Electric Jive, an excellent blog focusing on rare and unreleased South African music, has recently come into a serious musical treasure-trove of previously unreleased jazz. The existence of these recordings and pictures are due to the efforts of Ian Bruce Hartley, a white fan of the music who seems to have been a ubiquitous presence around the Capetown scene during the mid to late 1960’s. Although not a musician himself, Hartley was an avid taper, and recorded countless hours of live audio from shows around the city. Given the increasingly harsh measures put into law by the apartheid regime during the period, it isn’t particularly surprising that Hartley was subjected to harassment due to his close friendships with black South Africans. Kicked out of his loft for allowing black musicians to crash there after a gig, Hartley, who worked for the South African Government, was transferred out of Cape Town for “unknown” reasons.
![Tete Mbambisa and Psych Big T Ntsele](https://afropop.org/migrated-uploads/2012/06/Tete-Mbambisa-and-Psych-Big-T-Ntsele.jpg)