Gwen Ansell : In your ear
There’s probably now more jazz available on Gauteng radio than ever before. The community radio stations (Alex FM, Voice of Soweto) used to provide generous helpings – particularly of African jazz – until their managements went into advertiser-directed playlist mode and imported pop started squeezing it out. Some survive; but since the reception of these stations can be erratic, depending on where you live and which way the wind’s blowing, let’s concentrate here on broader transmission bands.
Kaya FM has a fair amount of African jazz in its general programming; unfortunately, you have to wade through huge quantities of viscous American soul sung by fat men in white suits and women in stiff wigs to find it.
Fortunately, Mpho Seboni’s show (3pm to 6pm on Sunday’s) provides welcome relief; the jazz is wall-to-wall and his own presentation is laid back. Seboni’s selections are sometimes a little unadventurous, but his enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, what he plays shines through. What the show needs, perhaps, is a little more prebroadcast planning, so that the tempo, mood and instrumental format can be built up and brought down, to avoid those long soporific plateaux of 3:4 time. Seboni’s style is absolutely right for Kaya’s target audience. He and Sibongile Khumalo, who features on Sunday’s from midday to 3pm, are the highlights of the week on the station.
In contrast, Paula Abrahams on Classic FM runs two weekend shows which are eclectic in the extreme: you might get Miles, Abdullah, Bob James and Ornette aired head to tail. But she manages those tricky transitions beautifully and like Seboni, her love for the music positively glows.
Nick Collis, who runs the weekly late-night jazz slot on Classic, offers different fare. He’s the only jazz DJ to air improvised and European jazz regularly (although not predictably: you might get a whole night of mainstream) and to explore the interface between jazz and modern serious music. If Collis has a fault, it’s that he sometimes provides only the barest details of the unusual cuts he plays.
No one could lay that accusation against the granddaddy of them all, Mesh Mapetla on Metro FM on Sunday mornings, Mapetla plods pedantically through every detail on the album sleeve – something which used to irritate the hell out of me until a friend pointed out that the fanatics who tape the show love those discographical minutiae. It still irritates me; only now I understand.
Since they canned Shado Twala, Mapetla’s show is easily the best thing on Metro. Like Seboni, he pays scant respect to transitions, cramming modern, mainstream and bebop in tight together – but he’s the only one of all the DJs I’ve named who’ll slip in something weird and unexpected just because he’s excited by it. Mapetla sometimes devotes his whole show to South African jazz, but you can also sometimes go weeks without hearing any; an odd anomaly.
What’s missing from all this? The shows are all essentially turntable-driven, when there are many other options for a music programme. Mapetla does offer occasional interviews with musicians, but these are essentially gentle, promotional events very much on the model of the older generation of jazz broadcasting la Don Albert. Unless you’re prepared to read it into the sub-text of tracks played, none of these shows tell you that there are debates, issues, trends and controversies in jazz; that it’s still an exciting music in development, both here and overseas. What’s needed are a few DJs who think of themselves primarily as journalists, not jocks.
Radio Metro on 96.4FM, Kaya FM on 95.9FM and Classic FM on 102.7FM in Gauteng