INTO ORBIT
A visionary new club in Braamfontein will help revive SA’s live jazz scene, writes Niren Tolsi
BEHIND Gugulethu’s Yellow Door in Cape Town, saxophonist Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi harnessed the elegies and bittersweet celebrations that accompanied protest and death in apartheid South Africa.
At The Rainbow in Pinetown, outside Durban, musicians who refused to go into exile, like Sakhile, provided the soundtrack for young activists starting their cross-border journeys to Umkhonto we Sizwe training camps after a few Sunday afternoon beers.
But in recent years, live music venues have dried up — perhaps a reflection of the widening fracture between contemporary popular music and the lived experiences of South Africans.
Twenty years of democracy have produced produced inquisitive, forward-thinking musicians like jazz drummer Tumi Mogorosi and pop-art collective The Brother Moves On. But it remains a musical age in which musicians tend to speak with power, rather than to it.
Adventurous music with integrity requires independent spaces to develop, not election rallies (think Chomee) or government bashes (Big Nuz). And there is a paucity of busy, dedicated jazz venues across the country.
Enter The Orbit, at 81 De Korte Street, in Joburg’s Braamfontein. It’s an antidote to the malaise, says the club’s co-owner and manager, Aymeric Péguillan.
Opened two weeks ago, and named after the 1958 Clark Terry album, In Orbit, Péguillan says the vision is for a “democratic space where students (who drench the quarter) rub shoulders with businessmen and everyone is there for the music”.
With two permanent inhouse pianos (one for each stage), a superb sound system and great sightlines from almost any vantage point in the upstairs bar, the Orbit can hold 250 punters.
And it has the potential to become a cultural fixture in a city with proud predecessors like Kippie’s and the Bassline. Nor are Péguillan and his partners Dan Sermand and Kevin Naidoo lacking in ambition: there is live music scheduled every night from Tuesday to Sunday, through March and April.
“Joburg is filled with musicians who aren’t getting enough work. We want to develop The Orbit into a space where different artists can come together to improvise and collaborate,” says Péguillan. Events will range from bigband events to Afro-Cuban nights.
On opening night, Feya Faku led a quartet through a blistering double set that included a tribute to Zim Ngqawan. Despite the chat- tering of the musical moths and social butterflies who were apparently there to hear each other’s voices, the show was a powerful foretaste of what can be expected over the next two months.
The venue is a converted a warehouse built in 1913 — and “completely transformed” from its former incarnation as the Puma Social Club, to create a “cosy environment” that doesn’t intrude on the musicians’ concentration, says architect CJ Eisenstein.
Hence bluish-grey palettes and close collaboration with sound designer Ivan Lin on the acoustic design. And South Africa’s jazz legacy is visually honoured in a collection of black-and-white photographs by Rafs Mayet and Oscar Gutierrez.
Look out for Gutierrez’s snap of Busi Mhlongo, and Mayet’s definitive image of saxophonist Robbie Jansen embracing the crowd, arms wide apart, eyes closed and a plaster on his forehead — the tell-tale sign of an alleyway witpyp between sets.
The Orbit is a reminder of South Africa’s vital jazz history. And a potential guardian of the present.