SA Rocks

This post has been generously thrown together by Rouvanne at Peak Performances! Thanks for the contribution and stunning photographs!

The Cape Town International Jazz Festival is finished, having been one of the most successful of the past 8-years. It was already been sold out by Friday, so it won’t be forgotten for awhile yet!

Wolfgang Koenig, a world music journalist from Radio Multikulti in Berlin, Germany, said that the CTIJF has been ranked as the 4th best jazz festival in the world (wow people, can I hear some applause for that please?), and that it has been positioned in the top 40 of the best events of any kind.

The audience come from all over for the music. And a little bit of the mountain, the city, the weather, the people… but mostly for the music!

The traffic was pretty hectic right through the festival, but once in the flow, the CTICC guys had full control and directed everyone perfectly! It is an amazing venue when you think that 1000’s of cars can all be parked within a 5-minute walk from the entrance!

As I wasn’t able to be at every show over the weekend, I can only offer some insight to the groups that I watched; such as Vivid Africa, with McCoy Mrubata (sax), Greg Georgiades (oud), Ashish Joshi (table), and the amazingly talented Siya Makuzeni (vocals & trombone), who sounds just as good live as she does on their CD! Ashish blew away the audience with a solo on tabla; just the smallest movements from his fingers send’s out a stampede of sounds!

When you have so many choices, as you do every year on the two days of the CTIJF (hmm, why not stretch it out over three days with the same amount of artists? It’s sold out as is!) you have to jump around a lot to be able to see anything!

The very funky Rudimentals had an amazing energy pumping on stage, playing their blend of ska/monkey-punk/reggae, with a Cape Town feel. The Rudimentals’ Zimbabwean lead vocalist, Teboho (Teboes) Maidza, really got the crowd going – and I left their gig pretty impressed!

Shannon Mowday (the current Standard Bank Young Jazz Artist of 2007) was on stage with an international ensemble called Burn, having the backing of Karin Hammar on trombone, and Hildegunn Øiseth (both from Sweden) on trumpet.

Kippies was chocka-block and the audience in absolute awe of Grammy Awards winners Ladysmith Balck Mambazo! Their acapella show was a very quiet, subtle performance, soothing to the soul, making it easy to become mesmerized by the rhythm. But as soon the group would start a little dance to accompany a song – especially a nice long version of that famous ‘hey baby hey, hey beautiful girl’ – the ladies in the audience got vocal! Ululating and throwing their hands in the air, the whole crowd would come alive and vibrate, with every Zulu style kick by the group, and flash of those little white tekkies they wear.

Yehya Khalil & his Egyptian Jazz Fusion band was awesome! Yehya Khalil, who great American Jazz legend Dizzie Gillespie described as quite possibly “the greatest percussionist alive”, had his drum kit slap-bang in the middle of the stage, dominating. With sax & bass players, a percussion section made up of three traditional drummers, a lead guitarist, a keyboard and two players of a type of Egyptian zither, they created real fusion, with jazz jumping all over the back of Arabian tabla.

Yehya Khalil, who started the first jazz band in Egypt in 1957, is this funny little man, wearing peachy corduroys, braces, and a short Father Xmas beard – but he knows his stuff! He gave a drum solo that just showed pure class, and would’ve been a master lesson to any drummer there!

Saturday night was another amazing Cape Town autumn night, and The Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Band, Stimela & the Bheki Khosa Quartet started the excitement off, with Tucan Tucan & the Ernest Mothle Quartet sending fans scuttling all over the CTICC.

There was a rush for the Basil “Mannenberg”Coetzee outdoor stage where Jack DeJohnette and South Africa’s star diva, Sibongile Khumalo, were appearing. Internationally renowned trumpeter Byron Wallen, who was brought out especially for this, showed his skill in one track by launching into an amazing duo with Sibongile, by playing a conch shell, instead of his trumpet. Even President Thabo Mbeki, who was ushered to the front of the stage, stood transfixed amid a writhing mass of bodyguards and police. Ministers Aziz Pahad and Trevor Manual, I noticed, had far more freedom to move – if I were Mbeki, I would have sent the guards for a beer and chilled awhile longer – because the fun had just started!

Ismael Lo, from Senegal, did some of his greatest tracks, and the audience was blown away by his percussionist It is great that the festival was able to secure Ismael, and I think that this festival should represent the African continents different styles of music coupled with international jazz – we have no better platform of the same magnitude, to be able to learn more about these artists from our own continent.

Zulu maskanda master, bafo Madala Kunene, got all the Durbanites in the audience to quickly loosened up the audience by whooping, ullalating and dancing every time Madala looked up, never mind play some awesome tracks with his new young band. The Sangoma who burnt offerings before the show started, obviously brought the most powerful ancestors to the party, because this was quite possibly one of the best outdoor concerts by Madala, in a long time.

Looking back today, I think Cape Town should be very proud of being host to such a successful gathering of world artists. Bigger and richer cities try the same and don’t meet the standard that we are setting – I just wish that we had more throughout the year, because you can just never have enough music!

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