GWEN ANSELL talks to a new generation of jazz composers involved in Our Music Our Voices at the breakthrough 1997 Windybrow Arts Festival
IN a tiny, sweaty rehearsal room at the Windybrow Theatre an improbably large band of musicians pounds its way through McCoy Mrubata’s Sangoma Blues. In the middle, in the few square feet between keyboards, drums and trumpet, a breakdancer finds just enough space to do the splits.Forty-eight hours before opening and the cast of Our Music, Our Voices is polishing final arrangements and staging.
Our Music Our Voices is an idea the Windybrow Festival took to four composers; reedman Mrubata, trumpeter Prince Lengoasa, guitarist Bheki Khoza and singer Suthukazi Arosi. Says director Walter Chakela: “We felt there wasn’t enough focus on the jazz composers of the post-exile generation. They tend to be showcased just as musicians, when in fact they’re fine composers whose work is fresh and at the same time deeply informed by the legacy of their predecessors.”
But there’s more. Talking to the four about their compositions (the programme includes five from each) is a conversation with a sharply contemporary edge, about what’s happening to culture in the “New South African what-what”.
Lengoasa sums it up: “We have to reflect on where we’ve come from to know where we’re going.”
“The orchestration, the chords of Prince’s songs,” says Mrubata, “the movement of the harmonies all have a real spiritual feel. They remind me of when I was a kid – I was an altar boy at the church of the Order of Ethiopia.”
The others are surprised by this memory and it carries the discussion off on a spiritual track. For Arosi, “It’s time to use music to teach the youth about who we are as human beings, so that our identity isn’t lost in multiculturalism.” Mrubata agrees: “My kids go to an English-language creche and I love the way their English is developing – but at home 80% of the time we speak Xhosa because I don’t want them to go too far away from their culture.”
For Khoza, those cultural roots are one of the strengths of Arosi’s songs: “There’s an appealing modern beat, but the singing over the top keeps the influence of the traditionalists.” And for him, too, that’s an important combination. “It’s hard to explain, but everything else in my music is built on a foundation of Zulu guitar. I learnt so early that I can’t even pinpoint when, or when I started thinking about myself as a musician. It was just natural. When I started playing pop chords, my grandmother would be there, questioning, telling me `that thing doesn’t answer: play it this way.’ “
Although he’ll feature a few straightahead numbers, Khoza’s set will focus on songs rather than instrumentals, a side of the guitarist that’s less well-known. “They’re songs,” says Lengoasa, “very much about what’s happening now – for example, there’s one about how drugs are damaging the music scene, disabling even some well-known players.”
That’s a concern for everyone round the table; the cocaine epidemic, they say, is starting to claim serious victims, and Mrubata, too, has an anti-drug lyric in his set. He’ll also be showcasing material from his upcoming album; out in mid-year and titled Tears of Joy – “for the emotions of at last being able to record what I like”.
Round the table it’s agreed Mrubata’s music represents a special kind of South African fusion “somewhere between marabi and The Crusaders”. Now there are new elements as well, like the song Fula (co-written with bassist Andre Abrahamse) which incorporates West African beats to reflect what Mrubata calls “the new atmosphere of urbanisation.”
And it’s that heady new scent of the city – drugs, cultural and spiritual questing, the jostling of old and new and a melting-pot of languages and rhythms – which not just Our Music, Our Voices but the whole Windybrow Festival has caught this year. As Lengoasa says: “We might make you get up and jive. Or we might send you away rethinking your whole life. Or both.”