‘Community spirit is essential to defeat racism and fascism, and music must create it’

Ahead of this Sunday’s concert commemorating the Battle of Cable Street, Chris Searle speaks to trumpeter CLAUDE DEPPA, pioneer member of the Grand Union Orchestra

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THERE isn’t a musical ensemble more fitting and attuned to leading a concert commemorating the October 4 1936 Battle of Cable Street than the east London-based Grand Union Orchestra. 

Composed of local musicians from heritages as far apart as China and Chile, the Caribbean and Bangladesh, South Africa and Russia, Australia and the Ivory Coast, the sheer cosmopolitan power of these universal troubadours  exposes out loud and in melody Oswald Mosley’s inheritor Nigel Farage, and the masked men of Dover and Portsmouth, as a scourge of humanity.

As the orchestra’s founder, the late Tony Haynes, wrote in his suite The Beast is Back: “This time the monster sings its songs/ Through headlines of imagined wrongs/ They shall not pass/ They did not pass/ We stopped them then/ We’ll stop them now!”

The Grand Union pioneer, the free, scintillating trumpeter Claude Deppa, was born in Cape Town in in 1958 during the grisly height of apartheid, came with his parents to live in London in 1974. What inspired him to become such a dedicated musician/activist?  

“My mum was a radiographer, my dad was supervisor at Guguletho township swimming pool. We were a musical family completely rooted in black community life. My grandfather had his own brass band, the Athlone Brass Band, so the vital importance of music being essential to life has never left me.”

He showed me a telling photograph of his grandad’s uniformed brass band, with the young drummer Claude sitting proudly in its front.

“When we arrived in east London I went to Bow Boys’ School and opted for the trumpet because I could easily carry it around. I couldn’t do that with the drums. Music in schools was better then. The Inner London Education Authority encouraged music in schools. Not so now.

“Young people need the opportunity to grow with music in their communities, but now we’re seeing community spirit sucked out of our young people. There are so few youth resources, which means we are heading for a generation of young people who won’t grow together, won’t think together, won’t imagine together, because many schools don’t encourage that.”

It was Deppa’s love for and belief in community musical activism that has led to his involvement in the south London Kinetika project and the youth initiatives of Grand Union.

“Give young people the encouragement to create through music,” he says, “and they will grow. I’m talking about working-class youth whose parents can’t afford to pay for or drive to music lessons. Even after I’ve taught them just two notes, when I see the lights in their eyes, it’s better than the best meal I’ve ever had! It warms my heart, teaching them.”

In 1984 he met Tony Haynes and became one of Grand Union’s leading activists. “Tony’s finest qualities were his inclusiveness and love of community. I called him my second grandfather because of what he taught me — like my first in Cape Town. It was their sense of community that was at the heart of both their music. Community spirit is essential to defeat racism and fascism, and music must create it.”

Deppa has played and recorded with some of the great figures in jazz and African music: Art Blakey, Carla Bley, Miriam Makeba, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Johnny Dyani, yet his belief in music within the community has always kept him teaching and campaigning, and helping to create the musicians of tomorrow. Out of Kinetika has come the now-times brilliance of trumpeters Mark Kavuma and Sheila Maurice-Grey, and tuba virtuoso Theon Cross, and Grand Union has been a birthing band of many powerful British jazz eminences like trumpeter Byron Wallen and saxophonists Courtney Pine and Tony Kofi.

“Some musicians say to me that if you haven’t been to music college you can’t be a proper musician. Grand Union doesn’t accept that. Our college is our community, which is a better message than ‘I, Me, Myself.’ We find joy in teaching our young members. We teach them that art, music and life grow together. Culture comes from the community.”

He talks about Britain’s new breed of Blackshirts, those who marched in Dover with a police escort like Mosley’s men, and those who insulted the volunteer lifeboat workers in Portsmouth.

“As a South African who grew up with apartheid but who always struggled for justice, I know that the community spirit which fired the people at Cable Street 90 years ago must be revived and grow. When we say ‘They shall not pass!’ we have to mean it in our music too, and always remember the critical economic foundation at the centre of it all. When there are no youth clubs or facilities, when schools which prioritise examinations over community, when young people are left to blame others and newcomers who have nothing.

“Anything that is solely money-driven can never be good for humanity and our culture. Grand Union is a home-grown intercultural orchestra. We create music out of love for other humans, for we are all so similar yet so different. Like in Grand Union, everyone plays differently yet we all play together as one in an international language. That is our world, a world completely opposed to racism and fascism and in full support of those who smashed Mosley and his followers at Cable Street.”

In the words of Grand Union lyricist David Bradford, inviting us all to their October 4 concert: “Raise the banner high/ Sound the trumpet soft/ Sound the trumpet low/ Sound the trumpet high// In London’s holy fields I see great numbers gathering.”

Grand Union Orchestra will play Oxford House, Bethnal Green, London E2 on Sunday October 4 at 7pm. For tickets see: oxfordhouse.org.uk. For information about Grand union orchestra see: grandunion.org.uk. 

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