With one witching trombone hurling hammers at walls covered with messy
art, expression found form in a room filled to capacity by dissenting revelers
in a season of atrocity.
A short fingered pianist ramming chords until my glazed eyes
showed me mirages of shimmering zebra skins, I was ablaze in a tin-drum furnace
on a cold Jozi near-winter kind of clime.
Bass chords blurted out from a shadowy skull illuminated by
starkly white eyes that closed and opened to far off rhythms carried like a dream,
fondling his fret, Thuto was a sailor who has lead a band of formidable young musicians over a
boiling sea.
The Jazz scene is quite hectic, misers and poets brush
shoulders and fake fists, and yet I sat there with a beer stuffed with my thumb,
legs folded in a contortionist’s wire sculpture, my mind racing baffled through
streets of a haunted suburb listening to new age laments.
Exiting for a smoke, drums pelt my gut with insane vibrations
and once outside, Westdene staring back as I feel comatose tarmac roads fill
and flush death machines headed for no specific destination, I knew I was enlightened
in the hands of music.
Elevated rather, even just this fleeting moment of euphoric
release executed through fingers, lips and stomping of angry black youth whose
weapon is solely art.
This was Afrikan Freedom Station on a day that witnessed
ghosts of Can Themba’s and Henry Nxumalo’s staggering jovially along avenues
that were to become death arena for a solid history of unadulterated liberty.
What a serial obsession with agonizing ecstasy? The young
bass maestro’s ensemble’s sound was pillaging all old norms of composition.
Watching explosions of delirious nostalgia on a shabbily
bearded face of a 57 year old car guard reminiscing about Masekela’s escapades
on rainy summer nights of prohibition and trespassing; I am left speechless.
Or maybe he was ghost gone rogue, telling tales crumpled
into waste bins and lavatory drains, or even buried under foundations of new
age gentrification projects housing restless workers and youths.
Jargon of pure sleaze weaved into a sober narrative of a drunken
bout, a story of derelict debasement that left legendary comas and poetry
avalanches on those who were bitten by the right venomous bug.
He slinks away contorted in a beggar pose towards a patron
vacating the wild plumes of sound screamed into sober microphones in what I
often feel a bogus art scene craze museum.
Distaste for self-censorship seems a credo for this band
ransacking all halls of jazzed up sex booths and gallows they each brought
along to this stage to be ogled lastingly by multi-racial crowds for a day.
This experience, though aged in its own skin, was fresh to
me after months in absentia and during a week two white farmers went on trial
for killing a black who happened to pick a sunflower from a sacred field.
Yeah, for months I was hibernating in a dusty bedroom and
cold tacky taverns; now thrust into a culture of upheaval that always fuels my
return to the city.
With this strange crowd I stormed heavens, an entourage
deployed to frighten angels with black beauty in full-scale mayhem and no
saccharine platitudes to the affluent; but rage against some unspeakable machine.
Punctuated by his odd glimpses at the crowd, the young
trombone player’s turbulence becomes an essence of an enthused protégé of
seasoned sound art inherited without brashness.
Applause rings all around, and whistling lips purse behind
cupped hands of lovers and loud mouthed blessers, yet the heavens are invaded
by suitably nefarious characters on aging instruments blurring angst anthems.
And tonight I remember, inferring that I am putting together
what was broken; a fervor and exuberant longing for the unexplored, which I
always found in spaces like The Afrikan Freedom Station.
