If Kesivan Naidoo’s drum kit could talk, it would probably out itself as a masochist.
The 2009 Standard Bank Young Jazz Artist plays the drums with the hyperactivity of a seven-year-old who’s been feeding his Ritalin to the cat and with the ferocity of a heavyweight boxer.
But it is not all driving groove. Naidoo also exhibits a nimble touch and an explorative penchant for improvisation that must leave the skins on his drums tingling with the pleasure of pain.
At Durban’s Bat Centre recently, following a gig by his current band, Babu, it’s apparent that Naidoo’s energy and enthusiasm aren’t just confined to the stage. He bounds from topic to topic like a puppy dog. Our conversation, ultimately, gets completed on the phone.
First up, Naidoo is “a little disappointed” that the Mail & Guardian gave Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan a high mark in its year-end ministerial report card.
“It’s not that the department is doing a bad job, but it’s very clear that it could be doing a much, much better job — especially if they want to be sincere about this ‘nation-building’ project that we keep hearing about and where arts is vital,” says Naidoo.
He adds that the department needs to re-envisage its role and start thinking from the perspective of artists and musos rather than as bureaucrats: “The website is so coded you’re not sure what people are doing,” he says.
Naidoo can see himself as a future arts minister and believes music education (in schools and for adults) and creating a network of performance platforms (“random, small venues, but with proper facilities and in-house engineers”) is vital if the music industry is ever going to be sustainable.
Musical education is a passion of the East London-born drummer who chose his high school, Hudson Park, because it had a drum kit.
“I would never have been a musician if I’d gone to the high school in my [Indians-only] neighbourhood,” he says. Being one of the first blacks at a former whites-only school meant Naidoo navigated the country’s changes and insecurities on a very personal level and says playing music “made it easier to be accepted”.
In keeping with the pedagogical bent, Babu this week completed a countrywide, eight-city workshop and performance tour through universities such as Rhodes and Wits.
According to Naidoo, the band approached both the National Arts Council (NAC) and Mmino (a Norwegian-South African cultural exchange initiative) to share funding for the tour. They are still waiting for a response — even a refusal letter — from the NAC, but “the people at Mmino were so passionate about the project that they eventually decided to fund all of it. It’s absurd that a Norwegian organisation has to pay for a South African band to tour in its own country,” he said.
The 29-year-old Naidoo has started his own company, Silent Revolution Productions, in an attempt to expose more people to the arts, especially music. One of its first initiatives was buying into the Independent Armchair Theatre in Cape Town’s Observatory and to start “running it from an artist’s perspective”.
The Armchair has a nostalgic resonance with this correspondent: it was where I caught Naidoo for the first time almost 10 years ago.
Then he was part of the inimitable Tribe, a still functioning quartet including previous Standard Bank Young Jazz Artist winner Mark Fransman (piano), saxophonist Buddy Wells and Charles Lazar on double bass. They were the first unsigned and unrecorded jazz band to perform at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague.
Naidoo hooked up with them after moving to Cape Town to study music (he has completed a bachelor of music degree with honours in performance and composition) at the University of Cape Town.
It was at the [National Arts] festival in Grahamstown that Naidoo was asked to fill in for an absent drummer in the Standard Bank National Youth Orchestra. After the gig UCT music department head Mike Campbell asked Naidoo if he wanted to study at the university. “At the time I thought ‘why not’, and a few weeks later I got a letter saying I was accepted,” he says, laughing.
But Naidoo, who was playing in the legendary Hotep Galeta’s trio at the time, was unsure if he could live on a musician’s erratic salary: “After my last matric exam I was like ‘Jasis, do I do this thing or what?’ and Hotep convinced me. I’ve never had to do any other sort of job since,” he says.
Since those early days Naidoo has appeared in several different musical configurations, including funk band Golliwog and jazz-electronica outfit Closet Snare.
Later, on the telephone, Naidoo, who has also recorded with the likes of Miriam Makeba and Bheki Mseleku, says he is “fundamentally into improvisational music”.
Naidoo says his family were “sports fanatics” and not musically inclined: “I suppose all the family members had a turn at playing the piano at about six years old, but I’m the first musician in the family,” he says of a love affair that started when he was 10 years old.
He remembers bursting into the home of his aunt’s boyfriend, the late drummer Reece Timothy, and hearing him playing to an old pop song. “It was a moment I will never forget,” he says.
Naidoo “started bugging” Timothy for lessons and initially played “funky jazz beats, which were easy and accessible”. At the age of 12 he discovered Miles Davis and John Coltrane — the latter, especially, a constant reference point in our conversations: “It had this appeal because the drummer’s groove wasn’t obvious — it was more implied.”
By the age of 15 Naidoo was playing professionally in the Alan Webster quintet and taking lessons from one of his heroes, the late Lulu Gonstana — this while playing with the school band on European tours and being selected for the Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Orchestra in 1995, 1999 and 2000.
In 1999 he won a South African Music Rights Organisation (Samro) scholarship award and decided to study in India.
He spent almost a year and a half in Kolkata studying the tabla under guru Sanjay Bandopadhyay. “The tabla is a demanding instrument. I was there more to learn about Indian classical music systems — from both the north and the south — to understand how their improvisation works and see how I could use it as a drummer,” he says.
Naidoo says his Indian sojourn gave him a deeper understanding of composition, rhythm, improvisation and the development of moods in Indian ragas.
Babu’s debut album, Up Roots, was recently nominated for two South African Music Awards in the best instrumental and best newcomer categories. The band includes Reza Khota on electric and nylon-string guitar, bassist Shane Cooper, Ronan Skillen on tabla, extended percussion and didgeridoo.
Naidoo does not sound trite when he says his Indian experience also had a profound spiritual effect on him. “You’re always saddled with this thing, in South Africa, of being ‘Indian’. Living in India confirmed for me how Indian I am not and how South African I am. It also helped me realise why I do what I do,” he says.
Kesivan Naidoo will perform with McCoy Mrubata and friends (including Marcus Wyatt and Herbie Tsoaeli) at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival at the CTICC on April 3 and 4. On April 5 he performs at the Nassau in Cape Town with legendary American saxophonist David Liebman