BABU, baby!

Story time for fine jazz fusion

Take a little Hot Water, add some Restless Natives and you’ve got a stew of local jazz improv that's gone all the way to India and come black to Africa.

Fittingly, the word Babu has both great and low connotations on the continent of India (erm, it is too a continent. If you’ve been there, you’ll agree), but in Cape Town it has only one: Brilliant, which fits well with words like Kesivan, Shane, Reza, and Ronan. A standing ovation from a demanding crowd at their Armchair gig a fortnight ago is evidence. Wish you’d been there.

Jazz is juicy. Jazz is not easy. It’s an acquired taste. We know. But the abstraction in jazz‘s musical narrative can alienate uninitiated listeners. Babu takes that to heart and to the extreme by breaking the set up into intriguing installments of an epic tale told by Kesivan. It embodies the music as much as it guides your mind. Whiskey time becomes story time without a bedtime under the careful hands of fine musicians who have found their mojo together.

They play like they love each other; tight, joyfully, and full of expression. Ronan’s incredibly sensitive touch turns a Tabla into an angel’s heartbeat. Kesivan is inspired, knocking the nonsense out of noise and never letting go of the rhythm. Reza’s quiet subjugation to his guitar belies his power over it’s twitches and tones. I’ve never heard distortions like that. At the flick of a switch or the pick and warp of a string he coaxes the voice of a sitar, a banjo, and a violin out of his baby, and then returns to its traditional articulation as if nothing unusual just happened. His machine is an uber-electric goddess in his arms. And he’s happy to worship while Shane holds it together with that affable effortlessness of his, apparently dancing with his baby more than plucking emotion out of bass notes.

They have a sense of humour too. Last time , after a heady buildup, after they’d killed off the baddies, they finally joined the protagonists in unholy union, which meant, of course, that they closed with a Love song. Very well. You’d expect a saucy, spanking climax after the way they wound you up through the journey. But. They gave the love song the gospel treatment. Just because you were expecting sex. And then they gave everyone a Tantric climax. Just because we thought they’d let us down.

Big up to babu.

Subjugate yourself.

live and lovely at The Waiting Room, Thursday, 28 June 2007
info: tel 083.640.6464

rkhota@telkomsa.net

Face it

(no myspace, yet, sorry; they seem to be too busy making great music...)

conFusion II

and further to that.

is this.

that

(ahem!)

i am also quite miffed that with all this musical global polyNation, people are still making mediocre, copycat music. (i'm the copycat, dammit!)

a good sound stands out. says something new. sounds like itself. and brings you relief.

look for good sound. and spread the word around the world.

Last.fm

is a good way to start sharing. if you've got broadband.

conFusion

it's becoming clear, as we near
2010 (which is irrelevant, except that the one half is twice the other)

that most music being made is some kind of fusion. alright. it's the next generation of audio evolution. but. we are still stuck in the naming and owning epoch. you know, that one where science rose up as the beast of all access (they conveniently forgot to point out that all scientific theory is, uh. theory. We're just lucky that some of that theory works. for now. though if the petrol price keeps rising and carbon emissions keep migrating for aMOREica, they'll need new ones fast or we'll fast be done in and poorly so). erm. so my point is that we're still compelled to name things, and genres are spared no mercy.

i'm guilty of it too. and i'm sorry, i'm on my knees, and upto my gills in alt-Pop-Metal-Rock fusion . and it just won't do anymore.

the idea that there are traditional schools of sound might be true in some senses, but in a passage of time, it is so very relative. once we had Pop, Rock, Jazz, and Classical. life was simple. or so they say. i was small. i can't remember. then Indy-Pop, Pop-Rock, and Rock-Jazz fusions came along. music morphed. Now everyone is mixing their metaphors with their music, and the proliferation is almost impossible to classify.

good! so let's stop pointing at and pointing to, and start clapping. what's in a name?

a successful Pop-Country singer-songwriter, (izzie aussie or yanki? and does it matter?>), Keith Urban, said something quite clever. He said, at the end of the day, it all boils down to whether or not you like it.

remember that.

caught in the closet?

One more secret is out. Closet Snare is cutting the edge of Cape Town’s fusion fashion.

Splicing contemporary jazz and unclassified Electronica that trips synapses and flips heartflows, these lads climb out the box, beyond whitespace, and throw all your expectations neatly out the window. it's tangibly sublime. their “consciously melodic”, effusive mix of melancholy and madness, held together by an implicit understanding. these boys don't rock; they break boundaries.

Closet Snare is
Kesivan Naidoo (drums)
Mark Buchanan (guitar)
Lee Thomson (trumpet and fluggel horn)
Sean ou Tim (bass)
Sibot (machines)


Though they’re pretty to look and magically more attractive in action(funny, that), it always helps to lay it on thick when it comes to aesthetic. Inka’s VJing adds is an excellent accompaniment to their musical brilliance and of live music’s second home, she mixes stilted motion shots and abstracted stills against warped club walls to underline your dreams…

For an earful and an eyeful, keep your nose sharp to snare the next leap out of the closet. (the fever returns in March.)