JAZZ: Jazz travels through history and community in the Klein Karoo

The Journey to Jazz Festival, held in the epic Swartberg Mountains, hosted the elders of South Africa’s musical community while also fostering the talents of local youngsters and aspiring artists.

The air is still, breathless, aside from the vibrations of Zoë Modiga’s voice as it is amplified by a natural amphitheatre in the Swartberg Mountains. She is paying homage to the great South African tenor saxophonist Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi.

There is a magic in the night-time stillness. A full moon, luminescent white, molten and bright, emerges over the shadow of an ancient ridge as Modiga finds words to Mankunku’s 1968 classic about the black condition during apartheid, Yakhal’ Inkomo.

A vertical collection of rocks lit up behind the Journey to Jazz Festival stage appear as a solemn sentry, standing guard between worlds: between the physical and the supernatural, the present and the past, political consciousness and amnesia, and the imaginings created by the silence between the musical notes.

I am transported back to this moment the next day during a masterclass with the inimitable guitarist and folksinger Vusi Mahlasela at the Showroom Theatre, a gorgeous Art Deco building on Church Street in Prince Albert in the Little Karoo.

Journey to Jazz creative director Brenda Sisane is in conversation with Mahlasela about his process, his politics during apartheid, his view of contemporary South Africa and what his friend, the late novelist Nadine Gordimer, described as “his accent” – the combination of guitar-playing, voice and lyrics born in Mamelodi. It has resonated through the country to such an extent that the troubadour has earned the nickname “The Voice”.

Sisane is talking about the role of art, and jazz especially, in a “fragile” democracy such as South Africa’s: “It is about bringing the pain of the past into the hope of the future,” she says. “Hope is a very difficult thing, but it is better than to be cynical.”

But there is no hope without acknowledging history’s pain. This is an essential, but often ignored, part of South African post-apartheid politics.

This notion, however, is characteristic of some South African jazz, from compositions such as Mannenberg to the lived experiences of musicians such as Mankunku who, in the 1960s, performed with a big band at Cape Town’s City Hall, but, because of the blackness of his skin and the whiteness of the audience and the rest of the band, did so behind a curtain. A white performer mimicked the great man’s playing.

Journey to Jazz, a plucky, community-driven jazz festival that completed its fourth editio