Well, 2010LAB.TV asked several people what they think about it. See the answers in this short cut (in german)
The supporting actors are critical to any good film, and this year’s fringe programme is Oscar-worthy in itself: diverse, creative and with the potential to keep you up all night (if you so desire). Boris Graue is the curator of the fringe programme in Bollwerk. We asked him all about it.
The 24 year-old Siya Makuzeni (trombone/ vocals) is one of the most recent discoveries on the South African scene. She grew up in East London in the Eastern Cape, took part in Stirling High School’s jazz programme and was selected for the National Schools’ Jazz Band, with which she toured southern Africa and Europe. She also performed with the Eastern Cape Big Band and in 1999 with Zim Ngqawana. From Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where she studied drama and theatre, she moved to South Africa’s oldest institutionalised jazz school, Pretoria Technikon. Her dynamics as a singer and her free expressive improvisation on the trombone are incredible!
This band did its first performance as BIGLovely in September of 1996.
We were doing a residency at The Fez in NYC. My girlfriend wrote me a loveletter and addressed it “To My BIGLovely.” That’s how we came up with the name. The band is like an allstar NYC band. Everyone in the band has their own band or plays with a lot of other people.
Toshi Reagon & BIGLovely kill Resistance, Anywhere I Can. from j. bob alotta on Vimeo.
“Extending a lineage of jazz-honed ferocity perhaps running from John Zorn to Little Women, the just-months-old sextet Super Seaweed Sex Scandal is already a dynamo of dissonant horns, crashing guitar notes, and thundering percussion.”
Super Seaweed Sex Scandal at The Stone!! 09.08.09 from Live Footage on Vimeo.
"I think, in a way, that all creative activity is in a sense a way of defying death. I think we are defined in our lives by the fact that we know we are going to die. And that artistict activity is a way of saying "I'm not going to die". So shouting is also very much about showing that you're alive and I very much like the quotation.
Since we're talking about quotations, Jean Durand, the saxophone player from Quebec, was asked about wheither he considered his music to be new or wheither he was interested in new music and he said - and I agree with him - that he didn't really care very much wheither the music was new or not but what was important to him was that it was alive.
And I think that's a very good way of looking at it."
"Again I think there is no such thing as one kind of music anymore.
There are rock musicians who improvise, there are improvising musicians who do things with ethnic musicians, there are all kinds of hybrids going on all the time, and there's a quote I really like, talking about how what we have now is hybrids of hybrids to the point where we don't even remember what the original was anymore. And I think it kind of describes the way the music scene is.
It's like everything is available so you can refer to anything, you can access anything, you can mix anything with anything else and so it's no longer possible, even though the record stores try - to classify anything.
When you walk in a record store, everything is subdivided and subdivided... and they are only responding to consumers. They don't invent those categories, the people who listen to the music invent them.
So in the end they are always behind the listeners and the record compagnies are even further behind and the institutions are even further behind than that !
That's why I found interesting that actually it's the listener who is determining what's going on and what's interesting."
The minute Dobet Gnahoré steps onto the stage, it is obvious she is something special. She exudes an inner strength and commanding presence that draws you in, even before she has opened her mouth to sing. Once Dobet does begin to sing, her voice is filled with emotion and range. She moves from heartfelt ballads to funky, danceable songs with ease, and is comfortable performing in a wide range of African styles.
Eventually, Dobet begins to dance, and the true depth of her talent shines through. She jumps across the stage like an acrobat, a soulful tornado of movement who astounds the audience with her moves. Just 24 years old, Dobet Gnahoré has got an exceptional voice, amazing dance skills and the engaging aura reserved for artistic greats.
“One of the new-generation African artists who are rewriting the rules about respecting musical tradition, the charismatic Gnahore…was as much cultural ambassador as scintillating performer. Veteran Afropop queen Angelique Kidjo would have been proud.”
The tension between structure and spontaneity has long been a core preoccupation for this expressly future-minded alto saxophonist and composer. “Travail, Transformation and Flow” (Pi Rec.), [...] takes that tension to heady extremes. Mr. Lehman composed most of the music on the album with clinical attention to frequency and overtone: his harmonies were devised with the help of spectrum analysis and programming software. So in one sense this is computer music, though it’s also the product of a nimbly improvising octet. (On Monday the group will play at Le Poisson Rouge; lepoissonrouge.com.) Some of the album’s eight tracks — notably “Alloy,” the longest and most immediately gripping — summon the ghosts of a knockabout post-bop avant-garde. Others, like “Echoes,” suggest the tolling of temple bells as remixed by a dance-music collagist. And Mr. Lehman closes with a meaningful nod, covering “Living in the World Today” by GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. It’s a perfectly ultramodern gesture, and the swagger fits.
