Cape jazz

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Cape Jazz is a genre of Jazz as performed in the southern part of Africa.

The Cape part of the name, refers to Cape Town, South Africa. The leading exponents of this style are pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and saxophonists Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen. These three, together with bassist Paul Michaels, drummer Monty Weber and sax man Morris Goldberg, recorded the seminal Cape Jazz song, "Mannenberg" in the early 1970s.

The main inspiration behind Cape Jazz comes from the folk songs sung by people descended from the former slave communities living in the Western Cape, known loosely as the Cape Coloured or Cape Malay people. A street carnival parade or Mardi Gras was held each year on the 2nd of January. This event was the culmination of months of musical and dance rehearsal and community-based competitions, by various mostly mix race folk, and was known as Tweede Nuwe Jaar (Afrikaans). The performers known as Klopse, borrowed the painted faces and bright consumes of the minstrel style of New Orleans (now USA) and combined this with African and European music which was to be heard in the taverns and night clubs of the port city.

Some of this music is also more recently known as Goema, or Ghoema Jazz, referring to a particular wooden barrel shaped Asian style drum (also known in the Cape as a Ghomma) played by the revelers in the troupes in the aforementioned parade.

There is a new generation of Cape Jazz musicians of which the band called The Goema Captains are a good example. The group features Mac McKenzie and Hilton Schilder who have brought strong improvisational elements to this music. They have literally re-arranged Cape Traditional songs and jazzed them up.

The first commercial record reference to Cape Jazz is on the label compilation of Mountain Records artists released in 1993. The album collects the work of several of the label’s acts over a 12-year period. The thematic similarity in the compositions, all of which are original, very clearly illustrates this genre.

In September 2006 a cultural project was launched with a concert promoted by the Arts and Culture department of the South African Government, entitled The Cape Town Jazz Orchestra. This event brought together 16 musicians from all over South Africa to perform arrangements of works by different jazz composers including the work of Abdullah Ibrahim, who also performed at the concert, and a piece dedicated to and inspired by the late Basil Coetzee.