The West is up to its earlobes in unwinnable wars; hemlines sweep the pavement or barely brush the pubis.
Streets, everywhere from London to Yemen, stink of tear gas and ring with protests against cuts and United States-backed tyranny. So maybe it’s not surprising that echoes of the Sixties and Seventies also dominated much of the musical agenda at last weekend’s Cape Town International Jazz Festival.
But they were echoes transformed: ‘Played in the key of the moment,” said trumpeter Prince Lengoasa later. Earth, Wind & Fire were the real blast from the past — the living representatives of an era when players breached the wall between jazz and rock, with startling results. They have heirs all over the world, including here, and it was the spirit of that era and bands like Spirits Rejoice that bassist Victor Masondo brought to his project Conversations, with Lengoasa, reedman Donvino Prins, pianist Mark Fransman and drummer Kevin Gibson.
Lengoasa talked of the legacy of funk in the set: ‘The sheer joy of doing this and feeling each other’s spirit as we play.” He describes more spirits hovering over the rehearsals: Allen Kwela, Moses Molelekwa and Winston Mankunku Ngozi. ‘It was Mankunku’s approach of building a new solo on a previous player’s phrase — I heard you; now I can say something new with this.”
Trumpeter Christian Scott’s latest album, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, also invokes the Sixties — partly inspired by legendary producer Rudy Van Gelder’s return from retirement for the album.
‘I realised he could give us that old sound in that room, so we could marry all kinds of things: Woody Guthrie, country music, the crisp power of Roy Haynes’s approach to drums,” he said. Scott, with pianist Lawrence Fields, bassist Kris Funn, guitarist Matthew Stevens and drummer Jamire Williams, played a blistering 90-minute set. It was packed with anger and beauty, from the screams and guns evoked by Scott’s new composition Danziger Bridge Massacre to the honeyed ballad Isadora.
‘A lot of our music is about trying to procure change,” Scott said. Although he’s regularly quoted attacking the conservatism of the jazz neoclassicists, fronted by Wynton Marsalis, he regretted that it is all that makes the papers. ‘What they don’t quote is that I believe it wasn’t a wholly negative thing. Jazz was in a bad state in the late Seventies and they regrounded the music in its history. It was really cool — they rewound the tape so we could start again. What’s negative is the denial that each musical generation will define itself with something new, and that is also jazz.”
Trumpeter Feya Faku’s wistful, contemplative quartet opened the festival and was rich with characteristic Eastern Cape sounds — galloping rhythms, harmonies grown from bow music — and embroidered with constant references to South African jazz’s historic affair with hard bop. His latest composition, the tribute song Unsung, married all those elements with the classic African jazz chords — a new song that was simultaneously a very old one.
Conversation between jazz and rock
For drummer Cindy Blackman-Santana, this dance through time and space comes with the turf: ‘Jazz is a music that deals with life. It’s part head, part heart and part street — and they’re all evolving.” Her Another Lifetime album is an explicit salute to drummer Tony Williams: ‘From the first note to the last note and the notes I think he would be making today. Because he was schooled in the history, you can also hear the future in there.”
Her set was a fiery conversation between jazz and rock genres, in which the rock rhythms directed the improvisation towards particular feels and textures. Blackman is an astounding drummer to watch as well as hear. She is energy, reach, freedom, fluidity and precision personified.
If such multiple echoes of past, present and future sounding simultaneously made this year’s festival a celebration of the quantum physics of jazz, its top scientist made the most timeless presentation. Now 77, Wayne Shorter has conducted groundbreaking research into every era: with Art Blakey, Miles Davis and — in the pioneering Weather Report — Jaco Pastorius. His spellbinding set, with bassist John Patitucci, pianist Danilo Pérez and drummer Brian Blade, distilled the conclusions. ‘My challenge,” Shorter said, ‘is to create music that speaks of the eternity of things and says tragedy is temporary. The constant is that which transcends tragedy.”
As for the festival as an event, the music makes up for most things, but there’s been some undeniable regression. Some of the Cape Town International Convention Centre’s barn-like spaces will never have great acoustics (although Rosies — this year as always — sounded perfect).
Aurally disappointing
Screeches from stage equipment aren’t usually part of the problem; this year they scarred the first Earth, Wind & Fire show. Sound-setting in the Moses Molelekwa auditorium took far too long between acts, for results that were often aurally disappointing. This fed into long delays on some starting times: unfair to audiences trying to dovetail what they see and to artists arriving mentally prepared to play, not brood. Recent festivals have been largely free of these problems.
The huge venue is beginning to feel cramped, so big have the crowds become. Getting around downstairs puts a whole new spin on that historic Sixties slogan: ‘Up against the wall, motherf—”