Taking the bittersweet joy of jazz to the Karoo

The small but perfectly formed town of Prince Albert shimmers in the singular Karoo light with all the promise of sweet respite from your weary travails.

It pops up, white, incandescent like a chimera at the edge of an oasis — a sentinel marking time at the gates to the great unfolding desert that lies beyond the last padstal at the foothills of the mind-boggling Swartberg Pass.

There is something quixotic in the people who choose to play in these sweet parts. The town has  magic about it — and once it has taken hold  of them, people of all stripes find themselves drawn into the fold.

Which is approximately what happened to Brenda Sisane, who for more than 30 years has been synonymous with the fine art of listening — really listening - to jazz, whether on the radio (a hall of famer at Kaya FM) or through her wonderful work in events and jazz collaborations all over South Africa and the world.

In her case, the town sent out an advance party from the Prince Albert Community Trust. One of the town’s children had won a music competition and Brenda was on stage in Cape Town discussing the imminent International Jazz Day (April 30),  jazz GOAT Herbie Hancock's Unesco project.

“Herbie said to me we are here to help children, and what he has come to learn is that we can do it through jazz because it can break boundaries, it can go into territories of war, strife, struggle, poverty and so it can speak any language.”

In 2020 the programme was to take place in South Africa, but then Covid struck.

And so during the bleakest days of the pandemic, Brenda found herself planning the Prince Albert Journey to Jazz Festival as its creative director after the townsfolk extracted a promise on that stage in Cape Town that she would bring jazz as part of the outreach programme of the International Jazz Day to the most rural and distant of towns.

A core team of eight principled and dedicated women took this brave idea and made it a joyful reality for the youth of their town, spreading the word about Prince Albert, one blue note at a time. 

Last weekend their vision bore fruit — almost to their own surprise, Brenda tells me over breakfast at The Whippet in Linden.

The new stylish panelling and mosaic floors have taken this Linden classic into seriously chic territory. I am delighted that its old school hipster offerings of avo toast are still intact along with all the accoutrements necessary for contemporary brunching.

Brenda explains how the entire festival was staffed by the town’s youth, giving the enterprise a lightness of spirit and a hopeful glow while the headline acts of globally renowned South African jazz musicians such as Melanie Scholz played in venues across town — from restaurants to hotels and a magnificent land art installation. 

Everyone pulled together. Recalling how she felt on her first visit Brenda sighs: “I saw that rock as I was driving into this huge mountain range, and then this flatland and I really could imagine prehistoric life. I said we need a programme to bring out this music that lives here. We can revisit that with jazz. The funders really must have looked at us and thought what were we smoking?”

Brenda speaks in the tones of the haunting melodies she so loves. I ask her where she first found her voice.

“Maybe it was in that first listening session with my friends. My mom had just moved from Meadowlands to Mofolo and I met these girls and they said they have listening sessions all the time.

“So I went to my dad and said what should I take from his records. I took Letta Mbulu. So it became an incredible conversation. Girls, music, boys. I mean, we were teenagers.

“I am part of that 1976 crowd that stopped going to school, and so I found this lovely job at the Rand Easter Show, at a stand for Sun International and Bop Airways.”

She moved to Bop and her listening sessions continued. “My friends told me there was this opportunity for a female disc jockey.”

It was a fait accompli. But in 1994 she knew she had to come back to the incredible post-apartheid Jozi energy and joined the fledgling Kaya FM team behind the mic and behind the scenes, and has spent a lifetime cultivating extended listening sessions on a national scale. 

What then is the power of jazz? 

“I understand it as the freedom to listen to music which is considered complex. But it’s that dichotomy that I love — that you can listen to it as a nobody, like myself who didn’t go to music school, but it's got this appeal. I can get lost in it and it opens my mind to other people’s culture.

“Once I get involved in jazz I want to learn what Japanese jazz means. In Ghana what is jazz? Is it really American? And why does it sound this way in Africa? But above all, it is healing and if you delve into its practice you realise it is a democratic platform. Musicians respect each other and learn from each other, which is very attractive to me.”

Her earliest memory in song format has her grandfather, a Sophia Town jazz saxophonist with sharp tailoring,  humming a famous 1960s doowop around the kitchen table.

It is a buoyant scene that bubbles into a full blown tableau — that celebratory week between Christmas and New Year in Soweto, with children running and playing in the street in their new clothes, popping into houses to sing for the adults who are taking a momentary break from their endless cares amid the dark days of apartheid.

The soundtrack to all this bittersweet joy is jazz. And it is resounding from its newest outpost in the Karoo.