Sunday 5 February
The Rainbow and Concerts SA kick off The Rainbow’s 2017 music program with a massive treat.
Shabaka and the Ancestors is a musical collaboration between UK based Shabaka Hutchings and the cream of contempory Jazz in SA. The band released their album Wisdom of the Elders in September 2016 and since then has been receiving rave reviews.
Shabaka Hutchings is a saxophonist, band leader and composer, part of London’s community of younger jazz musicians as well as the city’s thriving improvised music scene. For Hutchings, composition is a chronicle of the zeitgeist inhabited by a composer; an exposition of his or her search for meaning and the structuring of experiences in aid of recognising this meaning when it appears.
As part of the Caribbean diaspora, he sees his role as that of pushing the boundaries of what musical elements are considered to be Caribbean. Constantly evaluating the nature of his relationship with musical material and tradition, he describes his attempts at composition as wrestling matches with questions of where and how the Caribbean can be encoded, and what happens when it is exposed to the western classical music cannon.
Hutchings was born in 1984 in London, moved to Barbados at the age of six, began studying classical clarinet aged nine and remained there until sixteen. His primary project is the group Sons of Kemet, which won the 2013 MOBO Award for Jazz Act of the Year. In June 2014 Shabaka was invited to join the Sun Ra Arkestra, performing with them and recording a session for BBC Radio 3. He has performed and recorded with Courtney Pine’s Jazz Warriors, Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, Polar Bear and Soweto Kinch. Some of the many notable musicians he has shared the stage with include Jack DeJohnette, Charlie Haden and the Liberation Music Orchestra, Louis Moholo, Evan Parker, King Sunny Ade and Orlando Julius.
Through his work with South African musicians such as drummer Louis Moholo – who enthralled us in October at the Rainbow – and trumpeter, Mandla Mlangeni, Hutchings has been visiting and gigging in South Africa since 2014. The Shabaka and the Ancestors project was a natural progression from these musical collaborations.
Key contributors to the album, Mlangeni and pianist Nduduzo Makhathini, due to their own projects, will not be joining the group on this mini-tour or the extended European Spring tour that they are preparing for.
Joining Hutchings on the tour are Siya Mthembu, amazing lead vocalist of The Brother Moves On; saxophonist Mthunzi Mvubu, drummer Tumi Mogorosi, bassist Ariel Zamonsky and percussionist Gontse Makhene – all of whom have performed at the Rainbow in recent years.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuNID7KviuQ
Doors Open 1pm
TICKETS R120
Call: 031 7029161
The Rainbow, 23 Stanfield Lane, Pinetown
https://www.webtickets.co.za/event.aspx?itemid=409794326
Concerts SA Supporting Local Music
Concerts SA is a joint South African/Norwegian project housed under the auspices of the Stakeholder Hub within The SAMRO Foundation; it receives financial, administrative and technical support from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, SAMRO and Concerts Norway. By engaging with musicians, promoters, venue owners and audiences, the project aims to stimulate live music in South Africa by finding and implementing ways to create regular, sustainable performance platforms. Concerts SA also aims to develop an interest in and appreciation of live music by showcasing music performances and conducting workshops at schools.
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