The Cape Town Jazz Club at The Base - late 1980s

Originally, the Cape Town Jazz Society, presented gigs at a venue in Salt River but at some point in probably 1987, the gigs  moved to a Sunday evening slot at The Base in Shortmarket Street in die Cape Town CBD.

I attended almost all of the gigs, not because I was a huge jazz afficionado but because there wasn’t much else happening on a Sunday night in Apartheid-era South Africa in the late ‘80s. Also, the type of jazz presented at The Base was, I supposed, the more commercial kind with a broad appeal beyond purists.

The acts I recall, were Basil Coetzee’s Sabenza group, Robbie Jansen, The Genuines and Wired to the Floor. There might’ve been others but these seemed to be booked most often.

Wired to the Floor was a fusion four-piece band, led by saxophonist and vocalist Gavin Minter and the style was hard, funk-rock-jazz, some instrumental, some with vocals. “Art and the Dollar” was the big tune. The musicians were technically highly proficient but the music never resonated with me, as it was simply high energy, well-arranged songs with no soul and little emotional appeal. 

A unique aspect of their sound was that the guitar player played synthesises keyboards through his guitar, or controlled the keyboards through the guitar, to widen and deepen the sonic pallet.

The Genuines were, like Wired to the Floor, a four-piece band, with no keyboard sounds though bass player ‘Mac’ McKenzie’s  father contributed a little banjo plucking to their so-called “ghoema” Cape Flats sound. Though the music was also a muscular, dextrous, funked up, jazz rock fusion, they also paid homage to their Cape Town music roots. The Genuines were a regular attraction at Indaba (at the intersection of Wale and Buitengracht Streets), the Base’s competition but at the Indaba The Genuines played Friday and Saturday night gigs, the big club nights, and could well have been the hardest working band in Cape Town, given at how many venues, and how often, I saw them, to the extent that I sometimes avoided venues when I knew The Genuine headlined the evening.  

The band released two albums on the Shifty Records label.

Keyboardist Hilton Schilder came from, as the saying goes, jazz royalty in that his father, Tony, was a well-regarded jazz pianist and perhaps the other musicians had jazz backgrounds too but their music hardly sounded like traditional jazz.  Drummer Ian Herman went on to play with guitarist Steve Newman in Tananas before heading off for an “international career.`’ 

Basil “Manenberg” Coetzee’s Sabenza and Robbie Jansen (the two saxophonists once played together on recording projects and had a short-lived joint group) were the only true jazz acts at The Base. Both came up in the port bop scene and played with Abdullah Ebrahim (Dollar Brand), amongst others and in respect to his association with Ebrahim, Coetzee played on Ebrahim’s monster hit track of the same name, contributing an improvised, first take saxophone solo. An extended, rousing version of  “Manenberg” was Coetzee’s regular show closer.

Jansen played a similar style of music and also sang. My best memories of him is playing with Coetzee, though, as Jansen wasn’t as much of a regular on the Jazz Club stage as Coetzee was.

There might’ve been other jazz acts but I only recall the few that had the most gigs. Perhaps these were the only jobbing jazz musicians in Cape Town but it did seem like a kind of close shop. The only act I truly cared for was Basil Coetzee’s group. The jazz/funk/rock fusions of the Genuines and Wired to the Floor weren’t as interesting and  The Genuines was such a fixture on the live scene in Cape Town that their set became somewhat tedious from over-familiarity. As I’ve said, I attended the Jazz Club shows mostly for a want of something better to do on a Sunday night; it wasn’t particularly compelling.  

I’ve no idea anymore when or why the Cape Town Jazz Club Evenings at The Base came to an end. It could been the natural result of The Base itself closing down, probably at the end of 1988, more or less at the same time as Indaba Project, or the sessions could’ve ended because of lack of interest and commercial challenges.  The gigs were well attended but perhaps not as well as the normal club nights at The Base on Friday and Saturday nights. Beginning in late 1988 there was a general re-set of club venues in Cape Town anyway. The Café Royal Hotel, in Church Street, had started putting on gigs early on Friday nights, aimed to end before punters headed off to the late night clubs but from early 1989 it replaced Indaba Project as premier live venue in die CBD and roughly a year later The Smokehouse Blues Club set out its stall on Saturday nights on the premises of what used to be the Master Mariners’ Club on the corner of Shortmarket and Loop Streets.  By this time The Base and Indaba Project were merely fond memories.

If the Cape Town Jazz Club relocated and carried on, I didn’t know or care, really. It’d been a Sunday night distraction for a while but soon lost its lustre, for me, and became a kind of habit rather than a must-go event. By and By other jazz venues operated in the CBD, like Manenberg’s on upper Adderly Street (and which eventually moved to the V & A Waterfront) and, much later, the Green Dolphin restaurant in the V & A Waterfront. I never went to Manenberg’s  and hung out at the Green Dolphin maybe twice in the late ‘90s, quickly bored by the Tony Schilder Trio’s tepid background jazz.

 

 

 

 

The 1970 Festival Express

In the summer of 1970 the Grateful Dead, with The Band, Janis Joplin, the Flying Burrito Brothers. Buddy Guy, Mountain, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends and Great Speckled Bird undertook a tour of Canada during which they played three festivals, in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary. Sha Na Na apparently, flew in for one of the shows.

The main group of bands travelled by train from city to city, hence the name of the venture.

The 2003 documentary, with footage from 1970 interspersed with contemporary comments from participants, covers events at the shows, both musical and otherwise, and on the train, mostly musical. The musicians and hangers on seemed to drink, drug and jam nonstop.

Fascinating as it is to see this frozen fragment of the time between the hight of the power and influence of 1960s counterculture and the dissolution of those forces into the glam, cocaine fuelled corporate money rock scene of the mid 1970s, the most interesting aspect for me was to see the holdovers of the free music movement of the hippie era, where the slogan was something like “the music is ours” and should therefore be provided free of charge, especially by the musicians who came to prominence during that era and should therefore be deemed to share the sentiment.

This kind of attitude and behaviour is documented in the Woodstock movie and might’ve applied to many, if not all, rock festivals of the time. The general story is that the organisers and promoters of the festivals spend a good deal of money setting up the infrastructure of the event, including paying the musicians, and therefore charge admission, whereas, on the day, many people who don’t have tickets arrive outside the festival site and demand free entry and if this is denied, attempt to force their way into the site.

Their attitude is, as said, “the music belongs to everyone” and, as happened at these Canadian shows, that the promoters have obviously made their money from the people who did pay to attend the event and that allowing the ticketless in won’t cause any financial harm.

The truth, generally, is that the promoters may  have lost money anyway, without allowing in non-paying audiences but that they absolutely did lose money when acceding to the counterculture demands for free music.

It’s a fascinating view of a generation who were supposedly from the times of love and understanding being violent to achieve aims at odds with even hippie, or hippie friendly,  promoters’ commercial interests. The activists don’t care that somebody has put up money to put on the festival and seem to believe that they should benefit from this  hippie capitalist enterprise regardless of the consequences for the entrepreneur. Furthermore, not only do they demand free entry, but they’re also willing to force entry with violence.

Audience and musicians are informed by the same ideals, or are supposed to be, and should be part of the same broad counterculture movement yet the activists are happy to screw over their own for their own ends.

The Grateful Dead, as headliners and probably the most concerned and influential musicians, do their best to mediate, up to the point of playing free shows outside the grounds of the commercial festival and there’s also a fascinating scene where Bob Weir, with Jerry Garcia nearby, argues the point with an activist, pointing out that the musicians are entitled to earn a living and that the actions of the activists deny the musicians this opportunity and also questions whether injuries to police officers  who try to control the violent crowds, is justified. Of course, the activists, who refer to the police as “pigs,” don’t seem to be bothered by Weir’s questions and arguments and perhaps would accuse Weir of being a sell-out apologist for the establishment. 

Interestingly, as the Woodstock festival, the promoters do take a financial bath, acknowledge it yet still allow the show to go on and to cushion the musicians from the reality of it all. The party on the train never stops.

The jams on the train are entrancing (I would’ve like to be there) and the stage performances are equally fascinating as that snapshot of the past but the most endearing yet also, in hindsight, tragic performances are those by Janis Jopliin who died in October of that year. There are glimpses of Joplin bas passenger and at one jam session with a trashed Rick Danko, Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, doing “No More Cane” but the stage performances of “Cry Baby” and “Tell Mama” are enduring records of the fiery force of nature, tinged with melancholy she was in front of an audience.

One can’t help but think, if this kind of tour were organised today, it would be done with professional efficiency and strict financial controls but I suppose one could still put together a bunch of musicians that would party and jam as hard the guys and gals did in 1970.  I know the history of those days and I may never know the rock music history of the 21^st  century but the sense is that the giants who once walked the earth are not only mostly gone but a new race of giants hasn’t appeared to take their place as influences and inspirations for future generations.