Jazz travels through history and community in the Klein Karoo

The air is still, breathless, aside from the vibrations of Zoë Modiga’s voice as it is amplified by a natural amphitheatre in the Swartberg Mountains. She is paying homage to the great South African tenor saxophonist Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi.

There is a magic in the night-time stillness. A full moon, luminescent white, molten and bright, emerges over the shadow of an ancient ridge as Modiga finds words to Mankunku’s 1968 classic about the black condition during apartheid, Yakhal’ Inkomo.

A vertical collection of rocks lit up behind the Journey to Jazz Festival stage appear as a solemn sentry, standing guard between worlds: between the physical and the supernatural, the present and the past, political consciousness and amnesia, and the imaginings created by the silence between the musical notes.

Jazz as history

I am transported back to this moment the next day during a masterclass with the inimitable guitarist and folksinger Vusi Mahlasela at the Showroom Theatre, a gorgeous Art Deco building on Church Street in Prince Albert in the Little Karoo.

Journey to Jazz creative director Brenda Sisane is in conversation with Mahlasela about his process, his politics during apartheid, his view of contemporary South Africa and what his friend, the late novelist Nadine Gordimer, described as “his accent” – the combination of guitar-playing, voice and lyrics born in Mamelodi. It has resonated through the country to such an extent that the troubadour has earned the nickname “The Voice”.

Sisane is talking about the role of art, and jazz especially, in a “fragile” democracy such as South Africa’s: “It is about bringing the pain of the past into the hope of the future,” she says. “Hope is a very difficult thing, but it is better than to be cynical.”

But there is no hope without acknowledging history’s pain. This is an essential, but often ignored, part of South African post-apartheid politics.

This notion, however, is characteristic of some South African jazz, from compositions such as Mannenberg to the lived experiences of musicians such as Mankunku who, in the 1960s, performed with a big band at Cape Town’s City Hall, but, because of the blackness of his skin and the whiteness of the audience and the rest of the band, did so behind a curtain. A white performer mimicked the great man’s playing.

Journey to Jazz, a plucky, community-driven jazz festival that completed its fourth edition at the beginning of May, seeks precisely these histories, both large and local, narrativised in South Africa’s national story and Prince Albert’s more intimately felt one. The festival also looks forward towards the development of young children, especially through the activities of the Prince Albert Community Trust (Pact).

Community life

Organising the Journey to Jazz Festival is one of several activities conducted by Pact, which was formed in 2013 and became operational a year later. There are early childhood programmes at the Pact community centre in the township of ­Noordeinde (North End), literacy projects for primary school children and adults, music lessons and mentorship, and the Ons vir Ons (Us for Us) music festival with participants from neighbouring Leeu-Gamka and Laingsburg.

There is also on-site training and skills development. The youth of Noordeinde are involved in the Journey to Jazz Festival, learning skills including event management, music production, media and marketing, and sound and stage management. Musicians such as pianist Paul Hanmer work with the bands from local schools all year round, readying them for performances at the festivals the trust hosts.

Waldon Ewerts, Pact’s creative arts team leader, teaches guitar to children between 10 and 15 years old.

“Children are not just learning music and how to read it, they’re also learning numeracy and how to write songs, which helps their literacy,” he says.

Noordeinde sits on one side of Church Street, in the dry and barren part of town, far removed from the idyllic, charmingly manicured dorpie surrounding the NG Kerk at the other end. It is apartheid spatial planning at its most obvious.

It is also the residue of apartheid economics at its most pernicious. Near Noordeinde, begging kids clamber over you at the glint of a coin. It’s clear that unemployment and substance abuse remain rife.

This is a land, with its Unesco World Heritage status, where human existence can be traced back tens of thousands of years to the Middle Stone Age, and colonial dispossession can be traced back a few hundred. There are many injustices and divides to address.

“As an organisation, we are exploring how do we knit together a new understanding of community, which possibly goes back to the original meaning of the word,” says Ingrid Wolfaardt, one of the original founders of Pact. “It’s a safe container where certain ­universal values are shared: kindness, respect, dignity, acknowledgment, service to others, sharing…

“So how do we make that happen in a world where we are fragmented and living in silos? We are trying through the bigger work of Pact to find new ways to let that concept evolve ... and manifest in our work.

“A lot of the work we do on the ground is ‘developmental jazz’, if I can call it that. We listen, we hear, we are sensitive to what plays out on the ground and our responses are perhaps a little different because it’s co-creation, it’s co-curating our responses as a much bigger team… We want the norms to not be continuous struggle. We want to not be in continuous fight or flight mode.”

Pact has been going about its work without any headline corporate sponsors or grand pronouncements, but with large doses of commitment and passion. This is evident from the youngsters checking tickets at the NG Kerk and those learning hospitality and providing specials at Pact’s hub Ons (Us).

With its herb and vegetable garden, culinary school, restaurant, salon and shop selling soaps and beauty products made from local indigenous botanicals, Ons is the festival’s heart during Journey to Jazz. It is a space leased to Pact, which also owns the Showroom Theatre across Church Street. Together with the NG Kerk, these are the two main sites for the musical programme.

Unique voice of the festival

The programming has been stellar, with the festival’s musical director, pianist Kyle Shepherd, seeking out distinctive “musical voices” including Amy Campbell, bassist Jonathan Rubin, vocalist Zawadi Yamungu, Yonela Mnana and the Soultee Sisters, the Karoo Jazz Project and saxophonist Donvino Prins.

At Ons, Chimurenga magazine’s Ntone Edjabe ruled the decks for two late nights, playing tunes from reggae to high-life. In between, during a listening session about jazz and the African diaspora, he dropped some intellectual bombs about the genre as black modernity and an instrument of radical pressure in “undoing” historically normative ideas about land, politics, music, identity, culture and more.

¡Gracia!, an Italian trio featuring Anaïs Drago (violin), Fausto Beccalossi (accordion) and Luca Falomi (guitar), was inspired by surrealism and the Andalusian poet and anti-fascist Federico García Lorca. Their set was a journey between darkness and the light, often sounding like the soundtrack to an edgy French New Wave film.

Performances during the festival also allowed some great side musicians to shine. Mahlasela performed in a duo with Jerry Tsholofelo Papo, who had grown up playing the elder’s tunes. Papo was magnificent next to the great man. During Mahlasela’s masterclass they played a song inspired by Dennis Brutus, the poet, activist and champion of the sports boycott against apartheid South Africa.

The song, Troubadour, may have been about Brutus surviving a mugging in Johannesburg upon his return from exile in the 1990s, but more deeply, its lyrics asked, “Oh Troubadour/How did you respond to the blankness of their eyes?/How did you respond to their guns, knives, knuckles and boots?” It felt like a searing critique of a world in which people are denied art and its ability to lend a depth of understanding to what surrounds us.

During Hanmer’s set at the NG Kerk, the electricity blew out, leaving only the piano and drums mic-ed, along with two yellow stage lights, for a while. This was a momentary setback as the pianist, together with Marlon Witbooi (drums) and Nick Williams (bass), recalibrated beautifully.

Traces of silence

The notion of quietness, of slowing it down, permeated this festival. It was present in the breath control of Prins performing Grassy Park Requiem (composed by Hilton Schilder but featured on a Robbie Jansen album) during a masterclass with baby-faced bassist Jonathan Rubain.

Likewise saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane’s performance with vocalist Paras “Sibalukhulu” Dlamini and pianist Zibusiso Makhathini at the NG Kerk, which moved from the ancient hills of rural KwaZulu-
Natal to an orphan’s lament after her disappeared father. Sikhakhane’s control of breath on songs such as Nongoma and Busi Mhlongo’s Ntandane provided a deeply felt melancholia that moved through histories and seemed to offer a kind of salvation from the Black Lives Matter experience of Eric Garner’s last words: “I can’t breathe.”

One of the supreme highlights of the three-day festival was Shepherd accompanying four films by William Kentridge. Shepherd and Kentridge have been collaborating for seven years, including on the opera Waiting for the Sibyl, but Shepherd relished the opportunity to work from a “clean slate” this time round.

According to Shepherd, this meant “commissioning a sound designer, getting friends to record the ambient sound on the films and a lot of improvisation in the studio” for his live performance, which he intended “not to turn into a piano concert by practising restraint” in his playing.

The other screened films were Tide Table, The Moment Has Gone and Mine, all together creating a compendium of extractivism and dystopia, the sense of which lingered long after the performance was complete.

I wonder aloud about Kentridge’s practise of drawing and erasing, smudging and redrawing (with what appears in one film to be a giant black charcoal sabre-dildo) to the extent that there are traces of previous iterations of the work in the final animation.

Shepherd responds with enthusiasm: “The idea of traces remaining reminds me a lot of improvisation. As a musician, one does things and then you redo it, you develop the nucleus of an idea, building on hunches and an initial impulse until you reach a stage where it’s a thing that doesn’t allow for correction, but it does allow for change.”

The idea of continuing change rather than correction feels like an impulse deeply embedded in the Journey to Jazz Festival and its mission to build community in places both damaged and full of life. DM

Niren Tolsi’s transport and accommodation were paid for by Journey to Jazz.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.