02 JAN 2015 10:34
Regrets, musical ones, are an unfortunate part of my life. I regret that I missed my then favourite band, The Pixies, by a day in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 1989, when they were at the top of their form. And I also rue that I missed the on top-of-their-game hip-hop experimentalists Anti-Pop Consortium in Atlanta in 2002 – it was their last tour as they split shortly afterwards.
A more recent regret is that I also missed the album launch of jazz drummer extraordinaire Tumi Mogorosi’s Project Elo at the Orbit Jazz Club in Braamfontein in Johannesburg, last year.
Fortunately Mogorosi will play again (I won’t miss it again) here in Johannesburg and I’ve been able to buy the album on lovely vinyl edition. Project Elo exemplifies for me what has been one of the finest years for jazz in South Africa in a long time.
A magnificent The Orbit has played no small role in bringing us our exceptional jazz talent – exploding all of a sudden out of a boring old samey jazz scene. Week after week the classy, artist-centric club has managed to bring us brilliant artists like Mogorosi, Kyle Shepherd, Nduduzo Makhathini, Herbie Tsoaeli, Thandi Ntuli, Kesivan Naidoo, Benjamin Jephta and many more.
As the eloquent sleeve notes on Project Elo say, “when Mogorosi composed this suite for jazz musicians and opera vocalists he had never heard the previous successful attempts by Donald Byrd, Max Roach or Mary Lou Williams to combine these seemingly ‘unfriendly’ aesthetics”.
Project Elo’s spiritual jazz sees Mogorosi (27) team up with five highly accomplished jazz musicians and four opera singers who studied with him at the Tshwane University of Pretoria. It was recorded live with no overdubs was recorded live in a two days at Peter Auret’s Sumo Sound Studios in Johannesburg.
The album was released by British label Jazzman Records, and I could pick it up on vinyl. I spoke to Mogorosi at the end of last year and asked where the idea of recording with opera vocalists came from. “The suite was meant to bridge a cultural gap,” he said. “Where I was studying music at the Tshwane University of Pretoria there was an opera school opposite my department, so it was a natural progression.”
read more: http://mg.co.za/article/2015-01-02-good-vibes-and-jazz-for-the-spirit
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