/ 1 April 2010

The instrumentalist arrives

The Instrumentalist Arrives

Jazz aficionado Gwen Ansell reports on the Cape Town International Jazz Festival’s headline attractions and gives the lowdown on the best the high-profile music event has to offer fans

It could be a scene from a movie. It’s 1950s Philadelphia. In an African-American neighbourhood salon beauticians move purposefully around, painting nails and clamping clients under space-helmet dryers while, at the back, a pack of talented teenagers belt out R&B around a piano.

They’ll probably make that movie someday, because holding it together on keyboard was the young McCoy Tyner. Now an — albeit wholly unassuming — jazz megastar, 72-year-old Tyner will play the Cape Town International Jazz Festival over the Easter weekend.

Tyner’s mother owned the salon. “She had a couple of clients who had pianos and, when she took me with her on house calls, I noticed how she loved that sound. That made me pay attention. I was already getting dance classes and when she asked if I’d like to learn singing or maybe piano, I thought: Why not take a shot at piano? Later on she bought a piano and installed it in the beauty shop. We had this little R&B band jamming right there.”

Having played the Luanda Jazz Festival last year, he’s looking forward to coming further south, but is reluctant to predict what we’ll hear: “Tell people I’ll surprise them. Although,” he says, “since I’m in Africa, I guess I have to play African Village.”

Tyner has a huge repertoire to choose from. His albums now total close to 80 and that’s not counting the 1960s Blue Note output when he was billed as “etc” because he was contracted to Impulse. But for most South African fans, their introduction came from his work with saxophonist John Coltrane’s classic quartet: Trane, Tyner, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums.

Tyner calls that experience “a family affair”. That echoes Elvin Jones’s comment that during the period — “John and I became kin” — but also underlines how tight-knit the Philly jazz scene of the 1960s was. Tyner’s brother-in-law, Steve Davis, sometimes played bass for the group; the Powell brothers, Bud and Ritchie, were neighbours; down the road was rehearsal and hang-out space Rittenhouse Hall.

“John knew me in my late teens, because I played in the band of one of his friends. When John finally left Miles Davis — because, you know, he’d leave and then Miles would say ‘Won’t you just come back?’ and he’d return for a while — he asked me: ‘Wouldn’t you like to work with me?’ I loved his playing, so I said: ‘Sure!’ Then he brought in Elvin Jones, who became like my big bro’. I was still very young and Elvin told me: ‘If anybody bothers you, I’ll take care of it.’ Elvin was one of the most humble players I’ve ever worked with. He really respected the piano — he’d bring the volume right down to make space for a solo.”

Tyner stayed with the band for five years and Jones wasn’t the only one who respected the piano. Coltrane praised both his sound and his “exceptionally well-developed sense of form, both as a soloist and an accompanist. Invariably in our group he will take a tune and build his own structure for it.”

‘A whole lot of noise’
“I was just a kid,” says Tyner. “What I liked about the quartet was that John would pick up songs that the average person knew and liked. But then I’d play a vamp and we’d completely change the form. He was a great teacher. He listened to everything and gave us all opportunities to improvise and explore anywhere your imagination took you.”

Tyner left the group when Coltrane’s music took more experimental directions after the mid-1960s and has told other interviewers he “just wasn’t feeling it: all I could hear was a whole lot of noise”. But that doesn’t mean he has no taste for experiment. He’s explored a dazzling range of instruments — flute, percussion, harpsichord, dulcimer and Japanese koto among them — and formats since then.

His work as both soloist and big-band leader are, for him, two sides of the same coin. “In the piano you have an orchestra at your fingertips. The lower tones give you the tubas and trombones, the mid-tones the saxophones, the high sounds the flutes and clarinets. And when I’m working with a big band, why, then it’s like a great, gigantic piano. You can isolate sections of the band and use them as you would certain registers on the piano.”

But accessibility and “people walking out feeling good” have always been as important to him as form and technical brilliance. His playing is so lyrical and melodic that its complexity could pass unnoticed. He has talked of being drawn to the unusual intervals he hears in the music of Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, and explained to critic Ben Sidran: “My melodies are usually very simple. But I think it’s the harmonic movement that makes it interesting — you know, what’s underneath.” And his regular-guy persona happily confesses during our interview that: “We’re watching a baseball game right now”, before conceding that, underneath, his spare time also involves quite a lot of listening to “Beethoven, Bach, music like that”.

There’s no contradiction. Tyner has said he sees all music — and indeed, all art forms — as interconnected. His interest in African sounds was triggered at dance class: “This conga player, Saka Quaye, introduced us to African rhythms. I found them fascinating. I experienced Angola and now I’m thrilled to be coming to South Africa to hear music that I’ve mainly heard before on recordings and TV. African traditional music will always hold its essential form — but jazz is also an African music. It grew out of that experience.”

The Best of the Rest
Like most South African jazz festivals, Cape Town hosts every other genre too, from the edgy nu-rock of the BLK JKS to the kwaito revivalism of TKZee and the Icelandic nostalgia-fest that is Mezzoforte. Here are some names for the don’t-miss list.

Voices
Rachelle Ferrell has a range high enough to break glass and deep enough to plumb oceans. It’s not just vocal acrobatics; she sounds gorgeous too. Melanie Scholtz improvises with maturity beyond her years, and if you only know Zolani Mahola from Freshlyground, her session with Mikanik and saxman Buddy Wells will shock with how much you’ve been missing in that context. In a year thinner than usual for acts from the rest of Africa, the socially aware songs of Angolan semba star Paulo Flores will move you even if you don’t speak Portuguese.

Ivories
With McCoy Tyner topping the bill, it’s the year of pianists. Cape veterans Mervyn Afrika, Tete Mbambisa and Sammy Hartman each have something unique to say that you won’t hear from the Americans. But for a taste of New York piano that’s informed by history and highly articulate about today, check Jason Moran, not only with Charles Lloyd, but also in his own group, Bandwagon. Mark Fransman brings Akoustic Knot, a band new to the festival, with Scandinavian guests, and young lion Bokani Dyer is by turns thoughtful, edgy and highly danceable. If you must listen to fusion, Jeff Lorber does it with more class than most.

Brass
Okay, so a harmonica is not quite brass, but Toots Thielemans plays with such perfect mastery that he has to top any even vaguely relevant list. Saxophonist Charles Lloyd has an adventurous imagination that belies his years — and, probably, his planet — whereas Robbie Jansen and Ezra Ngcukana can still blow up a storm tougher than the Cape Doctor.

Strings and skins
Violinist Regina Carter can swing harder than almost anyone since Stuff Smith, as well as playing luscious lyrical ballads. Let’s hope she does both. Drummer Kesivan Naidoo mixes hard-driving straight-ahead jazz with tricky world rhythms and radical lyrics in The Lights. And although guitarist George Benson will please the fans with his Greatest Hits concert, you may hear his true jazz imagination far more clearly in his big-band gig covering the songs of Nat King Cole.