This was a sentiment expressed by Shane Cooper, Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year for jazz, after playing with the bearded jazz mystic as part of trio with drummer Kesivan Naidoo on a 90-minute set.
Born in 1970 to Swiss missionary parents in Brazil, Braff lived in Cape Verde and Senegal before settling in Switzerland. At some point during the concert, he expressed his admiration of the musicians who were coping well despite having only limited time to work with him. “I have been working on this music for years and the musicians have only had a week,” the Braff noted.
The bulky jazz man, sporting an orange T-shirt, was huddled over the grand piano, playing games with the instrument, his fellow musicians and audience. An imposing presence – what with the beard one imagines Jehovah grows and a hoary mane to match – he took the audience on a piano-led journey that explored, made fun of, and went in and out of rhythm. In the journey there were jerky stops and impromptu starts, lazy jogs and spirited sprints.
I don’t remember any of the musicians going on a solo. In many ways the collective redefined the idea of the solo. A note beginning with Braff would be amplified by Cooper before Naidoo finished it on the drums.
Braff combined two approaches: one so spaced out and lean that if it was a landscape, one imagines a blind man could easily find his way; and the other so dense and vegetated that even the sighted would come out at the other end with bumps, bruises and black eyes.
Still he never lost his audience. Perhaps it was because of the snatches of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, or his own melodic re-interpretations of Prince, or just the sheer beauty of his melodic jazz shamanism.