Blowing back in time: Mandla Mlangeni has reassembled the Tune Recreation Committee to record a new album.
On a Wednesday night towards the end of March, trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni took to the stage at the Orbit in Johannesburg for a performance with pianist Yonela Mnana, drummer Lungile Kunene and bass player Amaeshi Ikechi.
Ever since Shabaka Hutchings went on tour with most of the personnel that recorded the album Bhekisizwe as the Amandla Freedom Ensemble (the group also features in Shabaka and the Ancestors’ Wisdom of the Elders), Mlangeni has been quietly reconfiguring his space in the jazz world and his approach to playing, emerging out of the safety of the large ensemble.
In February, Mlangeni travelled back in time to record an album with the Tune Recreation Committee (TRC), a group formed in Cape Town with roots of at least a decade.
The band includes Clement Benny on drums, Mlangeni on trumpet, Nicholas Williams on bass, Keenan Ahrends on guitar, Ronan Skillen on tabla and percussion and Mark Fransman on saxophones (tenor and soprano), flute, pandero, accordion.
Why is the Tune Recreation Committee resurfacing now after the acclaim of the Amandla Freedom Ensemble?
It is based on the logistical challenges that I have experienced over the past couple of months. Many of the band members of the Amandla Freedom Ensemble recorded with Shabaka and the Ancestors [and were touring with him], so they have not been available. Instead of reconfiguring the Amandla Freedom Ensemble, I chose to go a different path and reassemble a unit I had a couple of years ago. It’s about diversifying what I can offer. The TRC is much more eclectic in its offering.
Troubles We Enjoy is such a fun, contradictory song. Explain the title.
All of us have troubles we enjoy. It is what makes us human. For example, some people are socialites; they like going out and spending time with friends, not realising the amount of dent it can have on the pocket.
Some of us like food, and are compelled to eat. Some of us like alcohol. Some like the fancy stuff. So it speaks to that. It points to the extents we go to make ourselves happy.
Where does the Balkan influence in Balkan Zulu come from?
Well, I was living in Norway at the time. I was an exchange student at the Norway Academy of Music. At that time I got to meet different people. I also got to play in different bands. I was part of a band that got to tour in and around Norway. We also went to Sweden, Denmark and Croatia. We used to play Balkan rock. It was through that band that I got introduced to that music. We wrote this about 10 years ago at a rehearsal, and that’s how I started to experiment with that Balkan feel. The melody has that Balkan feel to it — it starts slowly, where it laments and then gradually speeds up in tempo. So it was just going through the elements of my Balkan Zulu experience in Norway. I was in Norway from the summer of 2007 to the summer of 2008.
Whose composition is Hop n Skop? It sounds playful and has a Cape influence.
I composed it. I sang it. I put down the melody and it was also arranged by Yonela Mnana, a very good friend of mine and confidant with whom I’ve worked on a number of projects. He helps me in terms of musical direction whenever I have something that I am thinking about. His knowledge of the sonic realm is much more vast. But I still have much more control in terms of the direction I want to take it and the feeling. That’s important in a group like the TRC where material is workshopped. At the end of the day it all comes down to me filtering the material but it is still a collaborative effort assimilated over time.
If you look at it, I have lived in Cape Town for eight years. I am very influenced by what I experienced there musically. That is what I was going for: the light-heartedness, children’s laughter in the background, me picturing children playing this game. So the melody and the theme represent the hop and skip.
Tell me about the use of voices in uMuvangeli.
I wanted to convey a sense of longing and a sense of searching. The vocalist, Vuyo on there … I told him specifically to look for the wild and bewildered and to use his voice as more of percussion, rather than just evoking words. I think we are all evangelists in some kind of way, maybe not in a religious way but us going through the storms of our lives to find a purpose.
When it starts, it’s very sparse and it grows into a whole lot of interlocking between the voice and the instruments, where it feels like a lot of things come into our lives and it feels at that moment, like it’s not going to end and then it always clears out and you get to sing and tell your story. But it’s always cyclical. It wasn’t like: look at what chord I’m using, look at what I’m doing with the instrument. It was more just relaying incessant voices that are hidden in my head and doing it in as fun and engaging a way as I could imagine at the time.
Can you talk about Madala Kunene’s involvement in R.O.A.D.?
I was introduced to Madala’s music in Cape Town, when I was starting the The TRC and looking through material. His music was guttural. It spoke something. Its sophistication lay in its simplicity. I was a student and, for me, in order for something to be sophisticated, it had to have the best jazz chords, the best line, the best people on board. This, on the other hand, was something different.
It was only much later that I met uBab’ Madala, at the Afrikan Freedom Station [in Johannesburg]. He mentioned to me that he knew my father, and he knew of the work he had done. It was then that we struck up that connection. And working with somebody who had background information about my dad and interacted with my dad, it was interesting to engage someone like that musically. R.O.A.D. was a composition we wrote 10 years ago, when I first presented my work as part of a performance recital. R.O.A.D. stands for “resurrection of a dream”. I wanted to create that floating feeling, that dream state. There are actually lyrics to that song that I didn’t add on this version.
Could you explain the very strong and powerful presence of somebody called Nomthandazo Modiga?
She is also known as Zoë. She has just put out a great album so you have to check that out. Yellow: The Novel. I met her in Cape Town through a friend from Germany, Sebastian Schuster. We used to perform with Sebastian quite regularly. He became a de facto member of the TRC. It was when we used to have trouble getting bassists because all the musicians were moving up to Jo’burg.
He used to tell me: “Wow, she’s amazing.” What she can do with her voice is amazing, even her stage presence. She is an all-rounder. She is enigmatic and knows how to convey a story. I was looking for those individual stories that people can bring as part of the project. I didn’t ask her to sing in a particular way. I had a lot of faith and confidence in her, much like I had in Mark Fransman, the producer, who plays a lot of instruments on this album, like bass clarinet, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, alto flute. He is also on harmonica and melodica. I worked closely with him in terms of curating the experience.
- The Tune Recreation Committee will play at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival on Saturday night, April 1.
- The TRC’s music is available on iTunes
- For a video of the show and interview go to mg.co.za/mlangeni