Blog: Joy of Jazz…
Some may remember her from Bongo Maffin, but many of us have come to love her as solo artist Thandiswa Mazwai. I won’t go through all the awards she won but BAM!, what a performer. What a show. I admit, I do have a little crush.
An activist singer. A struggle artist born into the wrong generation although tellingly born into the year of the Soweto uprising. There just aren’t the sheer political problems today but the roots, the history, the resonance is so strong in her – given that both her parents were political activists and she was constantly surrounded with books and potentially dangerous political discussion.
Biko, Fanon, Achebe, Nkrumah – she is about blackness, or I would prefer Africanness, and she still reveals many of the social ills that plague us. Check her out whenever, however you can.
Erik Truffaz. Smooth operator. Careful, calculated but with the freedom of introspection and the allowance of mistakes. Which just makes the performance all the more engaging.
I first saw Truffaz in 2002, at the then called North Sea Jazz Festival in Cape Town. I had only been in the city for a couple months and his combinations with his trumpet proved to be just the right settling in music. He seems to move around a lot, even appearing in SA often enough.
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