How Tutu brought joy to Jozi's jazz enthusiasts
28 September 2015
World-renowned harmonica player Lee Oskar had grown men and women bellowing into the night: “Now that I feel so good, tell everybody, tell everybody …”
And just to show who was in charge of the proceedings, he gently told the “we want more” crowd that he was packing up after completing his set at the Standard Bank Joy of Jazz Festival at the Sandton Convention Centre on Saturday night.
Oskar told the more than 2 000 revellers who had turned Mbira, one of the four stages at the festival, into a Welcome Dover coal stove-heated shebeen, that he was making way for award-winning balladeer Peabo Bryson to help couples reignite the spark and spread a little more love Mzansi’s way.
But master bassist and Miles Davis protégé Marcus Miller was not so lucky. After taking 1 200 screaming fans on a thumping ride around the world, he caved in when the crowd hollered for more.
Although Miller was the main man, the driver behind the constant dum-dum beat, 23-year-old Brett Williams, the Pittsburgh piano prodigy, was pounding not one, not two but three keyboards as if his life depended on them. Wearing a baseball cap and shaking his head like a hip-hop artist, Williams showed off all the precocious talent that set him off on his first professional performance at the age of nine.
Miller was returning the favour that the hard-to-please Davis bestowed on him as a 25-year-old by allowing him to produce Tutu for the trumpeter in 1986.
At exactly 1.15am on Sunday, Miller and his four-man band turned to Tutu to bid Johannesburg farewell before promising to come back soon to solidify their ties with Msawawa.
William Parker, poet, activist and double bassist, warned against black-on-black violence and the scourge of white cops mowing down young black men in the US. That was after he had told the audience at the Conga venue that he really liked SA’s RDP houses. It was not clear how firm his tongue was pressing against his grey-bearded cheek.
Standard Bank 2015 Artist of the Year Nduduzo Makhathini was shaking off his piano stool as he and his band moved from hauntingly sad deliveries to hip-swaying, high-energy tunes that attracted a horde of photographers like flies to a freshly slaughtered goat.
The granddaddies of all things fun, funky and grounded - Hugh Masekela and Oliver Mutukudzi - gave a collaborative performance that will still be talked about when the Joy of Jazz caravan returns to Sandton 12 months from now.
“These old timers can show some of our noisy upstarts a thing or two. They are such consummate professionals,” said Kagiso Sejake to no one in particular.
After thousands of litres of beer enough to fill up a fire pool were drunk, hundreds of business cards to create a forest changed hands and countless bear hugs to encourage world peace were exchanged, the curtain came down on the 2015 Joy of Jazz in the early hours of Sunday … and someone whistled an out-of-tune Tutu along Maude Street as he headed towards the parkade. The show’s over, folks!