Babu jam

(photo from Babu's Face)

No, it's not a new something new to put on your sarmie. It's what happens when you put (from left) Rownan, Reza, Shane and Kesivan together in a room with some of their favourite toys.

Babu produces fine Jazz Fusion with an essence of the east thanks to a tickly fingered tabla player and the intricacies of classical indian compositions trickling in. Last night they seasoned their play with a smooth dollop of Buddy Wells, who is as tall as he is talented. What a treat.

Every time they play, you're guaranteed a fine articulation of excellent musical composition, and a sure build-up to a climactic crescendo which hits whenever and wherever it wants to. When the sound takes over like this, human beings seem to disappear into the music. The four (*um, 5 this night) let rip so well together, it couldn't be discordant if we paid them. (hang on, we do pay them, don't we? but do we pay them enough?)

It's evident that they love what they do, and that they're well matched as excellent, experimental musicians whose humility precedes them and whose passion for brilliant noise commands them.

BABU tastes good.
Take a bite.

kILLING mE sOFTLY (the sleepers)

photos.helen wesctott (hermanus. the next night)

A hallowed howl came out of R.O.A.R from the throats of The Sleepers last Friday night. It gargled blood, love and heaven and finished with a fine climax that brought inner walls crashing in on themselves.

Each time this band gets up on stage and breaks it down, the veneer of bourgeois bliss peels back another layer. Not that it’s about class - these boys with expensive toys work hard and play harder. (and anyway, we all know it’s a cult/ure war, not a class war (sorry, zinaid)). With their evil, equal mix of dark and light, The Sleepers are slowly waking us up to the fact that there is more to their music than meets the ear, and more to the mutliverse we call our hometown than withering winter wails.

Give Adam Hill, Steven Jacobson, Jordi Reddy, Nicolai Roos and Simon Tamblyn a chance and their scheming riffs and raids on rhythm will prove that the range of emotions broiling in slaapstad psyches extends beyond spring hope and summer bliss and winter blues into rage, reverence and wry detachment . I make no mistake with my take: The Sleepers herald a new season of the soul.

There’s a bit of a crossover going on here, and dissonance is a distant dream against the power of their sound. The harmony’s in their devilry. the guitars are so tight they meld and I haven’t heard a more articulate and delicate (sic) drummer in the city since kesivan cut the chords of my education (his is jazz fusion, by the way, and this is dark rock). Simon’s dissenting vocals offset any expectations that the popover may have left us with (a popover’s what you get when the morning after listening to too much commercial radio, and is best remedied with silence.) Altogether it mixes madly into something south of sane.

You’ll come out of The Sleepers gigs inspired. They carve catharsis out of sound, they curl toes and turn the night around.

Expect the ordinary and you will be sorely disappointed.

( in other words)

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...)

gigalot coz it's worth it

It’s impossible to be everywhere at once. But I do try.

On the whole, this Friday night is looking awesome for goodnoise across the city, but for one lone lass, it’s a bit too much at once. How’s this for a line up?

Japan and I	Zula
José Gonzáles	Tafelberg Tavern
Krushed & Sorted	Roosevelt
sShadoworkss	Armchair
Tonight We Die and SHU (pta)	Mercury Live

And that’s not even scratching the surface. There’s still affliction, the royal waiting room, and manyvarious clubs. Pubs. Bars. Cars. Streets. sheets… I’ll never get to my sheets at this rate; I’ll sleep in my car! If I sleep! Which I do. admittedly.

What I’d like to ask the booking agents is : why do you cram the full fare of the city’s soundgods into two short nights over the weekend? The answer’s implicit, innit? Money.

Money, money, money. We all know that venues make their cash off our co-dependent licquorific indulgences. And while a lot of us could easily notch ‘alcoholic’ on our weekend Hobbies list, most of us are beholden to its diametric opposite for survival, the Other Addiction. Another four letter word. WORK. (work? What’s that? .. ah. the thing you stop doing when you finally need to rest. Rest? What’s that? And so it goes on. Like I’m going on). It’s a bit hard staying up drinking beyond the witching hours just to listen to heart-wrenching, earth-stomping, soul-lifting sounds and still perform like human clones at work the next day. coffee is a thin disguise; the rampant abuse of the night before the morning after is all in the eyes! Shades look plain silly indoors. Bosses might be beasts, but they’re not dithering idiots. And anyway, besides being unable to afford it professionally, we can ill afford it financially! Which is probably the cruise control anyway. It seems as long as we can afford it, we’ll live the limits to the max, né?

So gigs are stacked up like a bed on bricks, Friday, Saturday, and sometimes Sunday (for the diehards in denial who wish Monday was a band name. As if. (I checked. It isn’t) We all know musicians don’t graft. Right? Wrong.

Don’t believe that some nice sound that makes sweetness in your ears is easily come by.

Have you seen the plastered fingers? Have you seen Kesivan after a particularly passionate gig? Elated. Exhausted. Etc. Music comes from the heart, but it grinds through the body, the brain… it’s no easy task, channelling. And there’s all the unseen stuff that goes into the audio synergy you see on stage– the preamble nitpicking and fiddling together to find a groove(noja, that’s the easiest part, perhaps), holding the frontlines at your day job to pay the bills and betties, scrounging around between the debts for more bucks to buy decks or a decent geetaar, explaining to your Beloved Other why you’re back at four am when the gig finished at twelve (“networking, darling”. “jou ma se networking” comes the terse reply), backstage haggling and pottering about around ums and aahs and how much of managers, bookers, venue owners and groupies to find the right slot on the right night… and then the delivery - music makers put their hearts and souls in the songs, and on the stage. They give us their grief and joy and ego and edginess. We soak it up, saturated by their humanity and talent. We feel ourselves through them. We feel each other. Yes. We do. (but CT boys are mostly well behaved, actually.) We should be grateful. And we are. Most of us are not able to be grateful seven days a week, however. (Unless you’re me, and you can’t help it) (of course, if you’re me, you’re also notorious for falling asleep at gently rocking retrogigs like Mikanic last week. Seeriyuss. I slept through five of the hottest tracks.)

Which brings me back to my gripe. Why all on one night? Yes, weekends are big. Big cash. Big easy. Yes, ok. But so is the demi-weekend, the Wednesday night that tides us over till our weekly dose of two-day freedom arrives). Why can’t we put more great gigs on this night? Coz I’m scuttling around like one of the million minion cockroaches that midsummer has spawned trying to keep up with the lineups. And I keep on missing fucking great stuff.

The consolation is : you’re spoilt for choice. So be a brave new world junkie, and gorge on good sound. (but don’t be too much of a drunkie driver, or you’ll end up looking like a pug. And it won’t be profound. I guarantee you.).

Put your money where your mouth is and let the love move through you. And have a drink on us. ANY day of the week….

(while I catch some zzzs in a cosy corner somewhere. Eish!)

jazz is the business

did you know that the live jazz at Asoka (kloof st) has made a Tuesday night its most popular?

it's free. it's full -on chill. it's fine music in a laid back atmosphere. come and have a beer. or a dom perignon.

[and kesivan returns in march....]

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.)