Creative Cape Town

Wanlov the Kubolor is from Ghana.

The Culture Music Club is from Zanzibar.

With Cape Town being the crazily creative place it has been for a long time – and is becoming, more and more, as time passes – one is almost blasé in one’s reaction when you hear about yet another music festival putting down roots in the Mother City. But even the most hardened culture vultures will marvel at the Pan African Space Station’s PASS Festival, which will run from Wednesday 30 September until Saturday 4 October at venues across town.

Now in its second year, PASS is described by its curators/creators as a “musical intervention”. From 12 September already, a web-based radio station has been pumping out music, performances, poetry readings, speeches, debates and much more from its temporary base in Long Street. For more info, go to www.panafricanspacestation.org.za. Co-creator Neo Muyanga says:

“The station is the performance. “ With the radio station being web-based, so much more can be done with this multi-media experience. “ We ask people to blog – they comment on what they’re experiencing and so we also get their emotional responses to what’s happening.”

But Neo and co-curator/creator Ntone Edjabe (editor of Chimurenga) – collectively known as The Heliocentrics – are taking it further: the spirit of the radio station will be spilling into the streets of crazy, creative Cape Town from Wednesday 30 September, with musicians from all over Africa performing live at a selection of carefully chosen venues, from St George’s Cathedral, the Centre of the Book and the Slave Church in the city centre, to the All Nations club in Salt River and Guga S’thebe in Langa.

Acts include Malian kora master Toumani Diabate, guitarist Nothembi Mkhwebane, aka the Queen of Ndebele Music, the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, all the way from Chicago, Cameroonian funk master Frank Biyong and his Massak Afrolectric Orchestra, Zanzibarian taarab orchestra the Culture Musical Club, Ras G & the Afrikan and Ghanaian pidgin rapper Wanlov the Kubolor.

The festival ‘s “opening salvo” is War Chorale, by jazz guitarist Bheki Khosa. Neo and Ntone sent him a story by the same name, by Chilean writer and revolutionary Fernando Alegria, from which he created this hour-long collaborative experimental choral work.

The “institutional home” for the festival is the Africa Centre, a not-for-profit organisation which promotes contemporary African arts and cultural practices. It is also responsible for three other annual festivals in Cape Town – Spier Contemporary (art), Infecting the City (performance art) and Badilisha Poetry X-change (poetry) – as well as an artist-in-residency programme based in Senegal, Nigeria, the DRC and South Africa known as SPARCK: Space for Pan-African Research, Creation and Knowledge. Without them, says Neo, it would not have been possible to offer such a top-class musical menu for R30 pre-booked, or R50 at the door. “It is also a political statement on who can go where, when – as it has become affordable for almost anybody to attend.” For more, go to www.africacentre.net

Bookings can be done via Computicket or buy your tickets at the door. For the full programme plus venue details, click here.