When asked what jazz was, iconoclastic pianist and composer Thelonius Monk simply shrugged and said: “You’re just supposed to know it when you hear it.”
It’s a savvy take on an idiom that iconic jazz trumpeter “Bra” Hugh Masekela was obviously in tune with when he recently declared that his mission was still to “desegregate South African audiences from generic musical pigeonholing”. And it’s precisely its own desegregation drive that makes the seventh Cape Town International Jazz Festival — hosted at the Cape Town International Convention Centre next weekend — such an engaging prospect.
A cursory glance through the festival programme reveals a bewildering blend of diaspora-filtered fusions from Africa, Cuba and the Caribbean joining hands with swinging American standards, smooth contemporary cruises, forgotten home-grown hip-hop frequencies, Afro-pop and experimental acid soul joints — all billed under that elusive “jazz” banner. Sure, there will always be the inevitable cynics out there who critique the jazz credentials of a cosmopolitan house combo such as Louie Vega’s Elements of Life or hmm, okay, what exactly is an ageing Latino flamenco pop singer-songwriter like Jose Feliciano doing playing at a jazz festival?
Well, what makes this festival worthy of its billing as “Africa’s Grandest Gathering” is that it avoids any attempt to canonise jazz as some kind of 20th-century classical music preaching to an elite audience of converts who are “in the know”. Boasting an even spread of overseas and homegrown heroes alongside a choice chakalala of emerging artists, this is one jazz festival that not only eschews any snobbery, but reminds you that, in Cape Town, it’s about discovering what jazz means to you, “when you hear it”.
Maybe this starts by paying that extra R25 for a reserved seat at the Rosies stage and actually taking in some jazz. Listening to Terence Blanchard discover his trumpet flow in the global funk-rock brew that took Miles Davis’s music to the next level back in the 1970s. Tuning in to South African saxophone titans Winston Mankunku and Robbie Jansen as they guide their sextet on a journey deep into the heart of Cape Jazz. Discovering the improvisational strategies at play in American double-bass maestro Charlie Haden’s quartet. Hearing the call and response conversations of award-winning pianist Paul Hanmer’s Unofficial Language reunion with drummer Ian Herman and bassist Pete Sklair.
It’s also about shelving your preconceptions. With his lanky retro-bohemian, jazz-hipster styling saxophonist Rus Nerwich may look the South African equivalent of comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s sidekick Kramer, but when he starts to blow his horn on the Molelekwa stage, you’ll know there’s nothing slapstick about his klezmer-kissed translations of Jewish Holocaust hymns. You’ll know he’s speaking the same jazz dialect as a Sonny Rollins. Ditto Swedish songbird Viktoria Tolstoy. She might have the same surname as the Russian author of War and Peace, but her unvarnished vocal blend of folk and jazz still swings to the same universal language as our own Mama Afrika, Miriam Makeba.
It’s an evolving musical vernacular that drives Grammy-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Omar Sosa’s calling to shape jazz into a transnational hybrid through an expansive vocabulary of bebop, hypnotic Nigerian Yoruba chants, hip-hop and traditional Cuban salsa. It’s the same genre-desegregating flow that fuels Cameroonian sax supremo Manu Dibango and his Soul Makossa Gang’s blend of Bob Marley’s reggae and Fela Kuti’s liberation funk into a many-flavoured Afrobeat brew.
The new South African jazz generation is also making their move. South African Music Award-winning acts such as Nthando and Thandiswa Mazwai may be marketed as Afro-pop, but the real secret of their recent Sama successes is that they’re finally mixing kwaito’s cool with its potent township jazz and pop roots, forming a strikingly contemporary urban cocktail. Hot young Jo’burg-based multi-lingual movers ‘n shakers Kwani Experience are raising their genre-hopping game, embracing soul, drum’n’bass, acid jazz and whatever idiom takes their fancy to get their groove on.
Perhaps this is exactly where the real jazz festival experience takes root. When you take a pit stop in the DuoTone Gallery to peruse the jazz photography of Dr Peter Magubane, Fani Jason and Mike Mzileni, and a saxophone wail over a phat-as-funk bassline suddenly calls you on to the dancefloor. When you dive into the crowd at the Kippies stage, get sweaty alongside your brothers and sisters and free your mind by simply shaking your ass to master sax blaster Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse’s blistering township jive. When you cruise through the Delta blues with Dan Patlansky and his New Orleans All Star Blues Band or, hell, throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care with some party-starting hip-hop, courtesy of Dutch rappers Relax!
The invitation to step out of your comfort zone, drop your listening prejudices and get desegregating might sound a tad trite in a country already celebrating its 12th year of democracy. But, in a town that is as notoriously divided as the Mother City, a city where politics remains split along racial lines and where communities still struggle to overcome separate development legacies, any festival that offers Cape Town audiences a reprieve from the “township vs suburban” divide is pretty damn crucial.