The sound in the here and now

One of the outstanding shows at this year’s National Arts Festival in Grahamstown was a collaborative performance featuring a Briton, a Swissman, two South Africans and two Dutchmen.

The band had British rapper and saxophonist Soweto Kinch, Swiss vocalist Andreas Schaerer, drummer Kesivan Naidoo, pianist Bokani Dyer, Dutch guitarists, Anton Goudsmit and Jeroen Vierdag.

These are accomplished musicians in their own right with different musical philosophies.

The result was an alchemy of sighs and grunts, saxophone blasts and the percussive clank of the cymbal. What we witnessed was an exhibition of jazz when clever men (one or two of them virtuosos) sit down and decide this is what contemporary jazz should mean; the sound in the here and now.

The opening track was On the Treadmill, a Schaerer composition, which coupled the Swissman’s carvenous groans with an ability to mimic the blasts of a horn, the guttural sounds of ancient rituals. At times the music created the ambience of, say, a seance, as if
incence was at that very point going up in smoke. You could swear that the sounds were not coming from his mouth—Schaerer was rightly
described by Kinch as a “madman”.

The other musicians stood their ground, Kinch and Naidoo, especially. They played his strange compositions, keeping up with the madness, amplifying it. There was a segment in the evening when Kinch would take words from the audience and freestyle. “Dominican Republic”, “mother” and “Ronald Reagan” were hailed at him by the audience.

Instead of ducking, he took the words, moulded sense into them, creating expansive soundscapes in almost the same way his saxophone had echoed earlier in the night.

For more from the National Arts Festival, see our special report.