Half Moon, House on the Hill, Greenlight Parade, Mishka, Now and Zen and Blue Carnival don't leap to mind when dredging the cranium for pieces of great local jazz. Give them time. Ebrahim Khalil Shihab (Chris Schilder) and ESP haven't been together that long. Sitting at Manenberg's on a wet Sunday evening with Zonker and the prospect of a Jamaican-born British stand-up comic splitting our sides with laughter, the last thing we expected to see was Shihab gliding in on a spiritual cloud with Basil Moses, bowed under his bass, in tow.
The comic had been canned and we were in for some serious sound.
Joined by the leisurely pair of Paul du Preez and Vince Pavitt, ESP warmed themselves to their set in the winter air, the flushed press of the Saturday throng an already discarded memory as they set about illuminating Shihab's vision. It is one traversing heaven and hell, the rhapsodic, mesmerising riffs of the higher self balanced by the deep, often angry and uncompromising discords of moribund mortality.
Jazz is to life what light is to day and Shihab's music is an intense dialogue rescued from intellectual aridity by shared passion. Moses has been thwacking away at his bass for so long and with such focus everybody knows he does not head for the lavatory to do his thinking. Du Preez's imposing bulk and authoritative calm hide a manic mind, constantly moving, always at the edge and, in Pavitt, the band has its thread, his drums framing the canvas on which ESP paint their swirling thoughts for a rapt audience.
In House on the Hill, Shihab revisits his grandparents, exploring with his keyboards the nuances of human interaction. Blue Carnival is a piece of vacillating extremes, ESP whipping the night to a creamed frenzy, and April Lament readily exposes the spiritual character of its creator.
Starting low, the grave sax is contemplative. Picked up by Shihab, it begins to run, push and question, the confused emotions of the intricate keyboards lent temporary succour by the calming restraint of Moses's bass. But the lament breaks like a dam wall breached and Du Preez's saxophone screams in catharsis before achieving a lasting peace, the musicians smiling quietly.
ESP deserve close listening, their music a complex blend of styles and statements. As a group, they're bound for uncertain glory. Perhaps, like the British comedian who failed to pitch, they will be panned by a fickle public. They deserve more.
In need of levity, we left ESP and the quiet set to their muted musings and headed off searching a different jazz reality. We tumbled into the pit of the Long Street Theatre, landing bewildered on a different plane of consciousness. In the black-walled hole peopled by weird, ethereal beings from a multitude of musical cultures and hairstyles, lounging in every crevice or brushing by us on wings of eerie sound, we felt our way through the gloaming towards the shroud of pale mist at the end of a tunnel redolent of J R R Tolkien or Judge Dredd.
The mist was of a cold-coloured light, at once blue, purple, green, and then red. It was out of this pall that the visage of a wild-eyed Frank Paco popped, scything with a controlled and perhaps malignant abandon at his drums glinting in the pervasive, day-glo fog. The apocalyptic sound of great music crackled in my hollow and somewhat numbed skull as a spectre, bent double, became the silhouette of a man who, his trumpet keening at his lips, rose, lifting high as the Grail itself the burnished instrument crying in the delayed wailing of its own echoes, trumpeting in celestial goldensong the birth of the divine.
And at his right hand appeared a dark man, slight yet solid, wielding an instrument as if an axe, from which snapped missives of deep and urgent import, and at his left, a cherub, wan and tousle headed in the innocence of youth, spilling from his keyboards a luminous, incandescent shower of brilliant notes.
This trinity, with the fourth, Mr Paco, the shadow, made itself apparent to me in the timeless vortex into which the pit had dissolved and reconstituted as a moment of lasting lustre. This was Virtual Jazz Reality, a world-class show of musical dexterity and technical resplendence creating an atmosphere subsuming the ego with the sheer splendour of jazz. Experiencing the sound and colour of Ian Smith, Andrew Ford, Frank Paco and Sammy Weber's music is a devastating, perhaps dangerous way of preparing for a mundane Monday.
Take it off. To hell with the consequences and to heaven with the music.
Note A musical interlude. From before the music died...
