It may have taken renowned Cape Town jazz drummer Kesivan Naidoo quite a few years to record his debut album as a bandleader, but it was definitely worth the wait.
“Dave Liebman once told me that it takes 15 years to develop as a jazz musician beginning a career,” says Naidoo in the album’s liner notes. “So right now I should just about be getting started.”
Whether it’s with his Indian jazz outfit Babu, progressive electro-jazz project Closet Snare or his resident Cape Town jazz quintet Restless Natives, Naidoo is always cooking up some damn addictive jazz fusion for South African and international audiences.
So now the time has arrived for his new outfit Kesivan and the Lights.
Seven years since his first recording session and 14 since his professional debut as a jazz drummer, at the age of 14, Instigators of the Revolution (Independent) hardly sounds like Naidoo getting started and more like Naidoo fully formed.
On it he pays respect to the jazz musicians who have shaped his love of jazz and his career so far.
“Instigators of the Revolution is essentially a careful selection of tributes,” says Naidoo.
Naidoo began playing drums at the age of 10, but it was when he heard Blue Train, John Coltrane’s 1957 hard-bop album, that he committed his life to jazz. “I couldn’t believe the sound,” he says now.
One of the most inspiring elements of the album was the drumming of Philly Joe Jones. “The sound completely intrigued me,” says Naidoo.
From there Naidoo jumped headfirst into the world of acoustic jazz, immersing himself in the work of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and later into home-grown heroes such as Hotep Galeta, Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi and Bheki Mseleku.
Having toured and performed with some of South Africa’s greatest musicians, such as Miriam Makeba, Zim Ngqawana, Marcus Wyatt, Feya Faku, Selaelo Selota, Errol Dyers, Hotep Galeta and Steve Newman, Naidoo is perfectly poised to play tribute to South Africa’s jazz revolutionaries.
“People like Bheki Mseleku, Bra Winston, [Thelonious] Monk, [John] Coltrane, Wayne Shorter and others, they’re the ones who forged the way in the progression of the sound,” says Naidoo in the album’s liner notes. “They’ve taken improvisation to the next level and most of these musicians are rebels.
“That’s why the music sounds the way it does,” says Naidoo. “They’ve inspired me and thousands of others.”
With Naidoo tracing the lineage of jazz revolutionaries it makes sense that he has chosen to rework Ngozi’s Daddy Trane and Brother Shorter and Mseleku’s Monk’s Move for the album, paying tribute to the greats such as Coltrane, Monk and Shorter through the lens of South Africa’s jazz icons.
Interestingly enough Naidoo has also chosen to arrange some more pop-oriented pieces, with Bjork’s I’ve Seen It All and In the Musicals from the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack and Beyonce’s Single Ladies magnificently reworked.
“Think pop music in a jazz setting and there’s Miles [Davis] doing Michael Jackson’s Human Nature and Ms Lauper’s Time after Time,” says Naidoo in the liner notes.
“The first time I heard the tune [Single Ladies] was on TV and obviously Beyonce looked really great,” says Naidoo. “At the same time the harmonic progression and the groove did speak to me as well.
“Bjork inspires me, end of story,” he says.
Lonely Woman/India sees Naidoo doing a take on free-jazz star Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Women before segueing it into Coletrane’s India.
“The idea was in the vein of Indian classical style with the alap, which has no time and the tala, which is where the rhythm is,” says Naidoo.
“Lonely Woman is the sombre alap and India is home now it’s grooving.”
Whatever the thinking behind the piece, it adds up to 11 minutes of gorgeous jazz.
One of the album’s highlights has to be Toyi Toyi, a take on the dance so closely associated with South Africa’s long struggle against apartheid.
This jazz exploration of the toyi-toyi features some magnificent work on the drums by Naidoo and is a particularly funky piece of music.
Recorded in Sweden over three dates in January this year, Instigators of the Revolution features a mix of South African and Swedish musicians whom Naidoo has played alongside over the past few years and together they make up The Lights.
As the album’s liner notes state: “The lights must remain switched on at all times.” Eskom permitting, of course.