It’s been proven true again. It is possible to bring Johannesburg’s notorious, downtown Newtown area back to life — as long as it’s night-time, and as long as there is a party.
Last weekend saw a blast of sound in several interconnected venues — the Market Theatre; the new Bassline (all neon lights on the outside and wide spaces on the inside — alas, for the sweaty, body-pressing days of its original Melville incarnation); the Horror Café; Niki’s Oasis. Plus a block-long marquee in the middle of Mary Fitzgerald Square that must have been three stories high and appeared to seat thousands, staring down at some of the world’s most famous guitar playing oldies and bass-thumping newies.
The Standard Bank Joy of Jazz Festival (it had a longer title than that, but there isn’t space for it in this kind of column) got Jo’burg out of its slums and suburban bungalows in a show of racial and gender harmony that was something to see. The universe itself seemed to be smiling down at this seething South African wonder by producing at least 20 extra moons in the night-time sky over the city.
Closer inspection showed them to be huge, illuminated white balloons moored to the fantastical marquee, each moon-balloon with the sponsor’s logo modestly printed on the side. Which proved something else: money can buy you anything, even a new galaxy, if you want. There was boerewors smoke in the streets and hardly any fighting.
I found myself flitting in and out of venues, sampling a bit of this and a bit of that, sometimes impressed, sometimes indifferent, most times wondering what jazz really is these days — especially since Miles Davis, the diva of divas, had declared it dead in the late 1960s. (God, in turn, struck him dead in 1991 — I guess just to prove a point.)
From Dianne Reeves to Mzwakhe Mbuli, almost anything seemed to go as jazz.
On a tip-off, I sat through much of the first evening in a tight red seat at the Market Theatre. Everett Greene, tall and white-haired, was the rumbling voice of jazz as it used to be. Our very own Zamajobe followed him with a beautiful, delicate voice and superb presence — and a low-cut green dress that had some of the younger members of the audience sitting forward in their seats to see if she was going to do a Janet Jackson bosom tumbler, which she is too much of a lady to even think of allowing to happen.
And then came Rachelle Ferrell. As far as I am concerned (as we say in isiXhosa) everything stopped dead in its tracks. It didn’t matter what you called the music — it was in a category of its own. And so was she.
She came on with a wide-mouthed smile and an atomic cloud puff of black hair on top of her head, her fist raised in the old black-power salute as the audience applauded her entrance. She gave thanks to the gods of all religions for allowing us all to be there. And then the music kicked in (a great backing band, sensitive, masterful, modest, tuned in to her every intonation).
Ferrell was dancing jerkily around the stage on her spindly legs — something like Mick Jagger or Ian Dury, if either of them had a sense of rhythm. No fancy kicks or Jacksonite choreography — just whatever moved her to move at a particular time, in a particular way.
Then came the voice — a voice, as the lady in front of me said, that can stretch like an elastic band — elastic like her gamine face, which distorts incredibly to produce the desired sound.
She had been introduced as a singer who sings about ‘life after love” — all those old clichés. I can’t say that I registered much about what she had to say on the subject, because I was transfixed by the sheer musicality of it all. Someone else had said before the show that she was ‘well-trained”. Well, the hell with that. She certainly is, but to leave it at that is one huge put-down. If training was everything, we’d all be doing it.
I slipped back in the following night and sat closer to the stage to see if my eyes and ears had really seen what they thought they had heard. She seemed to sense my intense, respectful curiosity, because she favoured my side of the stage, her hair out in an unruly burst of loose Afro this time, the narrow, black-framed spectacles perched on her nose like she didn’t care if you thought she was a nerd or not. She pulled that wide mouth into all manner of unladylike contortions and produced a sound like several different instruments — but still that elastic, superhuman voice.
In the middle of the set she did a ‘drum duet” with the drummer she swore she had picked up at Atlanta airport a few days before. It turned out the story was true — her regular drummer couldn’t make it, and this man had been called in as a substitute.
Excuse me? A drum duet (Buddy Rich and Max Roach?), her with her bottomless lungs and soaring voice box, and him with his sticks, the skins and the cymbals, chasing each other through complex drum patterns and bringing it all to a climax just when they knew they should — a pick-up at an airport and six hours’ rehearsal in Jo’burg the night before the show?
It was 2am in the morning before she quit. The rest of the precinct was in darkness, apart from those extra-terrestrial moons hanging over the square. Rachelle Ferrell and her band, all relaxed humility, wandered out of the theatre and headed for their hotel. I tried to tell her how amazing her music had been. She clasped her hands in a namaste and told me it had all been there already, in that place, in that space, before the show began.