Well, now I know the sound of jazz in Cape Town. It’s the sound of people saying “Shh!” to each other. At least, that’s how it seemed at the beginning of the Yusef Lateef concert at the North Sea Jazz Festival. Five minutes into the start of the show, and rude people were shouting friendly messages across three rows to each other, or talking loudly to the person next to them. War was threatening to break out between those few who were there to listen to jazz and the overwhelming multitude who appeared to be there because they wanted a light Kenny G soundtrack to go with the gurgling noises emanating from their beer-filled bellies.
The festival’s “intimate” venue, Rosies, is appalling under the best of circumstances. Music from the large band at the outside venue bleeds through from the right-hand entrance, and the screeching noise of the crowd outside the left-hand entrance surges and ebbs like traffic. And Lateef isn’t exactly loud, since he’s prone to quiet keyboard noodling, gentle chanted lyrics and an accompaniment of soft percussion.Before the performance started, the MC asked people not to talk during the performance, and to switch off cellphones. Ha. Phones rang continously. And people answered them. Five minutes into Lateef’s first number, and people started streaming out. What were they doing there in the first place? What were they expecting? George Benson? The show is only 45 minutes long, can’t they just sit still?Every time someone left, the music would blare in from outside. It was impossible to hear Lateef, and the entire experience was excruciating. At one point, the fat bitch next to me turned to me and said “Anything goes!” She mistook my dumbfounded look for deafness, so she obligingly repeated it loudly. “ANYTHING GOES! Piano, saxophone, ANYTHING GOES.” Yes, he’s a multi-instrumentalist, you cretin.
I went back the next night for the great Archie Shepp. It feels like I’ve been waiting my whole life to see Shepp, so I had to go, and I guessed that the organisers would have learned from the previous night’s debacle. Nope. It was worse than ever, because now the security idiots were letting people inside to replace the ones leaving, so you had a constant stream of noise and people drowning out Shepp.The security idiots did not even have the wit to let people in only between numbers. It got so bad that members of the audience who actually wanted to hear Shepp were getting up and going over to the security people to complain. It didn’t help, until eventually an irate jazz lover ran over to them and started screaming violently, and threatening to attack them. At that point, the audience started chanting “Close the fucking door!” Quite what Shepp made of this, I don’t know.Whoever the organisers are who were responsible for training the morons who handled access and security — you’re fucking useless.
Perhaps I’m being too kind: may you die and rot in jazz hell, condemned to listen to Andreas Vollenweider’s shitty harp for all eternity. Should I insert some more objective reporting in at this point? No, I don’t think so. What was the music like, you want to know? Well, so would I. Lateef and Shepp struggled manfully through their performances, but their hearts weren’t in it, and nobody could hear them anyway. I’ll have to wait another lifetime to hear Shepp, because I can’t imagine he’ll come anywhere near South Africa ever again. And I certainly will never go back to the North Sea Jazz Festival.