A sad note: was festival furore worth it?

Now that the dust has settled and the jazz furore has come and gone, what lessons can we learn for this whole mess?

The department of sport, recreation, arts & culture (Dsrac) had good intentions to revive the jazz festival after the Covid-19 hiatus and the Chris Hani District Municipality surely had good intentions to contribute funds to make sure this event went ahead.

The entertainment industry suffered the most during the pandemic as performing artists suddenly had to stay at home and earn nothing. Do you know how difficult this must have been?

Imagine someone who had a steady stream of gigs per month to suddenly have none. Not just for one month or three months but for a year and more.

When the pandemic started, none of us knew how long it would last and what lasting damage it would do to many aspects of our lives, let alone the entertainment business which depends on bums on seats to survive.

All things came to a standstill, and when an opportunity to kickstart things came along, I am sure Dsrac and the entertainment sector jumped at the opportunity to not only lift the spirits of the people but to put something into the pockets of the long-suffering musicians too. Jazz is a tough genre to sell and the musicians doing this craft are hard-pressed, even under normal circumstances, to make a decent living out of it. The music industry is dominated by many socalled musicians who do not know how to play any instrument, but the way music is produced these days, they do not need to.

They just need a computer and little knowledge, and voila, the person is a musician.

The consumers of music these days are not really exposed to “real music” such as jazz, and so when an opportunity to allow these music craftsmen to display their craft arises, it is a godsend to them.

Opportunities like these for a band in a township and village to showcase their talent on the same stage as established artists is rare, and something they work their whole lives to achieve.

This is what the Chris Hani Jazz Festival was supposed to be.

Sadly, it turned out to be anything but. This festival, like everything else in our communities, was taken over by service delivery issues, political factionalism and political opportunism.

This was such a pity as the occasion should have been a happy one and an event to lift the gloom of the pandemic by bringing together all peoples from all corners of the district.

As it turned out, it became the perfect stage and a proxy war for everything else going on in our communities.

Was it correct to bring all the political and service delivery issues into this event? Was it correct for the Jazz Festival to bear the brunt of the anger people have towards the municipality they voted in only less than a year ago?

Are people experiencing “buyer’s remorse” and now lashing out at anything government-related? Is it fair?

I do not know what the answer is but I guess time will tell whether the actions of all involved will produce the desired results in the coming weeks and months, and probably years. At least the jazz musicians got paid, I guess that is the positive.