/ 11 September 1998

To the beat of a drum

Nicholas Dawes Live in Cape Town

Amampondo leader Dizu Plaatjies is one of the more popular teachers at the University of Cape Town’s College of Music, where he teaches African instruments and dance. The role is not one he sheds easily, and when “Madiba’s favourite band” played at the Drum Cafe in Gardens last Saturday, his educational vocation was as much in evidence as his dedication to laying down furious rhythms.

Instruments were explained, names translated and audience participation solicited. One might have expected this to rob the set of some of its momentum, but Plaatjies’s charisma, along with a stunningly forceful performance from Amampondo, ensured that the intensity never flagged.

The only real drawback to the cultural education emphasis was that it seemed to encourage the (numerous) tourists present in the belief that they were attending an ethnographic safari rather than a concert. Of course safaris, particularly those that feature attractive young dancers, entail the snapping of numerous flash photographs.

Amampondo formed in 1979, and since then have become one of the pre- eminent traditional music ensembles in the country. Their earliest performances tended to be a little heavy on percussion heroics with the result that their sound wasn’t as dynamic as it might have been, but the original group of male drum and marimba players has since been joined by six women who markedly expand its possibilities.

Three of them are traditional singers, and their voices fill out the harmonic palette a great deal. They are lead by the formidable Mantombi Matotiyana, who opened the show with a mesmerising performance on mrhubhe, (a bow string rubbed to produce a rich drone which undergirds whistling and singing).

Amampondo’s “traditional” tag, however, should not be taken to indicate that they simply reproduce traditional forms, and their three young dancers are perhaps the most visible sign of a willingness to tweak things a little. They not only dance (with most minute and occasional traces of Janet Jackson) but do a very creditable Xhosa version of Rockette- style sass behind the microphone on the more contemporary material.

Most impressive of the three is undoubtedly Fancy Galada, who moves without apparent difficulty from full- throated Miriam Makeba lament to deep blues rasp, pausing only to demonstrate a nifty line in scat. She managed to make even The Click Song – a rather gratuitous addition to the programme – sound fresh.

The inclusion of a tenor saxophone in the line-up could also be described as non-traditional, but it certainly cuts a deeper groove than a kudu horn, and on the extended jam that Molweni became, it seemed to make perfect sense. When members of Amampondo and African Brass play together as Intsholo, one often gets the impression that the drums and marimbas are there primarily to provide an air of exoticism to the western instruments, or alternatively that the brass players are there to make Amampondo sound more accessible to western ears.

The problem is that in the end neither is particularly well served. Rene Maclean’s well judged intervention on saxophone and flute avoided both of these traps. Rather than treating the huge Amampondo rhythm section as platform for solo pyrotechnics, Maclean and the band improvised an object lesson in the relationship between jazz and African musics which gave nothing away to either in musicianship.

Amampondo won an FNB Vita last year for Best Traditional Xhosa Performance. The recognition is surely welcome for an ensemble whose relatively low profile in South Africa belies the respect they continue to generate internationally. The category, however, is something of a musical ghetto, and despite their intense (and loudly professed) dedication to traditional forms, Amampondo make music that is quite untrammelled by more restrictive notions of tradition.

Their collaboration with psychedelic trance outfit Juno Reactor is a particularly obvious case in point, but they hardly need help from a sequencer to make the argument. Their most recent recording, Drums for Tomorrow, on London label Melt 2000 (where, incidentally, they finally get the production standards they deserve) makes it absolutely clear that this not simply music for classrooms and safaris.

On the contrary, it is the sound of a rigorous and dynamic approach to a tradition that is conserved precisely to the extent that it admits innovation.