Cape Talk

To hear what you say, is there something about the physicality of it, the being there, the fact that every performance will be completely unique, especially in jazz? That maybe is the attraction in a kind of post-COVID world where I think we actually are craving something that's natural and organic rather than something that's you know virtual and artificial? Yeah, I think the attraction is the live instrumentation. I think for

From the 90s onwards, there was this fascination with electronic music, hence the rise of house music and hip hop DJs. But as I said, with COVID, a lot of us went online and started getting followers, and there was an attraction to the fact that people can create music with just instruments and not getting help from a computer. And so I think a lot of kids started picking up instruments from that.

And having big events, you know, big names behind big events, that must help the entire industry. You're able to do things with them. You're able to, you know, get excitement, get people talking about it. That must be a huge help. No, it definitely is. And I mean, festivals like the Cape Town Jazz Festival and the Standard Bank Joy of Jazz, they've got this great balance of bringing very popular artists, which obviously will bring in the audiences. Then they'll get the people who are led.

Known also performing, and from that, they get followed by those people who are following the popular people. So it's always important to strike that balance between the people who will, you know, bring revenue in terms of ticket sales and also upcoming artists. No, sure. Do you find that someone maybe comes to your club brought with friends or something and comes back of their own accord? I mean, to get people into it once they've had a

Taste of jazz? Yes, we've had a lot of people come back. I think there's this perception that jazz is boring and it's for all people, it's slow music. But you know, there's lots of different kinds of jazz, you know. There's Afghan jazz, there's American jazz, bebop, swing. So, you know, and the artists that we have at Sankai, we make sure that we have a broad

Line up of musicians who have different sounds so that we can attract different audiences. So that's how we approach it. I'm always intrigued by it, seems to me that jazz artists can really go for a long time. You know, they can be performing into their 70s, which is probably difficult to do with all other types of music. Even 90s. I mean, there's a lot of jazz musicians, legends. I mean, Abdullah Ibrahim recently passed away. I think he was.

So, yeah, there's longevity in jazz. I think because we are always trying to reimagine the music, reproduce the music, play it fresh. I think that keeps the spirit going, keeps the mind going, keeps the body going. Whereas, not to look down on other genres, I mean, I love hip-hop, I love house. It's sort of standard, you know, the feel is the same. It's just you know what I mean? But with jazz, it can always.