JAZZ: Gwen Ansell
IT’S the Wednesday before his first Johannesburg concert and Courtney Pine shivers beside a wall outside the Parktonian Hotel as rain clouds loom. “The guys all brought shorts and stuff. Is the weather real?”
Courtney Pine ambles out from side-stage at Mega Music, casually blowing soprano sax, about halfway through the first 32 bars of Garden of Eden. Clearly, plenty of people know the track, because the place is howling and hot. He diverts into Bob Marley’s One Love, gets us all chorusing, then takes off into the abstractions of his own Prince of Peace, roaring round big abstract chords like ‘Trane in Live in Seattle, but never for one instant ceasing to swing.
“When we started playing, the music press couldn’t see where we were coming from; couldn’t see the connection between reggae and jazz. But it’s the spirit that’s important, not the label. Jazz isn’t tied to any particular culture. An Eskimo could play it; an Aborigine could play it. The culture’s nothing like as important as the conversation that’s established between us when we play.”
Prince of Peace lets Pine demonstrate the first of the evening’s astounding stretches of circular breathing. The neck tautens and swells, the eyes pop, and the note just keeps on coming. Later on, he retreats to the edge of the stage and punctuates Cameron Pierre’s guitar solo with staccato blasts from two horns at once. The reference point this time is not ‘Trane but Roland Kirk, whose fondness for multi-instrumental pyrotechnics and jazz-takes on contemporary pop also led some tight-assed critics to undervalue the talent and respect for jazz tradition which underpinned it all.
“My generation has soaked up all the influences – the music our parents brought with them from the Caribbean; the pop music we heard; sound system culture; dancehall and the jazz legacy of Americans like Sonny Rollins and great West Indians like Joe Harriott. In the Eighties, we started looking for an opportunity to give musical expression to all of that.”
Bringing turntables to the front of the music pre-dates hip-hop. It belongs to dancehall culture and the talent young DJs applied to modest home hi-fis at Brixton rent parties. They’d “spice up” a track with vocal commentary, needle scratches, anything to extend the limited range of the record- player. Now Pine is duetting with DJ Pogo on Absolution, getting into a positive cutting contest. As Pogo takes off into an extended improvisation, you realise Pine is also vindicating the turntable as a jazz performance instrument; maybe the first really new one since Adolphe Sax invented his little toy. Other elements are more traditional, like Pierre’s full lyrical guitar solos, which would fit in nicely anywhere from Fletcher Henderson’s band to the Skatalites.
“After ten years of working with conventional jazz forms, I wanted to reflect the music of my generation, which is jazz for dancing. You could say I’m using scratching as a form of percussion – although it goes somewhere very different in terms of tuning and rhythm.”
Pine’s stage act owes a lot to his apprenticeship in reggae bands playing hard and sometimes rough audiences. He works us, smooths us into his backing singers, gets us dancing – then slams a wild free jazz solo at us while we’re still too charmed to worry. The act also owes a lot to older British traditions like music hall and panto. He tries to get us into a Mother Goose routine: “The band’s going away now … But they’re coming back … Oh, no they’re not…” The South African audience, used to more conformist models of participation, dutifully echoes “Oh, no they’re not.”
“For me, coming to Africa is the end of a ten-year pilgrimage. If I’m bringing anything here at all, it’s the message that something new and different can be done. The sounds of our generation are a completely valid part of jazz.”
“You know,” says one photographer afterwards, “I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure about all that hip-hop stuff, for a jazz concert … “
“Wasn’t it a wonderful show?” says the tenor sax player from Johnny Mekoa’s Jazz Academy Band, at least ten years younger than the photographer. “He’s the best jazzman I’ve heard live.”
“Do you realise,” says bari sax player Vee Sabono, “that he actually got a South African audience singing in tune, in a three-part harmony?”
“What I’d like to share, is my belief in creation,” Pine maintains.