Mark Fransman, Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for jazz, is one of the new breed of young artists showing that jazz can be serious and hip, cerebral yet cool. Dressed in black, with large round earrings, music-note tattoos and a distinctive hairstyle, Fransman is not your run-of-the-mill jazz muso.
This eschewing of conventions extends to his musical repertoire. One can hardly turn a page of this year’s National Arts Festival programme without finding Fransman involved in a project or two, a testament to his multi-instrumental prowess and depth as an artist.
He is part of An African Celebration, a collaboration of Young Artist Award winners including classical and jazz fusions; he is performing his own compositions with a string-quartet collaboration entitled Mark Fransman’s Suite; and his jazz band, Mark Fransman’s Strait & Narro, promise explorations into trip-hop and hip-hop, poetry, and funk with a dash of poetry.
This musical breadth can be attributed to his intense willingness to learn and grow. Fransman says that the festival is still a time of learning for him, even though he can now be considered a seasoned veteran with five festivals under his piano keys.
“As a jazz musician, the minute you stop learning you’re dead,” he says.
And so Fransman is looking forward to the Jazzfest’s late-night jams, where professionals and amateur musicians stretch their musical legs and just let rip. “Doing improv is like falling down a set of stairs,” he says. “You’re always just trying to survive. It’s the possibility of the unknown.”
Fransman honed his musical skills playing improv sessions all over Cape Town “until five in the morning” and identifies the jazz culture of the Mother City as a main inspiration in his music. “There are some young people doing some really intense, serious stuff in Cape Town, which you would think is beyond their years.”
As the winner of the Young Artist of the Year Award, Fransman has a different kind of spotlight on him this year. But he says that apart from the extra attention, the award has shown him that people are taking note of his work.
“As an artist you are always just trying to get to do your next thing and you don’t realise that people are actually watching you,” he says. “The award has given me the opportunity to travel. I recently went to Turkey. But it also gives me the opportunity to work with people I would not usually get to work with, for example the collaboration with the string quartet.”
For such an accomplished instrumentalist, Fransman is unusually passionate about infusing his work with a social message. “In Strait & Narro we incorporate poetry into the music, which allows it to be more of a platform for social commentary,” he says.
And even in instrumental composition, Fransman prefers to touch the audience emotionally rather than blow them away with technicality.
“The most valuable impact a musician can make on an audience is to be thought provoking.
“Instead of leaning back and being awed by the technical prowess of the musician, I want the audience to lean forward and engage with the composition, wondering what’s coming next. Otherwise what they see is just like a circus.
“Audiences in South Africa are very intelligent, so we should let them decide what the music represents.”
This article was first published in Cue, the National Arts Festival newspaper
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