She’s recently been bitten by a spider or perhaps stung by a scorpion, been pumped with antibiotics, and survived a strange swollen-up feeling that’s very unlike her. After this skrik Estelle Kokot is ready to roll and do what she does best in her public life: one-woman shows at the piano, recreating a spontaneous event labelled “the London sessions unplugged,” while adding some new material and reworked choice standards.
Kokot lived in London and toured internationally for seven years. She arrived back a year ago, but opted for a retreat in the Magaliesberg before finding her way back to Jo’burg only many months later.
Should her name sound familiar, jog your memory. She’s the ex-lead singer of Rush Hour, a band that has seen no equal. Going solo is a choice and it’s also no coincidence that she’s been chosen to launch SABC3’s jazz series, Bejazzled, and that she fitted so perfectly in its premiere broadcast last month under the banner of “Past Masters and Present Mistresses.”
Also at Aardklop she had more than a test-run in performing for our changed audience demographics. They loved her, especially for bringing such a heart-rending dynamic
to her setting of Ingrid Jonker’s Die Kind (The Child), eulogised by Nelson Mandela during a parliamentary opening in the mid-1990s.
The redefinition of her art will sound this coming week in the Off-Broadway theatre restaurant in Norwood, Johannesburg, where she’ll be presenting a very special two-set programme between November 28 and December 2.
The rest of the country won’t need to wait long. On December 16 she’ll join Don Laka and Hilton Schilder at the North West Cultural Calabash Festival at the Mmabane Park Cultural Centre in Mmbatho. An extensive Cape Town tour will follow in late December and January. One fixed date is in Darling on January 26, where she’ll be headlining a jazz festival.
All these are in a sense also curtain raisers for her big project: creating material for her 2002/03 season in London and New York.
Since her return, Kokot says: “I became much more aware of who I am, where I come from and what South Africa’s situation is — the country’s psyche. When you live in South Africa, you view history very encapsulated. When you go out there, you realise you’re part of a total new world.
“I find a lot of parallels between Jo’burg and New York. I love that. My two favourite cities in the world: the vibrancy, the edge. When I pass now the Mimosa hotel in Hillbrow, its like little Nigeria waiting to explode. I find that very exciting … “
Asked why she left London, Kokot says: “I’ve always exercised freedom of choice. When I bumped into an artist/poet friend of mine at the Market, he asked me: ‘Why do you always leave on the crest of a wave?’ He said a beautiful thing to me, something like ‘… you’ve got to feel the thorns and taste the honey. That’s what life’s about’. And I agree.”