'Take Your Mind Uptown'

Jason Bruer Band

The Basement, Sydney

Tuesday Sept 21

Whether you’re feeling upbeat or a lounge lizard, get a clue! Put on your sharpest shoes and let Jason Bruer’s music take your mind uptown.

Wild weather alerts might have kept some jazz cats curled up at home, but Sydney’s storm didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of Jason Bruer, his band, or his audience.

With his sharp shoes, sax, and samples, it’s refreshing that Bruer’s music doesn’t fit any easy categories.

Instead the Bruer Band’s music offers food for thought, as well as soul food. A big sax sound alternates with gentler musings, while the delicious voice of Briana Cowlishaw weaves through it.

I began to wonder if ‘Salon Jazz’ is a valid genre? If it is, then the Jason Bruer Band can step up and claim it.

The Basement was set up – seemingly in salon mode – with tables sprinkled across the dance floor, perfect for night-time.

But why restrict things? I’d also like to see the Jason Bruer Band perform live outdoors with space to dance – perhaps in a sunny restaurant courtyard or at a winery?

You can let Bruer’s music lazily wash over you, but it’s also music to interact with. The more familiar I become with Bruer’s music, the more I want to move with it.

But back to The Basement: Jason and his band are tight – both in harmony and complexity – but with enough breathing space for Mark Johns (guitar), Fabian Hevia (drums), Alister Spence (keyboards), Brendan Clarke (bass), to each flex and strut their individual style and talents.

It was cold outside, but things were warming up indoors. Bruer dedicated the first song of the night, Alfie’s Tree, to his wife.

Bruer’s sax danced like a butterfly through the next song, Little Orb – named after his son’s initials, O.R.B. I like this song a lot – it’s a hypnotic track that stays in your head.

I was treated to more of Briana Cowlishaw’s luscious vocals – and that’s highly recommended. The interplay between her voice and Jason’s swelling sax sound is irresistible – alternating hot, salty, and sweet.

I wanted to sip more of that sweet, salty, musical margarita, and later in the evening I did.

Spring Bossa blew away thoughts of the storm outside. It was nicely timed, with the Southern Hemisphere’s Spring Equinox on the following day.

Vocalist Cowlishaw writes songs as well as sings them. The Little Things was an opportunity to hear both a young lyricist and a young voice, and glimpse her potential for both. Her inclusion with the Bruer Band is both exciting and promising.

Equally exciting is Bruer’s eclectic use of audio samples. While he is restrained with the use of samples on his debut solo cd, onstage he ramped up the volume and the energy on The Truth of The Lie.

I really enjoyed hearing this song come alive. To me, the song evokes the atmosphere of a thriving outdoor marketplace or bazaar – with its clashing pots and pans, the shake of belly dancers’ coin belts, and the jangle of jewellery.

With my appetite for food and music, and my mind now wandering through a Moroccon souk, the tang of preserved lemons came to mind.

Preserved lemons impart a huge flavour that resonates throughout a meal – use too little and the flavour remains hidden, use too much and it’s too salty. Throw in a feisty handful, and the meal is lifted to another dimension.

I’m really curious about Jason Bruer’s ongoing musical journey, his intriguing use of audio samples, and his future ideas and collaborations.

The Jason Bruer Band holds a diverse and eclectic musical passport – a combination of Bruer’s hypnotic compositions, sparing-yet-daring use of audio sampling, excellence and passion in the band’s musicianship, and the epizootic vocals of Briana Cowlishaw. It makes me want to book a plane ticket to the next destination on their musical journey.

-- Kerry Awia Markey, October 2009

'The lion still roars...'

Hugh Ramopolo Masekela
by Kerry Awia Markey 5 Oct. 2009


Music is inseparable from the African continent. Throughout South Africa’s struggle against apartheid it was ‘Music’, Masekela says, ‘that saved us.’

‘It wasn’t called liberation music…(but) it was part of liberating ourselves’.

Hugh Masekela is a lion of jazz and world music – as a trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, and singer, and his music has been an instrument to demand change.

As part of a world tour, Masekela is touring Australia to promote his new album Phola, which he describes as meaning, ‘To get well, to heal, to relax, to be cool.’ He says, ‘Even where you live is your personal phola.’

Born in South Africa in April 1939, Masekela’s current world tour is becoming a long 70th birthday party that Australian audiences will help him celebrate.
And what a party it’s been! In a recent high-energy performance in Durban, he shared the stage with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ray Phiri, Oliver Mtukudzi and Johnny Clegg.
In September Masekela received the Doctor of Musicology (honoris causa) from the University of South Africa for his contribution to the growth of music on the African continent.

Masekela is also a pioneer in bringing the voice and spirit of Africa to the West. Over the last forty years, he’s recorded over forty albums, and sold more than 5 million recordings. Masekela considers music ‘an unfathomable well, an eternal orchard of sound, there for the picking for those who recognize that.’

Masekela’s birthplace is as inseparable from his music, as music is from his soul. ‘I grew up in a small town named Witbank, a one-street, redneck, right-wing Afrikaner town, surrounded by coal mines and coal trains with endless carriages and coal-packed containers criss-crossing the horizon...’

In his powerful song, ‘Stimela,’ he vividly describes the ‘curse’ of the coal train that would arrive in Johannesburg each morning, full of black workers who provided cheap labour to fuel South Africa’s economy.

‘I remember seeing women in the mornings and at sunset running alongside the coal trains with large tin cups collecting the coal nuggets that fell from the cars.’


It was a film about the life of trumpeter Bix (Leon Bismarck) Beiderbecke that inspired the young Masekela to play jazz. In his own youth, Beiderbecke had been inspired by the music he heard playing on riverboats coming up the river from New Orleans.

Another major influence was Louis Armstrong, who sent Masekela a trumpet. You can see a photo of Masekela – aged 16 – holding that trumpet on the cover of his autobiography ‘Still Grazing.’ It was while Armstrong was touring the African continent, that he sent Masekela the trumpet. Under apartheid, Armstrong’s trumpet could enter South Africa, but Armstrong himself could not.

‘When I was growing up, we were able to survive this country because of the inspiration from Black American musicians,’ says Masekela. ‘There was a sociopolitical umbilical cord that joined us.’

By contrast, South Africa had very few openings for local black jazz musicians. Masekela was one of a group of local musicians that made the first ever LP of African jazz. Those musicians went on to form the nucleus of the first complete band of black South African musicians to play modern jazz, replacing swing, boogie and jive-based music.

They called themselves the Jazz Epistles: Abdullah Ibrahim, Jonas Gwanga, Kippie Moeketsie, Johnny Gertze, Makaya Ntshoko and trumpeter Hugh Masekela.

It was jazz musician John Dankworth who helped Masekela leave South Africa by arranging a passport to Britain - where there were no legal restraints on the movements and actions of non-whites. Masekela then moved to the USA, where he played a blend of bop and South African township music.

In New York City, he met bebop heroes like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Gillespie told him, ‘Man, I’d like to be part of your revolution… because the people are always dancing and singing.’

In the 1980’s, Mbongeni Ngema and Hugh Masekela conceived the musical Sarafina! It brought the music – mbaqanga – and the stories of life in the townships in South Africa, to America.

While most Broadway musicals were based on fantasies, Sarafina! was based on reality – a reality in which most black children were born into a world of poverty, segregation and oppression. The musical tells the story of a girl named Sarafina who inspires her classmates with her commitment to the struggle against the government. Sarafina! premiered on Broadway in 1988 and became a hit musical.


While a sense of peace pervades the pace of the new album, Masekela’s message still has an edge, ‘I come from a country that fought for liberation for 400 years without a break.’

In a recent interview for an American TV network he commented: ‘I grew up in the 60s… when I came here, Harry Belafonte was the biggest fundraiser for civil rights, and they were on fire. And it was like I hadn’t left home…’

‘In this day and age,’ he told Tavis Smiley, ‘it seems like we've lost that outrage that we had. A lot of a sense of outrage has been lost all over the world…’

What can we expect when Hugh Masekela performs in Australia? ‘Some songs from Phola,’ he says, ‘and all the old favourites…’

Phola was produced by Erik Paliani and features a blend of jazz, R&B, Afro-beat and township music.

In Australia, he'll be touring with Zimbabwean-born Chris Gudu, who now lives in NSW.


AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES:
3 Oct – Bellingen Global Carnival; 6 Oct – Sydney Opera House; 8th Oct – Hamer Hall, Melbourne; 11th Oct – Perth Concert Hall

More info: www.diaspora.com.au