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Mail & Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mail & Guardian
Jazz in focus: Capturing a sound in image
Jazz in focus: The Peffers Fine Art booth at the RMB Latitudes Art Fair in Cape Town Jazz has to be seen live to be appreciated. That might sound like a platitude that could apply to any genre of music but, for me, it was a revelation. As a person whose ears were more finely attuned to rap and rock from a lifetime of listening, every attempt I made to listen to jazz in the privacy of my home ended in failure. Until I experienced it live. Some of the best moments of my life have been seated in a dimly lit room in front of a big jazz band. Nothing compares to seeing a six- or seven-piece ensemble playing at the peak of their powers, with an audience congregated to witness the holy communion of drums, bass guitar, double bass, piano, sax and trumpet. It was only once I had worshipped at the church of a sold-out jazz gig, and sat in the presence of the genre being created live and in the moment, that I was able to appreciate it. I had this on my mind last weekend when I encountered the booth hosted by Cape Town gallery Peffers Fine Art at the RMB Latitudes Art Fair. What I found was an exploration of South African jazz seen through the discerning eyes of legendary photographers. It was an encounter with a hard-to-describe beauty, an attempt to capture the ephemeral magic that makes this genre of music so special. The booth, a selection from the larger Back of the Moon exhibition, was the brainchild of Ruarc Peffers, often working with Matthew Blackman of the publisher Blackman Rossouw. Theirs is a fascinating, almost informal collaboration, where Blackman delves into the historical depths, unearthing narratives and forgotten faces, and Peffers brings a curatorial vision to the surface. The idea for this compelling booth began somewhat organically. 'Initially, it started with Ruarc representing the Alf Kumalo estate and then also working with the Baha Archives,' Blackman recounted. A casual conversation about the Journey to Jazz Festival in Prince Albert led to the idea of an exhibition. 'I made an offhand comment that maybe we could do an exhibition of jazz photography with them,' Blackman shared. This initial focus on Kumalo's work gradually expanded: 'As the project developed, we began to pull in all of the other photographers of that era. And then, you know, we finally pulled in the Ernest Cole photographs from the final chapter of the republished House of Bondage book.' Musician Moshe Kgasoane and comedian Loyiso Gola at the Peffers booth The Latitudes showing felt like a concentrated essence of that larger exploration, a collection of moments plucked from a rich and resonant past. The exhibition ultimately featured the work of not only Kumalo and Cole, but also Bob Gosani, GR Naidoo and Jürgen Schadeberg. Walking through the booth, I was struck by the way these photographers, each with their distinct approach, managed to capture something beyond the mere visual representation of musicians. There were the familiar giants, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, their images carrying the weight of their immense cultural impact. But it was the glimpses of lesser-known figures that truly resonated. Blackman's research illuminated the story of Gideon Nxumalo, a jazz innovator whose contribution in the Sixties deserves far more recognition. He found it interesting 'how there are these forgotten figures in our jazz history and … how truly incredible they really were among them'. To see Nxumalo captured at his piano by both Kumalo and Cole felt like witnessing a vital piece of history reclaiming its rightful place. Similarly, the photographs of Philip Tabane and Julian Bahula, pioneers of the Malombo Jazz Men, spoke to a crucial shift in the South African jazz landscape, a move towards a more homegrown sound. Through the lenses of Cole and Kumalo, their revolutionary spirit was palpable. This wasn't just a random assortment of photos. It felt like a deliberate curation of narratives. Some images were instantly recognisable, having become ingrained in our collective memory through album covers and publications. 'There's the famous Miriam Makeba by Jürgen Schadeberg, which was an obvious one,' Blackman noted. But it was the discovery of previously unseen or misidentified photos, particularly from the Ernest Cole archive, that held a particular allure. Blackman recounted the detective-like process of identifying subjects. He found it 'interesting that there's so many photographs in our archives that are sort of unidentified'. These rediscoveries underscored the depth and untapped potential in our photographic archives. Even a seemingly simple image of Masekela with a trumpet-maker, unearthed and correctly identified, held a quiet power, a glimpse into the everyday life of a legend. 'That was actually the one, interestingly, that Hugh's daughter had never seen before,' Blackman shared, highlighting the fresh perspective these discoveries brought. What, then, makes a jazz photograph truly special? It's a question I pondered as I moved from frame to frame. Jazz, at its core, is an improvisational, atmospheric art form. How do you capture the fleeting beauty of a saxophone solo, the rhythmic pulse of the drums, in a static image? Blackman articulated this challenge beautifully: 'Jazz, being music, is obviously an art form, which is one that is difficult to represent in written language … But a photo can capture the kind of poetry of that music because there's movement and obviously atmosphere.' The most compelling jazz photographs are those that transcend mere documentation. They aren't just about who was playing but about the feeling, the communication between the musicians, the sheer immersion in the act of creation. Alf Kumalo's image of Winston Mankunku, shrouded in cigarette smoke, his saxophone a conduit for something profound is an embodiment of a mood, an era, a feeling. Blackman pointed out some were posed due to the limitations of the equipment. 'Many of the early photographs are of jazz musicians posing as if they are in a jazz club rather than actually being in the jazz club.' Yet, even in these staged moments, there's an attempt to convey the spirit of the music. As technology evolved, photographers gained the ability to capture the raw energy of live performances. But, regardless of the setting, the great photographs capture moments of intense focus, where the musician is utterly lost in their craft. They're often not looking at the camera; they're in conversation with their instruments, with the music. There's something inspiring, almost primal, about witnessing that level of dedication frozen in time. 'The key is it's a photographer, who is an artist capturing somebody … making art themselves; there's this beautiful symbiotic connection.' The response to the booth was enthusiastic and culminated in it winning the audience choice award. 'I was really delighted to see how many young people were coming through, recognising who some of these jazz musicians were and taking selfies next to them,' Blackman said. Leaving the booth felt strangely akin to leaving a jazz gig, my senses still ringing with the rhythm of what I'd just experienced, reluctant to return to the silence outside. Just as it took witnessing jazz live for me to truly understand its power, it took standing face to face with these photographs to realise how deeply the genre's energy lives beyond the music itself. There, suspended in stillness, was the very essence I had first encountered in a crowded, low-lit room — the pulse, the presence, the communion. These images didn't just show me jazz. They made me feel it, again.
Daily Maverick
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Africa's depth and diversity on display — inside this year's RMB Latitudes Art Fair
This weekend, Shepstone Gardens will be transformed, its grounds a living gallery for one of Africa's most exciting art fairs. RMB Latitudes returns with a bold mission: to showcase the depth and diversity of contemporary African art. Art media specialist Bronwyn Coppola shares her top 10 picks — a glimpse into the artists reshaping the conversation across Africa. Botswana Focus At this year's RMB Latitudes Art Fair, a dedicated Botswana Focus spotlights the country's dynamic and fast-evolving art scene. The project brings together collectives and cultural platforms including TBP Artist Collective, The Space Botswana, ReCurate, Banana Club and ARC (Art Residency Centre Botswana). RMB Botswana supported and celebrated the project with a pre-fair exhibition in Gaborone, produced by Ora Loapi. The Botswana Focus explores the notion of borders — geographic, ideological and artistic — and reflects the region's shift from heritage-based narratives to more contemporary, experimental practices. By concentrating its international spotlight on one locale, RMB Latitudes fosters deeper engagement with Botswana's cultural and artistic ecosystems, offering audiences a more nuanced understanding of the country's creative identity. It's not about discovering a new voice, but about asserting one, with artists and cultural practitioners actively reshaping the narrative through experimentation, dialogue and collaboration. In a global art world that often overlooks smaller markets, the Botswana Focus asserts a bold presence, making space for Botswana's stories to be seen, heard, and supported. Talks programme The Talks this year embrace this momentous time for South Africa (as we prepare to host the G20), offering a series of dynamic, future-facing conversations that explore how artists, curators, collectors and cultural thinkers are forging new connections across continents and disciplines. Through dialogue, we aim to build bridges — between Africa and the world, tradition and technology, heritage and innovation. From the rise of digital tools in the African art economy to creative currents flowing from East Asia to the Americas, from bold visions emerging from Nigeria, Ethiopia and Botswana to the nuanced dynamics between Austria, France and South Africa — this year's programme celebrates multiplicity, movement and mutual learning. RMB Talent Unlocked For over a decade, RMB Talent Unlocked has been a powerful force in identifying, nurturing and showcasing emerging South African artists. This year, RMB Talent Unlocked introduces 50 artists who have come through the programme. The presentation offers a compelling cross-section of artistic voices from across the country, highlighting diverse mediums, practices and perspectives that reflect the richness and complexity of contemporary South African art. For these artists, the presentation at RMB Latitudes marks a critical moment in their journey — a chance to present their work to collectors, curators and art lovers in a professional, high-profile setting. INDEX RMB Latitudes' annual Independent Artist Exhibition, INDEX, champions accessibility in the arts by spotlighting talent outside the traditional gallery system. It connects independent artists directly with audiences, collectors and gallerists to boost their visibility and support long-term growth. Curated by celebrated artist Bonolo Kavula, this year's edition is titled Invisible Thread and offers a space dedicated to experimentation and new voices. It weaves together the work of eight independent artists in a collective exploration of identity, connection and materiality. Through a range of media — from thread and textiles to sculpture and print — these artists engage in a shared dialogue. The group exhibition includes works by Yonela Doda, Thato Makatu, Tshepo Phokojoe, Khanyi Mawhayi, Dineo Ponde, Unathi Mkonto, Tinyiko Makwakwa and Kavula herself, included as a gesture of collaboration and mentorship, reflecting her ongoing creative dialogue with the group. Disturbed Currents: Art for a warming world Each year at RMB Latitudes, the outdoor spaces of Shepstone Gardens are transformed into an open-air exhibition — a place where art, nature and urgent ideas intersect. Disturbed Currents, a collaborative outdoor installation by Dutch artist Thirza Schaap and South African artist Nina Barnett, interrogates ecology through distinct but complementary lenses. Schaap, renowned for her Plastic Ocean series, creates seductive yet unsettling sculptures from plastic waste collected on beaches. At first glance joyful and colourful, her works quickly reveal darker truths about consumption, pollution and waste culture. Barnett, by contrast, traces the flow of water across Johannesburg's Witwatersrand Ridge — a watershed where rivers divide to reach two oceans. Her spatial interventions, drawings and videos treat water not just as a resource, but as a political and emotional force. Together, their work confronts us with environmental fragility, inviting collective reflection and accountability. ESSAY: Tracing modernist lineages For a sculptor, a sketch might be a fleeting idea — a quick way to commit thought to paper — but drawing and sculpture share a profound, symbiotic relationship. Each informs and deepens the other. ESSAY focuses on the drawings and sculptures of two prolific South African artists: Sydney Kumalo and Amalie von Maltitz. Installed in the Chapel space, ESSAY pairs Kumalo's charcoal and pastel drawings with von Maltitz's expressive clay forms. Though their careers never quite intersected, both artists share an enduring concern with figuration, abstraction and the human form. Together, their work opens a dialogue about lineage, influence and legacy — and invites a reconsideration of what modernism means within a South African context. Mary Sibande: A Queen Never Dies Mary Sibande's established practice, centred on her iconic alter ego Queen Sophie, invites audiences on a journey of strength, transformation and identity reclamation within the context of black South African women's history. Queen Sophie confronts historical injustices while envisioning future agency. In collaboration with Usurpa, Sibande ventures into new media with A Queen Never Dies, presented within the turret at Shepstone Gardens. Visitors will encounter a holographic representation of Queen Sophie, a technological and artistic exploration. The hologram's creation involved the precise capture of an existing three-dimensional sculpture using laser technology. The process entailed illuminating the sculpture with a coherent light source, beam splitting, and recording the interference pattern to preserve its depth and form. Upon illumination, the hologram projects a three-dimensional image, offering a novel mode of engagement with Sibande's work and indicating an expansion of her artistic practice into digital realms. Design Week South Africa art. Launched in 2024 by Margot Molyneux, Design Week South Africa is an expansive initiative celebrating the future of South African design through events and immersive experiences that promote knowledge-sharing, inclusivity, and support for emerging talent. Lady from the Orient For Vladimir Tretchikoff fans, Lady from the Orient will be exhibited alongside a curated selection of important modern and contemporary works from Strauss & Co's flagship live sale. The winner of Latitude's annual ANNA Award last year, Somers will debut a series of large-scale ceramic sculptures as a special project at the fair. Maluleke will exhibit mixed-media paintings paying intimate homage to the city of Joburg, where he lives and works. Xanthe Somers: Wearing Thin A Zimbabwean ceramic artist based in London, Somers created her new body of work in Cape Town while on an artist residency that formed part of her ANNA Award. The collection of braided vessel-like forms is a progression from the monumental pieces in her 2024 solo presentation, Invisible Hand, which explored traditions of basket-making in Zimbabwe and the value of women's work in post-colonial contexts. Titled Wearing Thin, the latest series is marked by a sense of unravelling: the works' surfaces are articulated by interwoven strands of clay that have become untethered at certain junctures. Their rotund forms buckle inwards as they seem to succumb to their own weight. A fissure interrupts the warp and weft of a tall ovoid vessel, and everywhere the fringes begin to fray. Weaving is a powerful metaphor for social cohesion, storytelling, and the slow and repetitive nature of domestic work — cleaning, mending, stitching, sewing and cooking. In their exuberant display of colour and attention to scale, Somers' ceramics celebrate the creativity and mindfulness inherent in all these associations, but in exploring the limits of their making — and by implication, their functionality — she points to some of the structural imbalances too. It is commonly accepted that gender divides prioritise formal work over domestic work and care-taking in capitalist economies, and undervalue handicraft in contrast to art (traditionally the purview of men). Yet, even more insidious than these divides is the intersection of race, gender and class that forms the very foundation of our current milieu. The series also reflects on the power of cloth and clay to hold narrative, carrying symbols and images that speak of historic events, convey standards of beauty and display political allegiances. Somers is interested in how contemporary material culture bears the legacy of colonialism by conveying Western conceptions of womanhood and aesthetic value, perpetuating the erasure of indigenous traditions and principles. Terence Maluleke: A Love Letter to Joburg, First Draft Maluleke's new series of paintings, A Love Letter to Joburg, First Draft, springs from a deep engagement with and love for the urban fabric of his birthplace — the shifting terrain of a city in the constant process of being made and remade, by its enterprising, everyday inhabitants. Born and raised in Soweto, he recalls minibus taxi rides with his mother to buy bulk items at inner-city wholesale stores: 'As you arrived in the city, there was a sensation of going inside a humming, moving machine. There was something enticing about the towering buildings, the buzz, the feeling that really important things took place there.' As a student at the National School of the Arts in Braamfontein, Maluleke began to form his own internal map of the city, learning to navigate its more dangerous spots and finding a sense of beauty and community among the informal traders, street vendors, commuters and residents sharing the streets. 'Many of these people are occupying space they shouldn't, but as a community, they are making it work together. There is a deep human intent and a spirit of collaboration to survive in this environment, to improvise infrastructure and create a livelihood.' Made in his studio in Doornfontein, Maluleke's paintings capture real and imagined vignettes of public and private life: an indoor scene of lovers locked in an embrace, safe from the orange flares of gunfire outside; a pair of squawking hadedas — Joburg's ubiquitous birds — perched atop a stack of plastic chairs; a potted plant at a window overlooking warehouses and the Hillbrow Tower. His narrative approach encompasses the sombre reality of life on the economic margins with a portrait of an exhausted zama zama (illegal miner), taking stock of the tragic price paid by others who have ventured into abandoned mines. Maluleke's palette is suffused with yellow tones calling to mind the city's infamous mine dumps and vistas of sun-bleached veld, but simultaneously registering beats of hope and optimism. He leans into abstraction, fragmenting his picture plane into multiple perspectives and turning burglar bars and checkerboard flooring into framing devices. Mixing charcoal and pencilwork with paint, Maluleke builds textured layers and keeps much of his linework visible. His brushwork stops just short of the canvas edge — in progress, rugged and exposed. There's a defiance and a humanity about the world he is building in this new body of work, whose inhabitants 'have a disregard for a system that sometimes feels like it's not for them. But they still occupy it. It's as if they are saying, 'Before the system catches up, you'll find us here. There is a gap that needs to be filled, and that's where you'll find us.'' DM The Botswana Focus will be at the Great Hall Rooftop at RMB Latitudes; RMB Talent Unlocked will be showcased in The Manor, Stand E2; INDEX will be at Glass Marquee, Stand C3 at RMB Latitudes;
