Cape Town music picks: August 27 2010

Cape Town offers up an eclectic menu this weekend, from traditional to cutting edge.

• ‘People call it ‘Cape Malay Choir’ or ‘Cape Coon Carnival’, but there’s something wrong with that name. Our music is not just carnival – it is the music we play every day, man!” Legendary Goema guitarist and composer Mac McKenzie is sick and tired of the rhythmic groove at the heart of Mother City’s indigenous musical culture being marginalised into ‘Coon carnival” marketing clichés by unscrupulous promoters and record companies. ‘We’re saying this is Cape Town’s music. I call it Goema: it’s a primeval beat [that] goes into every heart and soul. Goema is the way we walk and dance, the way we talk and interact with each other. Put simply, it is a language.”

  It’s this vital musical vernacular that McKenzie has been conversing in for the past twenty five years. Back in 1986 it was the Goema groove that glued together the brash punk folk-jazz riffs of The Genuines’ seminal resistance anthem “Struggle. In 2003 it was the Goema that coloured the cool Cape jazz hues of his Goema Captains of Cape Town album, Healing Destination. And now, Mac’s back, guiding the Goema into a Classical conversation with his 25-piece Cape Town Goema Orchestra featuring strings, brass, mouth-bows, marimbas and mbiras at the world premiere of his composition “Goema Symphony No. 1”. SABC Studios Auditorium, 209 Beach Road, Sea Point, Cape Town, August 28, 8pm. Entrance is R100. Booking recommended. Tel: 079 726 3582.

• Can live performance recreate the intimate experience of listening to music at home alone on your headphones? ‘Silent Gigs in Unconventional Spaces” is Tonik’s enticing answer. Jann Krynauw (piano, Fender Rhodes, keyboards, live sampling), Ronan Skillen (tabla, percussion, didgeridoo, hybrid drums) and Marcii Goosen (motion graphics, VJ design) have created an integrated audio-visual experience that offers audiences a rare opportunity to tune into subtle chord shifts and frequencies often lost in the conventional live performance space. By hooking each individual audience member up with a pair of professional, audiophile headphones with personal volume controls, listeners are literally able to control their own sound. It’s an apt way to experience alternately narrative, illustrative and abstract soundscapes off Tonik’s Sama-winning CD, Visitor’s Book, which fuse Krynauw’s complex chord changes, Skillen’s unusual rhythms and time signatures with real time sampled, looped and layered improvisational textures into a rich and uplifting auditory and visual experience: a “Tonik”, indeed.Oude Bank Bakkerij, Shop 5 Oude Bank Building (Old Boland Bank), Church Street, Stellenbosch, August 28 and 29, shows at 7.30pm and 3pm respectively. Entrance is R100 and R150 (including lunch) respectively. Booking is essential as seating is limited. Tel: 021 883 2187. Email: [email protected]. Website: www.tonikcollective.com