Jeremy Dowson : Venues in Cape Town
On paper, the Drum Caf certainly has a whole lot going for it. Established six months ago as a bar-cum-caf that provides a forum for percussion lessons and performances, the venue would seem to be riding the storm of the pre-millennial cultural zeitgeist – the one which dictates that live entertainment should be as participatory (the other buzzword is interactive), ritualistic, non-elitist and verbally challenged as possible.
This is all well and good, but I doubt whether the architects responsible for this year’s model of the global zeitgeist would have enjoyed themselves much had they dropped in to the Drum Caf on a recent wet and windy Wednesday night. Not unless they’d taken a lot of Prozac or something.
Having paid my R10 entrance fee, I was told that to hire a drum for the purpose of taking part in the evening’s drumming circle would cost a further R10. Needless to say, this is a tricky decision when you’re pretty vague as to what to expect for your bucks.
So I passed on the djembe hire and somewhat self-consciously headed for the bar, to the accompaniment of some 60 or so people banging away on their instruments while perched on sensible-looking chairs that brought back dodgy memories of comfort- challenged school music lessons.
Cheered up by the speedy purchase of a Savanna (mind you, what kind of happening place doesn’t have a queue at the bar?), I settled down to survey the scene properly. Yup, a whole bunch of white men and women of twentysomething upwards – even the odd out-and-out wrinkly – were doing their percussive thing in what might be called a fair semblance of unison, depending how many drinks you’d had at the time. Not that the rhythms were complicated; it was a bit like listening to a non-verbal form of the alphabet being recited, as in “A, B, C, C / D, E, F, F”.
Occasionally a trickier variation of the
beat would be led, and some drummers would catch on a whole lot quicker than others.
As my attention wandered, I noticed that many of the women looked like their role model was Diane Keaton in Reds. There were a lot of gypsy-style scarves, bangles, earrings, spectacles and baggy home-made jerseys. Then again, the same sartorial code could be discerned among the men – except they’d probably have been more likely to cite Richard Gere (sans gerbil) as their ultimate purchase from Icons-R-Us.
Facile comments about the wannabe-drummers’ dress sense aside, what struck me from the outset was how little visible fun the participants appeared to be having. Bent in brow-furrowed hyper-concentration over their skin-tight conduits to the cosmic pulse, these shamen and shawomyn of the New Age weren’t exactly Billy Cobham, Karen Carpenter or Amampondo – and perhaps the uniform lack of smiles was an indication that, deep down, most of these honky umlungus knew they had all the rhythmic intuition of a Steers Raveburger, minus the sauce.
As I watched and listened, by now bored out of my skull despite a second Savanna, I pondered on why a drum caf in lower Gardens, Cape Town which is hardly uncosmopolitan in its racial make-up, could be attended almost entirely by Caucasians.
My conclusion was that only middle class white South Africans of a certain kind would be silly enough to spend R20 on banging away for an hour or two in a fun- challenged atmosphere. Most sensible people would rather bang their fingers on a counter in a venue where at least there’s a pool table or two, not to mention a chance to engage in good old-fashioned verbal conversation.
Sure, the Drum Caf provides a service. But so do choir practice venues in Guguletu, and they don’t call themselves cafs and charge entrance fees when they rehearse. Nope, I’m not a likely regular – and my attempt to give the place a second chance was nipped in the bud when a Congolese percussion troupe led by someone called Young Makuba failed to appear.
As a musician friend put it when I later fled to The Magnet in search of a spot of good, clean depravity, what’s the difference between a visit from a drummer and a visit from a percussionist? Answer: One gives a few knocks on the door, the other never stops. Non-verbal diarrhoea is a sad affliction, to be sure.
The Drum Caf is situated at 32 Glynn St, Cape Town, tel (021) 461-1305.
To be fair, it was cold – and not everyone looked like a throwback from white hippie communes in the Seventies; there were indeed smatterings of cropped-hair ambient/trance-bunnies, Kloof Street librarians and other weirdos.