Kultur, Nach(t)kritik
Brit Jazz Week – Soweto Kinch and the poetry of jazz
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So last night I went to eagerly check out a new act (unknown to me and probably also to the local jazz aficionados) and I have to say I had a truly great time. The host of the concert(s) was the Unterfahrt jazz club on Einsteinstr. 42, by far the jazziest venue I’ve ever visited.
The only thing lacking were the thick clouds of smoke you usually picture when thinking about an American jazz bar from the 40s; the rest of the ingredients were all present: wine glasses clanking, voices echoing, walls vibrating, instruments resonating and music literally thundering in the small, underground, blue-red room. The room was packed with people sitting at their wooden tables, clapping so often and so loudly that you could barely hear a drum solo. The crowd was very mixed, from teenagers rocking a Bieber haircut to office girls on a night out to old gentlemen wearing bow ties, and they all seemed to fit in perfectly, mostly because of the brilliant atmosphere Soweto and his band managed to create.
It feels great when you’re told after every song that you’re part of a good crowd – and you know you’re not being lied to because the band sticks around jamming until closing time. I missed the first half hour of the concert but I didn’t feel like leaving the place at all for the rest of the night, mostly because of the two encores they played and because they cleverly mixed classical sounds with a lot of improvisation – all in all, they made old jazz sound cool and fresh again. The star of the night was of course Soweto, a true Londoner by accent, boasting a creative spirit that must have flown over directly from the Caribbean.
His background is interesting to look at, as his mom is a Jamaican actress and his dad a Barbadian playwright. Soweto himself is an Oxford graduate with a degree in Modern History, so it’s almost hard to believe that he had time to develop his brilliant sax skills to this level of professionalism – he must be naturally gifted, right? Apparently his true jazz education started after college, when he joined Tomorrow’s Warriors (a development program aimed at nurturing and developing talented young jazz musicians.) Eleven years, two albums and numerous awards later, he’s touring with his own band and is a reputable and acclaimed artist, both for his alto sax skills as well as his MC qualities.
Yeah, about that. If I was to criticize something, that would be the spoken word poetry he does. Agreed, he has a couple of clever rhymes and witty references, yet the general feeling of his written compositions resemble the class assignments of a bored Literature college student – they abound in style and color but lack profoundly in insight and substance. During his performance he alternated his lyrical compositions with his literary ones, and the latter often broke the rhythm. The big surprise came when he incited the audience to give him something to freestyle about – he asked for words that spelled out FREEDOM and what he got was: fortunate, radio, everybody, e-mazing, dollar, Oktoberfest and monkey. Now that’s a true cadavre exquis and a real challenge to any MC. But it turns out he’s a wordplay virtuoso as well, and he rapped and rhymed flawlessly, creatively integrating these strange words into a story of his daily routine. I remembered the phrase ‘happy like double rainbows’ to further quote and the good feeling that freestyle gave me will stick around for a while.
For his first encore he pulled a lovely joke on the audience by convincing us to ‘stroke the hippo’. Apparently the only rule of this dancing game is that whatever you might do to the left, you also have to do to the right. So all the people stood up and clumsily tried to mirror their dance moves, to the sheer delight of Soweto and the band. And that concluded a great evening of smooth jazz and lyrical razzmatazz, the last but one of the Brit Jazz Week in Munich.
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