Oh you take some skins...” sings Bing Crosby in the film High Society — on cue, Louis Armstrong’s drummer, Barrett Deems, starts a thrilling susurrus behind him — “...and jazz begins.” Nowhere is the spell of the drum, that symbol of freedom and harbinger of joy, stronger than in Africa. Here, after all, the men who first gave America jazz were born. At the Drum Cafe in downtown Cape Town, mecca of South African jazz, that ancient magic is re-enacted each Monday, Wednesday and Friday night, as seven young black drummers, recruited from all ends of Africa, line a low stage, with a dynamic white girl, Kelly Schlesinger, in the middle.
At 9pm they begin their pounding beat to the concentric semicircles of young people seated facing them, who respond to each thumping sally on djembe drums of their own. Some they have hired for the evening for £2, some are drums bought from the store there for anything up to £90. Slowly, the beat gets more complex, but each time the young people drum back with exhilarating fidelity. It doesn’t take more than 20 minutes to pick up the beat.
The club’s been going for seven years now. On Thursday there’s a women’s drum circle, where a more gentle and sensitive approach to drumming is heard. Women are more concerned not with how loud they can play, but with how right they can get it. (Men are welcome on Thursday after 10.30pm.) On Saturday a wide spectrum of live bands from South and West Africa sit in and play along to the intoxicating beat.
The reverberations have rippled out to win unexpected aficionados; drum circles are now an integral part of corporate training. Any number of delegates from 10 to 3,000 can take part in 60-minute sessions in a boardroom or conference hall. Corporate drumming, they find, breaks down barriers of age, gender, religion, race, rank and disability. It helps build teams and launch products. Drum Cafe has a London office and is now a global business. Ecstatic feedback flows in from unlikely sources. “It was great,” enthuses Barclays Bank, “to have our executive committee members and guests drumming to the same beat.”
The spirit of jazz is encapsulated most joyously, though, in African Footprint, a mind-blowing stage extravaganza in which the story of “this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful country”, as the show’s poet, Don Mattera, puts it, is celebrated in song, dance, mime, tap, poetry and jazz — all underwritten by the exuberant beat of the drums.
It’s the brainchild of the producer and director Richard Loring, and opened in Johannesburg on May 11, 2000, in the presence of President Thabo Mbeki. It was an instant hit, has toured America, India and China, and delighted Prince Charles when an excerpt was given at the Royal Variety Show in December 2000. It has a permanent company based in Johannesburg, and is due to tour Israel, China again, and Europe this year.
“Look at us,” Mattera urges. “We are the future. Our feet are drums beating the heritage of our native land. Yes, look at us. We are tomorrow.”
MEANTIME, JAZZ today begins with a visit to the Green Dolphin on the reborn Waterfront, a sophisticated playground still for seafarers, citizens and tourists in the city that likes to call itself the Tavern of the Seas. It’s the place that does for Cape Town what Rick’s Café Américain did for Casablanca. It’s the only place that, since it first opened its doors in December 2000, has provided jazz, wine and food for — in its own words — “8 nites a week”. On our first visit we heard Saharadja, a group whose mission statement is “Bring back Bali’s smile”. It’s led by Rio Sidik, a Buddha-like jazzman from Java on trumpet and guitar, and Sally Jo, a pretty Australian girl who studied classical music at university and has played the violin in most of Australia’s top orchestras. She came to teach English in Bali, met and married Rio, and now plays the electric violin in his band.
Her passion is the Irish reel, and they play a heady mix of Irish and Balinese music. Even more daring that night was the delicious dialogue between Rio on trumpet and his sideman, Ajat Lesmana, on didgeridoo, the hot howl of the horn contrasting comically with the primal burble of that ancient Aboriginal instrument.
On our next visit to the Green Dolphin (you need several to take it all in), we were lucky enough to catch Ncediwe Sylvia Mdunyelwa, the diva of Cape jazz. This warm, feisty singer-producer-broadcaster still lives in a flat in Langa, Cape Town’s oldest township, where she grew up. She studied music in California, charmed the royal prince and princess in Japan, wowed them in Berlin, sang for Mbeki at the opening of parliament, and recently provided the swinging songs for Nelson Mandela when he did his famed Madiba jive at his staff Christmas party. Here she was in person, singing the good old good ones like Stormy Weather with delicacy and high definition. But then she seemed to shift to some new jazz gear as she began to give us the songs of her own Xhosa people.
Now her rhythm grows more complex and her voice changes timbre; she believes quite simply that the spirit of her ancestors invades her when she invokes their music. Let’s come back to earth a little by going over to nearby Manenberg’s — the jazz cafe named after the working-class suburb to which people were forcibly moved under apartheid. It opened its doors in December 1994, the year of democracy, to catch the new mood. With its simple black-and-white decor and silver foil wrapped casually round air ducts, it seems notably more cutting edge than the Green Dolphin, with a far greater mix of class and colour.
There’s a small floor with no shortage of takers dancing to African rhythms rather than the traditional nightclub shuffle. Tonight, Donald Tshomela, a 70-year-old Mandela lookalike, is singing. Just as we saw with Sylvia, when he turns to the music of his forefathers, he lifts his game. It’s not a question of people feeling inclined to dance when they hear him; they seem impelled. Soon the whole joint is jumping.
For a more sophisticated setting we must head uptown to Kennedy’s, a stylish place in Long Street, with overtones of London gents’ clubs like Boodles or Whites. It has 1930s decor with big pictures of cigar-smoking Hollywood icons and of JFK, the US president from whom they take their name. It boasts a classy cigar lounge where girls carry large boxes of Havanas to sell to customers, and the menu relates how JFK instructed Pierre Salinger to go out and buy all the Upmanns he could lay hands on (Salinger returned with 1,200) before signing an order banning the import of all Cuban products (including, of course, cigars).
