The 2006 Cape Town International Jazz Festival: Review and photos by Wolfgang König.

The end of March, beginning of April means one thing in Cape Town, South Africa: festival time! Since 2000, Africa’s south-western most city has been a magnet for music lovers from South Africa, the rest of the continent, and overseas. For the first five years, this event was co-produced by Cape Town’s esp Afrika and a Dutch company called Den Haag—hence the festival’s former name, North Sea Jazz Festival Cape Town. Since 2005, the renamed Cape Town International Jazz Festival has been an all-South African production, and I cannot recall a better organized musical event anywhere in the world.

From the start, festival director Rashid Lombard’s policy has been to present national and international artists in equal shares, thus satisfying the desire of the South African audience (about 30% of the adult population are jazz lovers) to see world stars while giving both prominent and new artists from the Cape a chance to play alongside their foreign colleagues and to be exposed to the festival’s many international visitors. In other words, at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival the prophet is welcome on his home turf.

There are many reasons for the ongoing success of the CTIJF. One is that South Africans have a very generous approach to jazz—one that might drive purists mad.  You will find in the festival records names as diverse as Marcus Miller, Joe Zawinul and Dewey Redman, but also The Brand New Heavies, Zuco 103 from Brazil, and Cuba’s rap heroes Orishas, all of whom performed at the first edition in 2000.  One of the five stages at Cape Town’s impressive Convention Centre is completely dedicated to dance acts doing kwaito, hiphop and house, so the tradition of eclecticism continues.  Since 2000, many big names on the jazz and world music circuit have appeared: Joe Lovano, Cesaria Evora, George Duke, Roy Hargrove, Ahmad Jamal, Deodato, Osibisa, Cassandra Wilson, Femi Kuti, Dave Holland, The Commodores, Ravi Coltrane…  Cuban artists have been a constant feature in recent years, including trumpet player Basilio Marquez and, this year, piano wizards Omar Sosa and Chucho Valdés.

After Brazil, South Africa is among the world’s countries with the biggest gulf between rich and poor.  Knowing that so many locals cannot afford to buy tickets, Rashid Lombard and his colleagues present a special free concert on the night before the official festival starts—five or six of the foreign acts performing outdoors on Greenmarket Square in the city centre.  Meanwhile, the well-heeled local clientele at the Convention Centre concerts offered clear evidence that 12 years of democracy has seen the emergence of a black middle class in South Africa. 

The festival has always been more than a string of musical shows.   For example, it is a rare chance for young South African musicians to learn from experienced colleagues in several music workshops, this year done by people like Chucho Valdés (piano), Gerald Veasley (bass) or Bay Area-based South African top drummer Ian Herman. Other workshops dealt with thorny topics like negotiating the music industry, copyright problems, and jazz journalism.   The Convention Centre is not only a venue for the shows but also for a jazz photo exhibition, brainchild of festival director and former press photographer Rashid Lombard.

A new feature this year, which organizers hope will become a tradition as well, was the South Atlantic Jazz Music Conference. Speakers and delegates from Sweden, the US and South Africa, including jazz fan and Minister of Culture Pallo Jordan, discussed ways to promote live music through coordinated public and private activities.  After all, an event like the CTIJF is also an economic boon for the city of Cape Town, which earned the equivalent of 13-million US dollars in 2005 from taxes and the spendings of tourists who account for 70 per cent of the festival visitors.  More than 22,000 attended the festival this year, coming from other parts of South Africa, as well as Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria, the USA, Sweden, Germany, China and beyond. 

The audience favorite at this festival was clearly Miriam Makeba, “Mama Africa,” on her farewell tour.  The 74-year-old Queen of African music announced earlier that 2006 will be her last year of touring and regular performances.  Kippie’s, the biggest venue at the Convention Centre, was packed with about 10,000 people who celebrated an artist who had seemed to be around always and forever, a personality that is hard to think of as a retired great grandmother. At least, she told the press, she will not completely stop performing after 2006, but will “sing at special occasions and for very special money.”  This was not the statement of a greedy person but of an artist who has performed countless benefit shows and who runs a center that takes care of many girls who once lived in the streets of Johannesburg.  If anyone deserves “very special money,” it is her. 
|
Two other festival performances were particularly emotional. One was the concert of Andy Hamilton, a Jamaican saxophonist and resident of Birmingham, England since the early 1950s. He was excited to be in Africa for the first time in his long life. On stage he played infatuatingly beautiful, swinging jazz blended with calypso, reggae and bossa nova.  Hamilton said, “I turned 88 last Sunday. Mandela will turn 88 in July. Tell him, 88 is a great age!”  The other touching event was the performance of Robbie Jansen as special guest of Winston Mankunku, Cape Town’s answer to John Coltrane (a comparison that Mankunku always rejects modestly). A year ago, Robbie Jansen, a veteran of Cape Town’s music scene as well, had collapsed. He lay in coma for weeks, his life in jeopardy.  Not only did he survive, but he surprised everyone by returning to blow his horn once more, a feat that had seemed impossible. On stage, Robbie appeared weak at times, but when he took up the alto sax or the flute to play a solo he sounded as fit as a fiddle. 

Other crowd-pleasers were Caiphus Semenya, husband and producer of singer Letta Mbulu and close collaborator of Quincy Jones during long years of exile, Cameroonian super stars Manu Dibango and Richard Bona, Chucho Valdés from Cuba (unfortunately without his sister, the great singer Mayra Caridad Valdés, who was ill), a rocking José Feliciano, Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander who was joined on stage on saxophone by Ernie Watts from Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, and former James Brown bandleader Pee Wee Ellis who had come to Cape Town with Omar Sosa.

Remarkable shows were also delivered by Mario Canonge, an extremely underrated pianist from Martinique, based in Paris, and South African percussionist Tlale Makhene who fuses township jazz with Latin rhythms. Capetonian saxophonist Rus Nerwich impressed with a set that was based on music sung and composed in European ghettos and concentration camps during the holocaust, from which many Jews found refuge in Cape Town.

The CTIJF, now in its eighth year, has evolved into one of the nation’s main cultural events. If you want to combine a trip to South Africa with a musical experience around March/April 2007, keep yourself informed through the website www.capetownjazzfest.com.  

First published: www.afropop.org