ARTIST...: Jacaranda Muse
TITLE....: September Muse
YEAR.....: 2012
LABEL....: Heavenly Sweetness
CAT.NO...: HS047
GENRE....: Jazz
TIME.....: 42:07 min
SIZE.....: 96.60 MB
QUALITY..: 320kbps/44.1kHz/Full Stereo
ENCODER..: FhG
SOURCE...: WEB
RLS.DATE.: 2012/11/11
WEBSITE..: http://www.bagpak.net
TRACKLIST
01) (03:39) Let You Go
02) (03:15) September Sun
03) (04:40) Thirty Five
04) (05:17) Emergency Exit
05) (04:12) Still In Love
06) (03:53) Kunakirwa
07) (04:42) Coming Home
08) (05:27) Moonlight
09) (04:26) Free Fall
10) (02:36) Underwater Subway
In the spring of 2011, when I was travelling the length and breadth of Africa with a
group from Paris, I interrupted my ômusical journeyö to take in the Harare
International Festival of the Arts (HIFA), held in ZimbabweÆs capital city. On a
rainy Sunday afternoon, a then completely unknown group gave its first performance,
just a few weeks after it had formed for the occasion. They hastily named their group
after a forgotten musical genre, Third Stream, whose standard-bearers they were. This
encounter between jazz and European classical music in the still-segregationist
America of the 1950s has long since disappeared, but not without gathering some fans
in the heart of southern Africa.
Like their American Third Stream predecessors, the three musicians on stage, Donald
Chifamba on cello, Vimbai Mukarati on sax and vocals and his brother Tinashe on
congas and marimbas, accompanied by the experienced pianist Filbert Marova, produced
a kind of music that resisted any kind of stylistic pigeon-holing. It also mixed the
influences of classical music and jazz but added in pop, soul and the melodies of
their Shona culture.
Far from the erudite elitism of the theorist of the Third Stream genre, Gunter
Schⁿller, their compositions had a simplicity of melody and an earthy drive that
entranced the audience and awakened my appetite for production.
Thanks to the enthusiasm of the Alliance Francaise and its Director Charles Houdart,
a date was made to record a CD of Jacaranda Muse, their new name, in December 2011.
So we shut ourselves away in the simple but practical Thulani studio for three days
of live takes together, in an effort to capture the raw emotion of their music.
The recording of this album was a first for the youngest of them but their performing
experience goes back to their early adolescence. Donald and Vimbai, aged 22, met as
schoolboys attending the prestigious Prince Edward School in Harare, a state
secondary school where musical education, both classical and jazz, plays an important
part and where Tinashe had also been educated a few years earlier. All three had
already toured in Europe or in the United States with other traditional, hip-hop or
classical music groups.
Filbert, the oldest member of the group, was the pianist with the Cool Crooners with
whom he played in France in the early 2000s, and who, for the last fifteen years, has
been a well-known figure in Zimbabwean ôtownshipö jazz.
Although it naturally incorporates the elements of their national culture, like the
mbira (the Shona thumb piano), it is impossible to reduce the music of Jacaranda Muse
to a specific genre or a geographical location. From the ôEnglish popö melody of
September Sun to the mutating jazz of Free Fall, from the ôwhiteö quality of the
timbre of VimbaiÆs voice to the sound of DonaldÆs classical cello, you will almost
certainly find your preconceptions about the supposed nature of Zimbabwean music
being overturned.
Going beyond the assertions of musical identity made by their predecessors or the
reductive Western vision greedy for easily digestible genres (Nigerian Afrobeat,
Zairean Rumba, etc), Jacaranda Muse, like their contemporary æcousinsÆ in Paris,
Chicago or Tokyo, have left stylistic arguments behind to produce a form of music for
the 21st century that is both authentic and drawn from many cultural sources.
Antoine Rajon
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