kagablog

this review first published on deon skade’s blog acoustic strings

St Clements, 191 Musgrave Road, Durban 4 September 2010

“The rare experience of virtuoso players in complete improvisation THAT REALLY WORKS is back! HA!Man and Ant Cawthorn-Blazeby have given audiences some thrilling excitement in the past and they are building on it.”

I wonder……I wonder: do people really understand the ‘ethics of improvisation’?

Many years ago, as a dancer…..I always left areas of choreographed performance for improvisation….but it seemed to me at the time that people interpreted this as the ‘do anything’ phase. I was always hard pressed to explain the level of expertise and concentration required for this aspect of a performance…..for surely the risk is ‘all or nothing’ from a threshold of the deepest integrity that is so demanding at the time.

And now 2010……?

The HA!Man….and Ant Cawthorn-Blazeby….I cannot fault them on their integrity….for the interplay of these two artists was without fault in the sense that fault always lead to an evolving brilliance.

The threshold for constructive improvisation is ALWAYS prowess. This allows the participants the freedom of surety of knowing that the level of engagement is never crass or arbitrary….while at the same time allowing space for error of judgement….which is never actually that because the ongoing ability to grasp the resonance of connecting/searching is always respected as a transformation………an opening of vulnerability. Metamorphosis is therefore an ongoing state of tuning in to the dynamic of interpersonal experience where inspiration is deeply respected as the muse of the outcome. This requires the performers to be intrinsically in tune at a heightened level of intuitive interplay with one another without the fear of an egoistic ‘take-over’. This allows the seeming domination of rhythm and/or virtuosity of the performers to be thrown at one another as a challenge/risk to the spirit of improvisation which provides the spark that raises improvisation to the extraordinary.

I found the performance thrilling!

An absolutely interesting book cover of a Johannesburg’s famous building with a drizzle of light to go with the theme of Jozzi being well known for its lights. A well managed cover design that says “pick me” with a smooth feeling cover that one can run by the chick to get the literal feel of the cover.

The Wena title surely administers and corresponds with the beauty of the colors used and the reader is challenged to think of the meaning “Wena” since this title is in Nguni language meaning “YOU”. I had to think whether the Wena is directed to Johannesburg or Wena directed to a person and the only way to find out was to read the book. The book cover does not introduce poetry but since Ntsiki has done well with the media appearances and pre-marketing the book it became obvious that this is her piece poetic offering.

Surprisingly the first 2 pages are blank so obviously with creativity around one has to keep a space to learn something new if off course that was one of the intentions. Wena is a poem about a guy who is convinced that he “has it all” in terms of ladies. Extracted from the third stanza is:

“ Bendi kwenye’kasi kuthwa awujoli he yake s’thandwa sam

Oyini nhliziyo yam

Kwashukuma umzimba wam

I am strong, black woman- angry

But I have my dignity

Take this epiphany

You were never worthy

I’ll get through gracefull”

Which she also features on the music video of DJ Sumthyn black. A beautiful combination of poetry and beats which Mazwai blends well with her voice that take a listener by storm. Indeed her strength lies behind her appearances on several videos and has a strong stage maturity as an artist.

Mazwai also responded with great enthusiasm to the woman that was humiliated in Johannesburg at the taxi rank called Noord for wearing a mini skirt. Her expression and reaction to the saga went like this as per stanza

Noord Street Taxi Rank

“In a denim mini skirt

Her long legs carried her

Through her city

Nwabisa bald headed girl

In a T-shirt

Finding her way home

It was all so sudden

They dragged her skirt up her torso

They grabbed at her panties”

It is evident enough that she has a unique way of painting a picture of words for one to actually see the main picture in clear colours. This scene was documented and shocked the country when the taxi rank was turned to be a circus place embarrassing a young black woman who dressed her mini skirt unaware that it would ravage into a scene!

The very smallest or shortest poems are Boy Problems which reads:

“The problem of being a girl like me

Is the ability

To like more- than- one- boy- at- time

Ndinithanda nonke!

Also In my garden which reads:

I picked up all your cigarette butts,

Threw them in the dustbin:

Memories too.

Over all this collection is a masterpiece, sadly that I read it with eagerness and ended repeating some poems within 3 hours but I truly recommend it especially for the sisters. This anthology is Mazwai’s first of many to come I believe. She advises that you need to speak out than to die inside with pain. Whether abused or joyous you are advised to express yourself the best way possible. The book is said to be available at exclusive books and other selected stores.

The book is a 94 paged poetry with only 28 poems in it! With the rest of every second blank page I had to question whether again this is an application of creativity or just simple laziness and making the book look thicker with blank pages. The reader is cheated in this case as a result it is crucial to page through the book before considering taking it to the tiller. This book could have been done in 50 pages maximum as some of the pages have a 4 lines poems like My Garden and Boy problems. The blank pages could have rather been utilized for her art or some paintings to emphasize on her ideas or she could have taken some time to write more poems. Could it be perhaps Mazwai was pressurized to release a book? It is a matter of influence that could have came from the publisher to make shillings since she has done very well as a brand herself? It is a premature good looking work that could have been given more meat as a reader is left with a skeleton to bask than the real meat of the idea.

Yes the poems themselves are beautiful especially the consciousness and liberal mentality that Mazwai approached Wena to indulge a subject of self assertiveness more especially to young girls. Most definitely I rate it as high influence of change that makes a young person to think outside the box. I think Mazwai can either concur or tarnish with my thinking that the book was prematurely birthed but pre-maturity does not necessarily mean that one cannot make it as she backs it up with her super outstanding branded self poetic stature. It is a risky situation to release a book of this nature unless you have a good back bone like Mazwai’s as you can suffer vulnerability towards adapting to the nature outside the womb.

It is not hard to see that she pays her utmost respect to her ancestors as it appears in a poem called Ghetto Princess which says a lot about her background and upbringing. Her Xhosa mixed with English is well blended and would be enjoyed mostly by Xhosa speaking and the rest of the Nguni majority. Ntsiki Mazwai, will also be recognized as being a major part of Feela Sista Poetry Collective.

The book is said to be available at Kalahari.net and Exclus1ves book shop respectively.

“There is such a vast difference between a thought, and writing a thought. The gap between them can never be bridged.”

I have never read a book that so perfectly describes the abject uselessness of being an academic as does Johan Van Wyk’s “Man Bitch”.

“Literature that is moral is boring.”

Man Bitch is structured as a tryptych – Durban/Europe/Durban followed by a lengthy coda – Durban/Mozambique/Durban/Poland/Durban. The European sections of the book describe the protagonist Johan Van Wyk’s journeys as a traveling literature Professor. The inanity and emptiness of “Professing”; of literature itself as a means of making a living – is excoriatingly portrayed.

“I read Dostoyevsky’s Possessed, an old Everyman’s edition. I was surprised by the relevance to my own situation. I felt like his character, Stephan Trofimovitch, who was overtaken by historical events, and who felt that all the social changes amounted to was ‘that he was forgotten and of no use.’, I thought that, similarly, my life was useless, and my book was an attempt to remind the world of my existence.”

The real life of protagonist Johan Van Wyk takes place in the seedy bars, clubs and hotels of Durban where he meets a succession of women whose working hours are after dark but not once in the book does he refer to them as “prostitutes”. He loves these women, or at least experiences the nausea that would appear to be the most consistent symptom accompanying the condition of love; and the many women that he is variously engaged in relations with all confess to varying degrees of love for him. But what is this love? Perhaps the book’s most important project is to try to understand what love means in the context of a life as unrelentingly grim as is lived by these characters who share a great deal in common with the ubiquitous cockroaches that, according to Van Wyk, “only fucked.”

“Why does one write a diary, why duplicate what is already in the mind, and why if you are only writing for yourself, I asked myself as I walked back from the consulate. Memory needs refreshing, I thought. Back at the flat, an Indian in the lift told his girlfriend: “Kaffirs like ants here. Need a can of Doom to spray.” I opened my flat window; the breeze, the voices of an excited drunken crowd and sirens floated in. I heard the sounds of hell. I sat on the toilet, trampled a small cockroach, and thought that cockroaches cannot communicate. They only fucked.”

That the women Van Wyk loves are all black is important. (There is one exception – Polish Ewa – “and for the first time in years my fingers traced tenderly the outlines of a pale white body…”) That Van Wyk is a boer is important. When, after many years away, Van Wyk returns to Bloemfontein to visit his parents, he is physically repulsed by his own kind. “In the early morning, the geese woke me. I played tennis against a wall until the retarded boy from across the road, joined me. He told me how he assaulted a maid with a golf stick, for misplacing the keys to his fishing trunk. I felt nauseous. Even the innocent and the disabled had internalized the abusive behavior of the place.”

Van Wyk’s monotone, his unhurried, dispassionate descriptions of the dystopia he finds himself in, echoes the best of Georges Bataille’s fiction (Madame Edwarda; The Dead Man) while his ruthless self analysis (of the protagonist “Johan Van Wyk” as well as of the author “Johan Van Wyk”) brings the early Céline to mind. This brief novel is on par with Raymond Radiguet’s “The Devil In The Flesh”. Nothing in South African literature prepares one for the scalding jolt of reading this book. Van Wyk has written from outside the paradigm of the geographically South African literatures that have appeared to date.

“Love is a kind of hell.”

This is not a cheerful book and the unrelenting detail of the filthy environment can bog one down and yet the overall achievement of Van Wyk is to populate this landscape with real human beings and a real sense of collective humanity. He is one of very few so-called white South African writers who has achieved this when writing about so-called black characters. Reading Van Wyk exposes the inhuman cyphers that pass for “blacks” in Brink and Coetzee as just that – cyphers. “Man Bitch” is also fascinating in its rich evocation of the underbelly of the city of Durban and it would be appropriate if the book is filmed by Claire Angelique, whose autobiographical film “My Black Little Heart” is a perfect companion piece for this unique and essential novel.

“I returned to South Africa through a misty Swaziland. The rivers were overflowing, and raindrops were gliding like sperm on the front windscreen. There was a feeling of elation, when the city of Durban became visible with its neatly painted high-rise buildings and shopping centres. I did not have money for a taxi, so I decided to walk to my flat. I walked past a tramp looking dead and rotting in a flowerbed next to the pavement. Back in my flat, the power was off, and the place was filled with a strong smell of death. I opened the fridge, and realized that it was blood from meat that smelt. I opened a bag of cashew nuts, to discover that it was full of maggots. On the switchboard, I saw that the electricity had tripped out. It must have been lightning. I was tired and collapsed on the bed, and then took a cold bath.”

First published in 2001 by Van Wyk himself, it remains scandalous that this book has not been picked up by a major South African publishing house.

Aryan Kaganof

this review first appeared here

édité par Gary Cummiskey et Eva Kowalska, éditions Dye Hard Press, Sandton, Afrique du Sud, 2009.

Avec cette collection d’essais le poète Gary Cummiskey rend hommage posthume à son compatriote homologue Sinclair Beiles (1930-2000). Nous avions écrit un article sur le dernier recueil de Cummiskey “Aujourd’hui est leur Créateur” (voir notre Kagablog du mois de décembre 2008). Cette fois, nous aimerions tirer votre attention sur cette collection essentielle. Nous avions acquis une bonne impression de Cummiskey comme critique littéraire par sa revue “Green Dragon”. Maintenant avec cette collection d’essais notre première impression est confirmée.

Ce n’est pas parce que Beiles est resté longtemps en Grèce que nous avons été motivés pour écrire cet article mais par le fait que Beiles était un proche des beatniks américains et qu’il est resté pendant un moment à Paris. Il avait co-habité avec eux à l’Hôtel parisien Beat (aujourd’hui renommé “Relais Hôtel Vieux Paris”). “Le fait que Beiles avait une collaboration avec les écrivains Beat à Paris était une coincidence brève. Le fait aussi qu’il était plus un fan qu’un similaire dans cet hôtel Beat ne renverse pas son identité Beat” (une citation de Eva Kowalska, op.cit., page 85).

Le critique littéraire américain George Dillon Slater écrit : “Sinclair à Athènes faisait son autopromotion et pratiquait la psychanalyse dans un café près de la place Kolonaki. C’était une bonne idée parce que les Grecs s’autoproclament extrêmement intelligents”, op.cit. page 67. Cette touche ironique de Slater vient compléter notre estimation personnelle de cette “inteligentsia du café expresso” grecque et pourrait justifier la dépression nerveuse de Sinclair Beiles en Grèce : “Souvent Sinclair était interné dans une clinique grecque pour retablir et après il venait chez moi dans l’île de Hydra pour reposer” (op.cit. page 63).

Gary Cummiskey est un poète important et avec ce livre il nous confirme qu’il est aussi un grand humaniste des lettres.

écrit par Dionysos ANDRONIS

Director Michael Haneke, awarded the Palm D’or at last year’s Cannes Fest for ‘The White Ribbon’, is an auteur fascinated by everyday Peter and Annah placed in highly stressful and/or traumatic situations, preferably where said stress is hightened one dazzling notch at a time.

Essentially a meditation on hyper-gratuitous violence in mainstream cinema (the bigger the explosions, the more gushing the blood, the merrier the popcorn & Coke go down); and the audience’s implicit complicity as safely remote voyeurs, ‘Funny Games’ has widely been condemned for its sadism and brutality, though most all its violence occurs outside the camera’s frame. Indeed, compared to your average PG-13 blockbuster, it is gore-free.
What so unnerves the viewer as the film progresses – outside of the emotional realism – is that they become aware of their implied presence: As Haneke has stated, “If you enjoyed this film, you missed its point.”

‘Funny Games’ is what happens when you and your wife and kid go to your holiday-home for the weekend, and two politely smiling young men knock on the door. Only thing is you’re out boating with the kid and the wife recognizes them (she saw the two chatting amiably with the neighbours as you pulled into the driveway). And soon, and subtley at first, the world starts going wrong.

Wife opens the door, and the first of the two protagonists, soon joined by the other, politely asks if he can borrow some eggs for the neighbours. By the time she returns from the kitchen the two have slipped into the entrance hall. This seemingly innocent trespass, combined with their identical white gloves, and the fact that they keep alternating names, depresses alarm-buttons. When Husband returns a minute later, the wife insists he throw them out.

The two, however, are there to stay, and swiftly their conversational manipulations become subtley menacing; and when Husband finally loses patience and strikes one of them, they transition to physical manipulation, breaking one of his legs with a gholf-club.
>From here the evening degenerates into the morally void twosome drawing the family into increasingly sadistic games. When one of the two (his name interchangebly Paul, Tom, and Beavis, to the other’s Peter, Jerry and Butthead) announces: “I bet that by tomorrow 09:00am you will all be dead” the atmosphere within the camera frame is tangibly nauseating.
As the family-members look to one another for assistance which won’t come, Paul turns to the camera and asks you, the viewer, which way You bet.

Through various ingenious techniques Haneke keeps bringing the audience to question their ethical role as viewers. Slyly slinks you into account..

A chilling film; and a complex, brilliant interrogation (and anticipation) of the desensitizing age of hyper-mediation.

[first published in Muse magazine]

Led Zeppelin. Even their name suggests weird alchemy. The crude, neutral vowels framed by bold consonants. It reeks of spell-craft; some nether variation on ABRA-CADABRA perhaps? Mysterious knowledge, mystic mastery.. sex.

There’s something about Led Zep’s lascivious strut, its knowing sneer, its falsetto-tight leather pants, and little oceans of hair, that just seems to resonate with the female soul, and anatomy. As a teenage male I couldn’t fathom a link between attractiveness and the Zep, didn’t know it existed. I knew Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp were sexy, but that’s because Die Huisgenoot said so, and because they looked like girls, and they had that double-explosive terminal consonant thingie going.. Super excited and a tad taken aback at a female friend’s owning of the entire Zeppelin catalogue, reverently kept in its box-set frame, shrined in its special
corner of the room, my teenage self asked her what it was that she dug so much about the Zep: Plant’s impressive quasi-feminine range? Bonham’s thunderbrush drum-strokes? Page’s sweeping, grandiose compositions?

“Sex.”

I wasn’t expecting a monosyllabic answer, and certainly not that one.. What about the bombastic poetry of Page’s guitar, Plant’s cooing howls – their unequaled ability to invoke an episode from Tolkien’s pages with lucid clarity? The look in her eyes was distant, and utterly focused. That kinkiest of three-letter words was still framing her lips. I fell in love with her a little bit right then.

But enough about copula enigmata. Zeppelin brought the noise. They wrought the lightning. They cast their spells thick. Credited with laying down the framework, or kicking open the door, for heavy metal (What’s that? Black Sabbath you say? Sabbath just
played the Blues so slurringly and at such phenomenal volumes that it sounded really dark and satanic. Not to diss Iommi’s voluptual riffing and gifted three-fingered fretboard runs, nor Ozzy’s cockney devil anti-charm.

But Zeppelin had the epic, dark fantasy, the majestically occult wardrobes. They had riffs hewn from the depths of Hades; pick-up lines straight off Beelzebub’s tongue.. Their three-pronged guitarist owned Aleister Crowley’s Loch Ness castle for fuck’s sakes).
Zeppelin’s image was aided and abetted no end by their fierce mystery – they just didn’t do press. You only heard them on vinyl; you only saw them onstage; you only added to the dancing web of folklore and myth that seemed to halo them in that dazzlingly Faustian mist of theirs.

By the time ‘Houses of The Holy’ broke the levee right down, Led Zep had near single-handedly carried Rock through its sudden post-69 slump with the crunchy blues crash of Led Zeppelin I & II – all sound and fury and faeries – and then cemented their Lords of the World status with III and IV, their accumulative peaks. They had pretty much eclipsed their own sizeable ego’s.

‘Houses of The Holy’, then, was an album conceived in a generous sun-spot set in a gentlest glade. With nothing left to prove they toyed with new directions, afforded themselves new layers of production. The lazy yet impossibly rhythmed ‘The Crunge’ (is that, like, 17/8??) was a triumphant nod to Mr. James Brown, all dusty funk; while ‘Dy’er Mak’er’ did the ‘effortlessly cool quasi-reggae’ jig; the prog majesty ‘The Ocean’ simply hypnotizes with Plant’s acapella outro, a swirling invocation; and then the almost sunny drizzle of ‘Over the hills and far away’ – building from kinky, strumming folk to arena-sized boom, before sighing out with a sacred chime-poem.

The further Out they ventured, the more they stamped their essence unto new territories. ‘Houses of The Holy’ shimmers with post-conquest glow – a soul sated and irrepressibly at peace. Obviously, no Led Zep album would be complete without quintessential Classic Rock, which they lay down here with opener ‘The Song remains the same’, sliding from tongue-in-cheek Country to out-and-out rocking Stomp and back; and epic Swords & Sorcery haunt ‘No Quarter’.

Classic stuff.

[first published in Muse magazine]

From the little planet of characters that grandmaster of magic and suspense Christopher Lee has portrayed – Dracula; Fu Manchu; Jekyll & Hyde; The Mummy; Rasputin; Saruman, and a host of lycanthropes and other curiously seductive creeps, over the course of 266 (yes, you read right) films – it is his merry jaunt as Lord SummerIsle, pagan king to a Scottish island of bushy-tailed lasses and randy Scotsmen, that he cites his favourite.

Deliciously coy, sillily fun, and surprisingly tense, ‘The Wicker Man’ follows the ill-fated good intentions of a particularly pompous, gloatingly righteous Christian copper who plunges into the hedonistic din of the island (think Rambo armed with a Bible), in search of a reported missing child. With Biblical disdain and sexless passion he troops from one side of the isle to the other, scowling and shaking fists at the salacious, carefree ignorance (coated with just a shimmering hint of malice) of the ever-frolicking heathens.

The more he rants and raves the gentler the the villagers’ condescension becomes, and the scenes he stumbles into become increasingly threatening to his spiritual well-being – children at the local school taught about the phallic tree of Life’s creative force; a spring-hare buried in place of the missing girl; a casual midnight orgy outside local pub ‘The Horned Toad’ – and, as the film unravels ever faster into a dizzyingly pagan crescendo, the good copper finds himself on ever shakier ground, surrounded by carnival masks and leering frenzy.

Wonderfully wicked stuff!
With a lovely, lilting Scottish folk soundtrack to boot.

“First published in Muse magazine”

this review first published on deon’s blog acoustic strings

For the first time in years I managed to read a book and finish it without putting it down! It is not because I know, and I’m fond of the author of the pertinent book (Tebogo and the Haka), but because I love literature and would like to read as many books as I can in my younger days whilst I am still energetic and dynamic.

I picked up a copy of Tebogo and the Haka, written by the enigmatic and unfathomable writer (Mr. Bolaji) at the library for personal interest, and my interest was glued on the characters such as Tim who seems to have all the information yet he keeps it in a 4 page notebook “under his pillow”

Yet I must admit that I feel sad that at the end of the book, the author in this case lets the female criminal go scot-free, whereas she should have ended up behind bars with the keys thrown away. Could it be that the author is indicating that in our society criminals can be let loose as the community keeps quiet about it! We are talking of the death of two men who died almost at the same time due to poisoning by the same beautiful woman whom Bolaji describes as a “peach” with her height, light complexion and long legs!

Could it be that beautiful women can get away with murder, as jail does not accommodate external beauty? In my reading of the book, I looked at the Haka and I must admit that I saw the Haka in my illusions as I even pictured the tavern, the snooker, the bedroom of Sol and even could see other characters like Mpho doing a bit of mopping the floor. I could even imagine the jew box machine and the dance floor (which is not mentioned in the book) – that is how the book led me to have my own imagination as Bolaji’s fictitious skills took me to greater heights and I concluded with the sad, yet happy ending that after all the criminal was finally figured by the investigator Tebogo.

I am glad that the author remained morally spot-on, as I thought that perhaps the sexy lady was going to “bribe” Tebogo seductively to keep him quiet after he had figured the truth about the murder she committed. I also thought that if Tebogo was not so loving and faithful to his wife then he could have fallen for the dangerous lady’s charms, as they even shared a questionable kiss on the mouth! To me, this kiss means something for a reader to figure out!

Nothing much is said about the character of Tebogo’s wife, Khanyi. As a result I ask myself if Tebogo is morally outstanding in his gesture towards women, or his character limits him to explore as the cliché “every man’s weakness is a woman”. Tebogo does us well for a change that a man can be faithful to one partner, so I give the author a pat on the back for this one as he promotes faithfulness and being trustworthy to our partners.

Going back to the character, Tim, I question his integrity as he apparently knows the killer of two men. How many crimes does this character witness and keeps quiet since the tavern is not such a safe place after all? He remains a “coward” in my own opinion, and I would not like to see this happening in our communities as this could perpetuate crimes committed and unreported. One of the questions that remained in me after reading Tebogo and the haka was: what will the “ flamboyant protagonist” do after Tebogo has returned with the report of what happened in Ladybrand?

I discovered that the Haka is actually a song that is sung by the New Zealand rugby players and I imagined our people in the townships doing even the riveting dance! I discovered that the late Sol was quite an influential personality, as it was said that whilst he was still alive the performers of the Haka were more energetic than after his demise. What a fiction by Bolaji! The song is sung in a Maori language from New Zealand.

Well, Sol on the other hand richly allows us to learn and acknowledge his death as a womanizer and also keeps us aware that one way or the other, every soldier must die in his own warfare!

Another impression I got as regards Khanyi (Tebogo’s wife) was that I would have loved to savour more glimpses into her romance with Tebogo (but of course this has been done very well in earlier Tebogo adventures like Tebogo Fails, and Ask Tebogo). In Tebogo and the Haka, was the author trying to explore the possibility of a long distance relationship, or she was not really in his mind much? ; as a result she was “suspended” throughout the book? We are only told of pictures and few phone calls and SMS’s.

Call me over-sentimental, but I personally missed Khanyi in Tebogo and the Haka and I am happy that in earlier, and subsequent adventures, she had returned to the bosom of her husband, so to speak! But I am realistic enough to accept that the Tebogo adventures involve detection and mystery, and are not supposed to be stories of romance! (like in Tebogo Fails – 2003) Detective work can be dangerous, and Tebogo won’t be expected to involve his wife is such investigations, eh? …but maybe it is a possibility worth exploring? I am a lover for literature, so lovers do explore!

“Vandalism as a crime has been allowed to exist by the system so that the attention may be diverted away from the real vandalism of the soul,” states Zim Ngqawana quietly in a moving documentary recorded in the badly damaged Zimology Institute following a break in.

Raised in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, Zim Ngqawana continues a lineage of great South African horn players that reaches back to such giants as Winston ‘Mankunku’ Ngozi and Dudu Pukwana. Schooled in jazz at the University of Natal, he went on to study with Yusef Lateef and Archie Shepp in the States before returning home in the early nineties. It was during the breakdown of apartheid that his musical spirit was really set free. Working alongside Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela, he went on to lead his own ensemble Ingoma as well as directing the huge ‘Drum For Peace Orchestra’ at Mandela’s inauguration. Following collaborations with the Norwegian San Ensemble, in 1996 Zim debuted with the acclaimed album Zimology heralding the arrival of a titan of the South African new wave. While indebted to US heavyweights like Arthur Blythe and Archie Shepp, Zimology drew heavily on Ngqawana’s Xhosa roots, combining folk melodies with an avant-garde militancy. This freeform ancestral music reached its zenith with the 2004 masterpiece Vadzimu.

While the messages in Ngqawana’s recordings have always been socially conscious, it is through education that he has made his biggest contribution to his community, setting up the Zimology Institute on a farm outside Johannesburg in 2001. Entering into his own quest for “knowledge of the self” he asked his students or “fellow travellers” to free themselves from the shackles of conformity and towards the liberating path of improvisation. Comparing the improvisations of jazz to the daily quest for survival in the townships, Zim’s study of free sound has been an inspiration to all those around him. One of those who opened his ears and his mind, was a young Cape Town born pianist named Kyle Shepherd who has become one of Zim’s brightest alumni, and one of the featured players in Aryan Kaganof’s incredibly poignant film Vandalizm.

“My concern now is about universal consciousness, a move away from the self, and music is the best vehicle towards realisation and freedom.”

Moving shaman-like around the dancing flames of a ceremonial bonfire, Zim Ngqawana wards off the flames with the power of his horn. This introduction to Vandalizm is a powerful analogy for how the teacher has channelled his rage at the actions of those who broke in to his beloved Institute. What follows is a healing ceremony of improvisation. A grand piano lies on its side, its keys played furiously by Shepherd while in another room Zim picks up a broken water pump and blows – creating a deep resonating tone. Into another part of the house and a toilet cistern is transferred into a horn. The images are both sombre and inspiring. It’s a while before the master speaks. “Improvisation is a willingness to move into the unknown,” he whispers thoughtfully. As the film progresses we hear more from the man who put so much into this community resource, addressing the post-apartheid issues that resulted in such actions, and in particular the chains of poverty that continue to hold the people back.

“Entertainment has its place, but our music is more about inner-attainment.”

Back in the Spring, I was fortunate to catch a screening of ‘Vandalizm’ at Cape Town’s City Hall prior to an intense duo performance by Zim and Kyle, promoted by the excellent black arts magazine Chimurenga based a short walk away in Long Street. As with mighty pairings like John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner, the saxophonist and pianist exhibit an intuitive flow where individuality and duality are given equal space. From the first note, the hip artsy crowd that have gathered for this event are transfixed. While Zim’s horn exudes both a fury and tenderness that seems to echo with the story of his nation, Shepherd’s piano is both meditative and probing, recalling Abdullah Ibrahim but not in awe of him. It’s a sound that was captured well by the journalist Miles Keylock of Johannesburg’s Mail & Guardian: “An impressionistic collage of South African jazz sounds, from slam poetic minimalist re-imaginings of Afrikaans Volksliedjies and Muslim calls to prayer, to goema groove deconstructions.” Or as Kyle himself puts it “my music is a direct representation of my traditions and the lineage of artists that came before me, and I am merely a portrait of their mastery.” With the night’s proceedings part of the slow process of fund-raising for the rebuilding of the Zimology Institute, we can only hope that other young musicians are given the chance to shine under the guidance of Zim Ngqawana.

andy thomas

this review first appeared on mondomix.com

“Out, damned spot…”
Blood is thicker than water. And it stays under your nails.

I only saw Aryan Kaganof’s short film “The Promise of Water” once, about two years ago, and I don’t recall many specific details, although I have listened to the eponymous Angels of Light song that provides the soundtrack many times before and after seeing it. The sense I got at the time of viewing was that the film concerned moral neurosis. To me, it expressed a desperate thirst for redemption, along with an abject knowledge that all the water in the world can never be enough to wash away the stains from a guilt-ridden conscience.

Deepened by the slow, menacing chanting which propels the song, the film’s drone of internal anxiety felt relentless. In the imagery of running water I saw a restlessness of the spirit rather than revival. The woman’s drinking and smoking were morbid physical manifestations of inner pollution, which provided no relief beyond surface distraction.

Trapped between denial of conscience – “there’s nothing to fear because nothing here’s real” – and dread of the dark repercussions of sins past – vengeance from those wronged – transcendence or separation from the degeneracy is not possible. “They live in your head and they travel your veins”…”Let their hate fill your mouth”… The horror is embedded within, deterministically, at a cellular level. With every breath it is sustained. “If you kill them enough they will look just like us”. There is no distance between “them” and “us” – brutalising another brutalises us. Rational apprehension is drowned out, drains away, surrendered in a flood of dumb terror and compassion. One is forced to go with the flow and submit – “Just as it was is just how it will be”. “The promise of water”, of escape and absolution from this violence, is a delirious mirage.

I experienced the film in its entirety as a meditation on the inescapable weight on the spirit of a sense of culpability: as a quietly chilling commentary on living with the legacy of racist oppression in South Africa, but also as a species of morality tale, one bearing a more universal meaning about the toxicity of guilt on a personal level.

Ce court métrage de 5 minutes réalisé par Aryan Kaganof en 2008 est encore une enigme cinématographique, ou plutôt un film à multiples interprétations. Il commence par un plan général flou en noir et blanc : on aperçoit un forme féminine de loin en train de boire et fumer. Les plans suivants deviennent plus rapprochés. On voit le visage en premier plan de cette belle femme qui est incarnée par Mika Le Roux, la galeriste de Johan Thom (voir notre article ancien sur “Les racines grecques des performances de Johan Thom”).

Les plans qui suivent sont aussi très rapprochés ou des détails même de cette eau d’un ruisseau en train de couler paisiblement. Il n’y a aucun souci de pénurie d’eau dans ce film joyeux et bref. Tandis que quelques pays africains sont marqués par ce grave problème, Aryan Kaganof surpasse grâcieusement toute référence pejorative et nous livre un essai vital, un essai baigné par la sensation fluide d’eau fraîche et vivifiante.

La chanson de “The Angels of Light” contient des vers métaphoriques sur l’eau, on dirait un cadeau divin. Kaganof aimerait suggérer métaphoriquement que son pays l’Afrique du Sud est une exception par rapport à la plupart des autres pays du continent, que son pays n’affronte pas directement ce problème crucial.

Tout est palpitant de vie dans ce film. Une nouvelle vie se prépare afin d’inonder le monde.

écrit par Dionysos Andronis