I am Ayse and I am Rafiki Jazz Up Close 2019 tour blogger. I will be with you during the tour and passing on my observations. They say I am a bit edgy and I hope you will like my voice.
Come to celebrate with us and check out our live set on the 28th September at Kala Sangam Bradford (pay as you wish). Hope you can make it!
I have known Rafiki Jazz since 2013, time doesn’t flow linear any more. Surprising…
That was the first time I heard the band rehearsing since their Artist Residency at the Lyth Art Centre in Scotland, where “UpClose” tour music was created and recorded for the new album, Saraba Sufiyana.
With a mystic like a smile, I parked my car and headed through the yellow-painted brick arch of Yellow Arch Studios. Already my ears caught glistening steel pans.
It has been a quite summer musically but the band’s back ground processor, Tony Bowring wasn’t. Starting a busy couple of months.
I passed by the Arctic Monkey’s poster, on the fleet of stairs and reached the first floor, turned right to the large rehearsing room.
The first rehearsal was at the familiar Yellow Arch Studios in Sheffield. As usual, they were in the large recording room. A rectangular glass window on the wall separates the mixing desk, the music kitchen, was closed that day with grey brown curtains.
Rafiki Jazz, sounded perfect. They sounded as if they had been rehearsing every single day for the last 12 months, yet I couldn’t recognize the song.
A sweet embracing melody, rhythmic and happy… How deceiving…
I don’t have the right vocabulary to express how I felt.
It was like: “This is where pies go when they die,” baby.
Do you remember that day we were in a hurry, our pace was fast, we got that marathon type of hip action going and we hold our watches in front of us like those pink plastic rabbits for hounds. Then that music came from nowhere in no time and made us stop. The echoing cobble tick-tocks melting under our hurried feet stopped. We darted dim the ally way.
When would be the next time to hear a music as such?
The song finished.
I spoke with Mina about his new hand made Oud (Egyptian lute type instrument). His joy and pride worth to see. He showed me the Coptic engravings made for him by the craft master.
Turned my head in the room to see the familiar Cath’s radiating joy, Guery’s cheeky smile behind his Berimbau, Vijay’s easing violin bending the boundaries between British and Indian folk. Absence of Kadialy’s smile was noticeable, Tony’s “yes but” structures and John’s tick-tock hammer next to his tabla, Sarah’s baby pink silk/satin trousers with large sparkling flowers embroider on next to Avital’s natural earthly brown loose fit wool socks.
I am about to leave. It was sunny outside. I heard the silk embodying sea.
At 10.32 pm, I was talking on the phone with Tony.
The song is called Cajueiro. An Angolan song… In Portuguese it means Caju (Kaju) nuts.
“Slavery,” it talks about the rivers of tears flowing through the palms of Angolan ancestors of lyricist Angelina Abel.
Angola, now famous for its Kizomba, was once trading 10 000 men, women, children every year. Yes, that was a long time ago, 1620-1690 and so on. Still,1920-1947, Portugués government ordering colonial authorities to force nearly all adult, male, ethnic minorities in Portugal’s African colonies to work; a life sentence of force-labour.Civilrights for natives, no longer treated as natural law, had to be “earned” on a case-by-case basis under the designation of assimilate. Not that far long ago, by 1947, 40% of workers died each year with a 60% infant mortality rate. The ascendents of the luck%1is here to tell the story of the devastation of souls.
for natives, no longer treated as natural law, had to be “earned” on a case-by-case basis under the designation of assimilate. Not that far long ago, by 1947, 40% of workers died each year with a 60% infant mortality rate. The ascendents of the luck%1is here to tell the story of the devastation of souls.
I turned to Wikipedia.
Caju is a river of Roraima state in northern Brazil, a lower-class district of the Zona Norte (North Zone) of Rio de Janeiro, the Portuguese name for the fruit of the Cashew tree, a necropolis in Rio de Janeiro; also a former football player from Brazil, Samba Cajú, a town and municipality in Cuanza Norte Province in Angola and a trans-Neptunian object.
Aren’t we all carry the blood and sweat of our grand-grand-fathers and grand-grand-mothers in our blood?
Cajueiro is now an ear worm….
Ayse Balköse