Creative Week is well named. It has a mountain for a mother, a Fringe for a centre, and this year it announces an event where the intangible helps us touch each other while we swim in something we can’t see. Surely you have no idea what we’re talking about, but its venue is one everyone will know. The beautiful, mysterious, and largely silent City Hall, which is soon to fill with song.
After a protracted process of negotiation and collaboration initiated by Creative Cape Town, The City Hall is once again the property of its people, and through a grant from the National Lottery Development Trust Fund (NLDTF), The City Hall Music Series makes its debut on the first day of Creative Week Cape Town, Friday 9 September and again on Saturday 10th September, 2011.
Local music lovers will be excited by the appearance of Thandiswa Mazwai (of Bongo Maffin fame) and jazzo Kesivan Naidoo and The Lights. Vocalist Thandiswa last year blew discerning Cape Town music audiences away at the Pan African Space Station festival and will no doubt deliver a spine thrilling display of harmonic vocals in her musical vernacular. Kesivan, otherwise known as the virtuoso who can, takes it upon himself to energise and elevate every audience. Dexterous and driven, he plays the drums as if he has every arm of Kali to hand, which is apt, considering Kali is the Hindu deity of time and change.
Just in time for change the bill also boasts international artists Ray Lema (DRC) and Chico Cesar (Brazil) making their Cape Town debuts.
Says Steve Gordon, coordinator of the music series with many years experience in the local and international music scenes,
“The “Ray Lema and Chico Cesar” duo brings on stage an intimate, and intricate sharing of the transatlantic experiences of these two bandleaders and musicians – a mix of languages and vocal styles - as this duo groove and exchange piano and guitar lines.
“Ray Lema was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but has been based in Paris for over three decades. Classically trained, Lema’s musical projects range from the “popular music” world (for example, his collaboration with Stuart Copeland of the Police), through to conducting the Sao Paulo Youth Orchestra in Brazil. Add his recordings with choirs in Bulgaria, and musicians in Morocco, and you have a small sense of the wealth of musical experience that he shares.
“Chico Cesar hails from the province of Paraiba in the north east of Brazil. The singer, songwriter and social commentator normally works with his own band, but during the past five years, has collaborated increasingly with Ray Lema. Paraiba is on the Atlantic coast of Brazil, and through slavery and other trade, has strong cultural links with the African continent.
Bring your ears to hear the ‘creative’ and the ‘cape town’ as the voice of the African continent rings out through The City Hall.
Tickets at R150 will be on sale at Computicket from 10 August.
[images (c) www.musicpics.co.za]
