28 & 29 March

Report from Wolfgang König

Rashid Lombard, director of the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, was surprised when the experts from festival website www.melodytrip.com rated his event number four among the world’s best jazz festivals – after New Orleans, Montreal and Monterey and before Montreux and Cape Town‘s former partner festival North Sea in Holland. But festivals that are as well organized as the one in South Africa’s “Mother City“ are rare even in the so-called “First World“.

Purists may argue that the event is not a “real“ jazz festival, as it includes r&b as well as African and Latin American pop music. But apart from the fact that this can be found at many jazz festivals around the globe, the (South) African definition of jazz has always been extremely generous – up to the fact that in some African countries all music that was played on Western electric instruments was labelled “jazz“. And South Africa can proudly claim to harbor, along with Cuba, the oldest jazz scene outside the USA, with the port city of Cape Town always having played an important role. North American spiritual choirs and minstrel shows performed here even before 1900 and left a lasting mark that can still be seen, for example, in Cape Town bands using the banjo.

About 30 per cent of South Africa’s adult population are jazz fans and consequently the Cape Town Jazz Festival has become very important not only for the city’s reputation but also for its economy. Three out of four of the 32,000 festival-goers are not locals--half arrive from Gauteng, the metropolitan area of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Others come from countries all over Africa, from Japan, China, India, Europe and the Americas. They spend the equivalent of about 7 million dollars just for accommodation in Cape Town. Even political heavyweights like Minister of Culture Pallo Jordan and ANC chairman Jacob Zuma could be seen at some of the concerts.

The festival took place again in Cape Town’s International Convention Centre where there used to be four stages inside the building, and an outdoor stage next to it.  All of the stages are named after legendary musicians and clubs: Basil “Manenberg“ Coetzee (Cape Town saxophonist), Moses Molelekwa (Johannesburg pianist), Rosie’s (Cape Town club), Bassline (Jo’burg club) and Kippie’s (Jo’burg club named after saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi). The small Moses Molelekwa stage, dedicated to “real“ jazz, regularly proved to be too small, so it was moved this year to the former Bassline stage, which features dancefloor acts, while a new and bigger Bassline was put up across the street as a second outdoor stage.

This year’s edition of the festival, which lived up again to its slogan “Africa’s Grandest Gathering“, featured many guitar players: Cape Town-based Jimmy Dludlu from Mozambique, Johannesburg-based Kunle Ayo from Nigeria, US-based Lionel Loueke from Benin, Oliver Mtukudzi from Zimbabwe and from the USA Lee Ritenour, Raul Midón and Be-Bop Guitars, led by John Baboian, guitar professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and featuring four Cape Town guitarists. As always, half of the 42 acts at the festival were South African, giving the foreign visitors an interesting insight into the country’s national scene. And the South African visitors were not only interested in foreign stars, by far: a local hero like the fantastic Jimmy Dludlu easily filled the big Kippie’s stage that holds about 10,000 people.

Big names at this year’s festival were the mbaqanga legend The Soul Brothers, r&b veterans The Manhattans, smooth jazz stars Candy Dulfer, Najee and Gerald Albright, bossa pop champion Sergio Mendes, vibes player Mike Manieri and from the straight jazz faction, pianist Kenny Barron as well as saxophonist Javon Jackson with his Superband featuring the legendary drummer Jimmy Cobb.  Jimmy can be heard on the bestselling jazz album of all time: Miles Davis‘ Kind Of Blue.

But the most interesting music came from another side: The discovery of the festival was the local quartet Babu that was led by drummer Kesivan Naidoo and presented a really innovative fusion of jazz and classical Indian music. Literally heartwarming was the performance of the African Inkspots, a vocal quartet that was started in 1946 (!) and is still active with two founding members and two singers who joined the group in the 1950s.

Some of the festival acts featured interesting collaborations. Oliver Mtukudzi invited Raul Midón on stage for a song. And Lee Ritenour was extremely keen to perform with South African singer Zamajobe – a show that had an interesting prehistory: Ritenour had played in Johannesburg in 2005. When he could not sleep at night, he switched the tv on and watched some videos of Zamajobe and fell in love with her voice. Back home in LA a few weeks later while working on his new album Smoke ‘n‘ Mirrors, he thought that for this South African girl would have the perfect voice for Bill Whithers‘ song Lovely Day But he had forgotten her name and it took him a while to track her down. Finally, he got in touch with Zamajobe’s husband, guitarist and producer Erik Pilani and sent the music to Johannesburg. Zamajobe and Erik Pilani added their parts and contributed one of their songs. On the day of Lee Ritenour’s arrival in Cape Town he met and spoke to Zamajobe for the first time. The next morning they rehearsed a few hours and in the evening, Lee Ritenour, his band that included Patrice Rushen on keyboards, Zamajobe and Erik Pilani performed in front of about two thousand excited people.

While the festival only lasted for two days (Friday and Saturday), many events took place around it: Workshops for kids and young ones, master classes done by international stars for music students and local professionals, special workshops for arts journalism and music business, an international music conference and a free concert on Greenmarket Square in the city centre for all those who could not afford festival tickets. For the first time, a Human Rights Concert was staged in the township area of Mitchell’s Plains on the Sunday after the festival, featuring South African as well as international artists and providing a platform for the launch of a nationwide campaign against drugs and violent crime.

First published: Contributed by Wolfgang König