JAZZ: Gwen Ansell
Forget screams, moans and squishing noises. The sexiest sound in the world is a big fat horn line playing jazz. Irakere, or “The Forest”, last week’s jazz guests for Arts Alive, feature four horns. On saxes, Cesar Lopez provides the intellectual acrobatics and an ironic take on the more florid ballad numbers while Alfres Thomson’s warm tenor adds guts and heart. On first trumpet, Mario Hernandez effortlessly has the highs without ever sacrificing roundness and warmth. He’s a wonderfully old-fashioned player — old-fashioned as in Clifford Brown. His dreadlocked partner, Basillo Marquez offers a sharper, dizzier approach.
But there’s also leader Chucho Valdez’s scholarly, swing piano and arrangements, Mayra Valdez’s inspired scatting and soulful shouts, a drum team that leaps between the Yoruba forests and Birdland — so many riches, crammed into one band.
The programme mixed Afro-Cuban rhythms and structures (rhumba, bolera, salsa) with jazz standards; these latter often taken at breakneck unison speed in idiosyncratic mixes — like the medley which combined a brief excursion to Georgia with I’ll Remember April. By the end of the evening, the whole audience was sweatily invoking Oludun, critical faculty totally suspended.
And after the high subsides, what can we learn from Irakere — particularly in the context of an evening which began with a sloppy and lustreless set from Mike Makhalemehele? Strong rhythm work, Bush Sestlolo’s distinctive keyboard style (given full rein for once, on a great instrument), and Bheki Khoza’s astute, intricate driving guitar solos all won hearts, as did the charm of Makhalamele’s own compositions. But the set began ten minutes late, the opener, Moraledi, was disjointed and uneven — and it is no longer charming (if it ever was) to confess that you only met the piano-player yesterday and don’t know his name. It simply makes us all wonder how much preparation you put in to what we are paying for.
However, let’s look again at Irakere. They come from Cuba where music education is freely available for the talented; where it is a source of pride to be a musician, and where the cherishing of cultural roots is a national mission. Here, we force talented musicians to run around cap-in-hand to raise cash for their own music schools; “musician” is often uttered with a disparaging curl of the lip, and a prominent jazz critic can dismiss our South African variant of the genre as “tribal pop” — and get away with it. Add to that the grotesque resource inequalities inherited from apartheid and you begin to understand why South African musicians don’t always deliver on their promise.
Irakere are nothing phenomenal. They are simply a great, jazz-rooted dance band; enormously talented, tight and hardworking — and out of a cultural context which has made it positive for them to hang together for nearly a quarter of a century to get that way. The fuzzy equivocations of our latest culture White Papers suggest we’ve a way to go before we reach that point.