Nobody can sing My Way like Thandi Klaasen.
The occasion was Ezra Ngcukana’s memorial jam at Nikki’s last week. Klaasen has been perfecting her art since 1950s Sophiatown. Her look that night was sharp, not glam: tailored tweed jacket and newsboy cap. She took a song that can be the apotheosis of schlock (except, maybe, when Johnny Rotten sings it), grabbed it by the throat and, with raw power and emotion supported by impeccable phrasing, turned it into a masterpiece.
The performance was nothing extraordinary by Klaasen’s standards. But it brought home how limited the stereotypes are that the South African commercial music industry offers female jazz singers nowadays.
You can be an Afro-soul queen in the sub-Erykah Badu mould: styled by the latest Elle-approved South African label, adorned with ethnic beads and lipgloss so thickly luminous it almost crawls on its own. You can be an R&B diva in the sub-Beyoncé mould: same label, same lipgloss, bling instead of beads and Christmas-turkey quantities of leg and breast. You can be a club-music diva in the sub-Janelle Monae, sub-Grace Jones mould: ditto, ditto, ditto, but it’s all made from black PVC with a quiff.
Your songs must express the solipsistic discourse of heterosexual ‘lurve” or the Earth-mother world of a dumbed-down ubuntu without the politics. Nobody really expects you to improvise, but if you must, make sure it doesn’t take the track over five minutes and that it can be perfectly reproduced with the band at every performance. Raw and spontaneous aren’t on the agenda.
And neither, of course — despite the lavish use of the term in promotion — is jazz. Jazz songs don’t need words. But words, if present, are as much fair game as any other element for jazz improvisation: the essentially African art of telling infinitely varied collective stories from the same motifs.
Melanie Scholtz’s work treads a fine line: making just enough accommodations to stay marketable (she’ll sing covers at corporate gigs), but never so many that they compromise her identity as a jazz singer. She is the real thing.
Scholtz came from a musical family — her father played alto sax in a Seventies’ dance band — and studied opera first with the Eoan Group and later at the University of Cape Town, from which she graduated with distinction in 1997. In 2002 she was named Best Vocalist at the Old Mutual Jazz Awards. Other awards include Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz. She has taught in the UCT jazz department, in community projects and elsewhere and toured extensively. Scholtz has three albums to her name: 2002’s Zillion Miles and the more recent Connected and Standards.
Zillion Miles had its passages of sunny love song in the Norah Jones mould. But right from the start, Scholtz established herself as a writer of good originals that lent themselves to improvisation, song structures that didn’t conform obediently to the chorus-verse-chorus pattern and intelligent, sometimes challenging lyrics, such as the abuse song This Can’t Be Love.
Her voice is light and mellow and her jazz sensibility shows itself with the most impact in her phrasing and in the way she plays with the melodic lines. She called Zillion Miles an exploration of ‘what kind of artist was I and how did I want to use my voice? What did being African, and being a woman, mean for the kind of artist I aimed to be?” Connected pushes the songwriting further and although some of the lyrics veer towards the school of Hallmark (‘Like a melody unsung/without you I’m no one”), she can also exhibit a startlingly fresh feel for words (‘Travelling at the speed of life/not wearing a seatbelt”).
Scholtz has described Connected as ‘jazz-inspired and -influenced, rather than mainstream jazz”. Yet though the tracks may sometimes simply employ the idioms, her stage renditions of the same material move well beyond borrowed clothes. Performing live, she wears her own jazz coat very comfortably indeed.
Living in Cape Town pushes artists towards a club sensibility — the harsher edginess of Jo’burg tends to grow a conscious soul. Spending time in Europe — Scholtz’s life and musical partner is Norwegian guitarist Gorm Helfjord — exposes them to audiences who sit happily and quietly through 20-minute jazz numbers full of extended, demanding improvisation.
On stage it’s this side of Scholtz that comes to the fore. The songs are hers and she takes command of the band. She calls the solos and indulges in delicious, scattered conversations with her fellow players. Even Ella Fitzgerald was too often presented as merely an ornament to a male band-leader and band. Scholtz’s mastery of her stage and music subverts that stereotype, too.
The Standard Bank Joy of Jazz festival runs at various venues in Newtown, Johannesburg, until August 28. For more go to www.joyofjazz.co.za or see our special report at www.mg.co.za/joyofjazz