Overseas acts provide all the excitement at next month’s Arts Alive festival, writes GWEN ANSELL
BOLD and brassy Cuban ensemble Irakere will terrify the storks and electrify the dancers at Johannesburg’s Zoo Lake on September 8, as they kick off the popular music programme of this year’s Arts Alive Festival.
Irakere, founded and led by last year’s piano guest Chucho Valdes, went back to the spiritual and rhythmic roots of Cuban tradition to inject new life into big-band jazz. The formula worked. Irakere have been wowing audiences for over a decade — particularly with the furious soloing of its brass and reed players.
Irakere is one of the top international acts appearing at this year’s festival. Also on the bill are Wendy Mseleku, Southern Freeway and Avzal Ismail, typifying the essentially safe and repetitive choices made from among South African acts.
Not that there’s anything wrong with any of these performers; nor with Mike Makhalemele and Jimmy Dludlu, who also crop up in the programme. They’re all superb musicians and highly enjoyable acts. It’s just that, once more, a festival has missed the chance to showcase anything from the modernist edge of the music.
Ironically, UK guest Courtney Pine is precisely that: the young black British reedman has explored both abstraction and Caribbean roots through today’s eyes, producing music which not only entertains but challenges, and which is in a constant state of development.
In his own way, the same is true of Baaba Maal. Maal’s album Firin’ in Fouta (and, more particularly, the DJ mixes of tracks like Siddiki created by Maal and mix-man “Groucho” Smykie) made full use of the control desk to electrify — literally — deep Senegalese folk idioms.
Smashing barriers and preconceptions is also the speciality of jazz poet Jayne Cortez, appearing at Carfax in Newtown with her band The Firespitters. Drummer Denardo Coleman has an assertive style, matching the anger of some of Cortez’s verses, which disturbingly document the struggles of women and people of colour, and celebrate life, love and music.
Among South African artists, McCoy Mrubatha features — deservedly — on two bills in his new project with Trudy Aspler. Mrubata has a unique and exhilarating saxophone attack, and is heard far too rarely. And the new generation of mbaqanga players appear in Durban’s Skeleton, part of the usual extensive bill for Mbaqanga on the Precinct.
So, we have from overseas music which is about contrast, dazzling juxtaposition and the now. From home, we have a few new things, but predominantly music from the safe side of the fence. We do have a South African jazz avant-garde. Do our young lions have to lose their teeth before any arts festivals notice them?
* The musical line-up of Arts Alive kicks off with Jazz on the Lake on September 8, featuring Irakere, Southern Freeway, Wendy Mseleku and Avzal Ismail, and on September 11, featuring Irakere and Mike Makhalemele.
Jayne Cortez and The Firespitters are at Carfax on September 13 and 14; Courtney Pine and Jimmy Dludlu will be at MegaMusic on September 20 and 21; Mbaqanga on the Precinct takes place on September 21, at the Newtown Precinct; and Baaba Maal, accompanied by Phusekhemisi, is at MegaMusic on September 27, and together with McCoy Mrubata, the Soweto Youth Jazz Orchestra, Andy Brown and Storm and Ringo, at a venue to be announced in Soweto on September 29.