‘I’m beginning to see things beyond things,” murmured Wayne Shorter. ‘The disconnection is the connection.” Cosmic musings from a Zen jazz master, riffing off a simple ‘welcome home!’ salutation at a press conference? Maybe. But the paradox in his proverb also tapped deep into the core of the 12th Cape Town International Jazz Festival experience.
Five stages. 40 artists. 34 000 fans. And a cornucopia of ‘jazz’ ranging from smooth, straight-ahead and old school standards to retro R&B funk, African soul, electro-house, hip-hop and beyond. It’s easy to feel alienated trying to navigate such a seemingly disjointed assemblage of genres. Even more tempting to want to get lost looking for an answer to ‘what is(n’t) jazz?’
But as Shorter’s mantra suggested, the answer lay somewhere in between. In following the sonic slippages between Tumi & the Volume’s poetic hip-hop and Tortured Soul’s kinetic house hip shakers.
Between Don Laka’s ‘kwaai’ jazz township breezes and The Flames’ vintage psychedelic rock. Or Simphiwe Dana’s burnished Afro-soul blues and Dave Koz’s polished smooth jazz saxophone soars.
Form and function
As drummer Cindy Blackman put it: ‘Jazz is not finite. You’re always looking, searching, honing. If not, you’re bored.” Her quartet tribute to pioneering drummer Tony Williams was precisely such a search. For Blackman the drum kit is more than just a time-keeper. It’s a time machine, a polymorphous funk jazz rollercoaster transporting you from Art Blakey’s hard bop and Weather Report’s jazz rock to more speculative free form fusions. ‘I try and keep my expectations of what the music should be – apart from a level of excellence – to a limit. If the music wants to breathe and take on a different form, I’d like to let it.”
Grammy-winning bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding was in synch. Her Chamber Music Society’s mission? To free classical music from it’s canonical cul-de-sac. Before a jam packed Rosies crowd she blended polyglot scats and deconstructed bass improvisations with Latin rhythms, cello, viola and violin textures into a playfully seductive Broadway jazz fairytale.
Substance and style
Spalding’s naive nymphet found a counterpoint in Christian Scott’s angry young man. It’s easy to see why Scott’s a Downbeat cover boy. The Mohawk. The dashiki. The custom-made bell-curved trumpet straight out of Dizzy. It’s a style thing. He’s a 21st century Miles. Unlike the conveyor belt of GQ jazz guys sporting their Armani suits and their endless reanimations of hard-bop, Scott has his own thing going on. He’s restless. He’s New Orleans. For Scott, jazz is a music that is always political.
His revolution in multi-part harmony on the Moses Molelekwa stage was exactly what the late night faithful needed. Molelekwa was not just the physical space, but also his headspace. ‘I’ve seen what’s happening in the townships isn’t what’s happening at the beaches,” he said by way of debuting his new future-bop ballad ‘Tembisa”.
The Reconnection
Where Scott’s politics swung in the street, Wayne Shorter’s travelled the space ways. At 77 he is no longer the hard blowing ideologue who fuelled the fire in Miles Davis’ classic quintet and Weather Report. He’s a Zen jazz master. ‘My challenge is to play music that speaks about eternity,” he said. Challenging the cliché of the superstar soloist, he was more than content to lay out and let his band of young guns take centre stage. They were all too happy to man the ship. As pianist Danilio Perez put it: ‘How can you say no to someone who’s invited you on a free ride to the moon? That’s what Wayne did for us.” The rapturous standing ovation Shorter’s quartet received spoke volumes.
The pulse of the festival was felt in this restless interplay between the individual ego and the collective impulse. Shorter again: ‘If you want to speak, make sure you play in a way that takes people out of the sedation of continually being conditioned by false platitudes.”
Ultimately, the Cape Town International Jazz Festival is one space where South Africans are able to reconnect with a belief in freedom, a creative consciousness that insists that music — in all its manifestations — can still save the world. As Blackman summed up: ‘Jazz is a music that’s part heart, part intellect, part street. It’s how we live everyday.”