From Music Of The Spirit 0:50
B1 Working Out (Nothing Better Than The Truth) 12:13
B2 Ourang-Outang II 8:07