SNJO to mark Nelson Mandela Day with take on Sam Cooke classic

Sam Cooke PIC: Hulton Archive / Getty Images

It’s been a long time, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will…

Sam Cooke’s soulful anthem of optimism, widely embraced by the 1960s civil rights movement in the US, has been much broadcast recently, as the festering iniquities of racism have never been so rawly exposed. Today, however, sees the online release of a striking new audio-visual interpretation of A Change Is Gonna Come by the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, mixed and edited by its director, saxophonist Tommy Smith, and with notable American guests vibraphonist Joe Locke, who has arranged the SNJO version, and singer Kenny Washington.

There are multiple connections here. The SNJO were due this spring to perform Cooke’s song, along with material by Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder, the Beatles and others in a Pop! Rock! Soul! tour featuring Washington and Locke, both of whom have guested with the big band in the past. Due to Covid-19, that tour has been postponed until next spring, but the SNJO musicians have not been idle during lockdown.

Smith reckons the timing of today’s release couldn’t be more appropriate: “With all of humanity in turmoil, Sam Cooke’s song is still relevant.” But today is also International Nelson Mandela Day and Smith intends that cash raised from the streaming will contribute towards the current proposals by the Nelson Mandela Scottish Memorial Foundation to erect a statue of the Nobel Prizewinner in Glasgow’s Nelson Mandela Place, off Buchanan Street.

This resonates with Smith who in 1990, as an emergent saxophone star newly signed to New York’s prestigious Blue Note Records, played alongside Scottish and South African choirs in a piece composed by William Sweeney for the anti-apartheid Sechaba Festival, part of Glasgow’s European City of Culture programme. Smith recalls that the performance, three years before Mandela’s own jubilant visit to the city, concluded with an impromptu and exuberant gumboot dance from the South Africans. Sweeney’s composition was a setting of a poem, “I Will Wait,” by a young South African poet, Mongane Wally Serote. Today, Smith points out, Serote is his nation’s Poet Laureate – “the equivalent of our Scottish Makar.”

Thirty years on, Smith finds himself dealing with some of the same people who organised that 1990 event, as he prepares for today’s release in conjunction with the Memorial Foundation.

“Our version of Cooke’s song is slightly different from other versions out there. The way Joe Locke has arranged it for us is more like a prayer. The challenge of putting it together with a big band in lockdown was quite difficult,” he adds, with some understatement, explaining how he started assembling the individual audio-visual recordings from 17 SNJO players before sending the mix to Locke and Washington for them to add their parts.

“Some of the musicians had their cameras vertical, some horizontal, so to create a story following the lyrics was difficult. I spent a long time editing it. Anyway, it’s good to have that expertise now,” he laughs.

The result intersperses video of the players with historic images of black rights activists such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Mandela himself.

Speaking from the States, Joe Locke describes Sam Cooke as “so much more than a pop star. He was a man of great compassion who cared deeply about justice and equality for people of colour in America. He not only wrote and sang about change, he worked for it and his untimely death was a tragedy for us all. Myself, Kenny, and the SNJO are proud to honour his memory.”

Washington, who has given some memorable performances along with Locke and the SNJO, also regards Cooke’s song as all too relevant to today’s turmoil: “But people of colour can stand tall and embrace our astounding accomplishments so far. The human race is of many colours – we can all learn from one another.”

And he matches these sentiments in a delivery that is honeyed, heartfelt and brimming with soul.

To access the stream, visit www.snjo.co.uk/mandela

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