The Rough Guide to Cape Jazz

The term ‘Cape jazz’ was apparently first used as recently as 1993 as the title of a compilation album on Mountain Records, but the origins of the music date back much further to the Cape Town of the late 1950s and the emergence of Dollar Brand (later known as Abdullah Ibrahim) and the Jazz Epistles. The genre's defining characteristic is traditional African rhythms given jazz arrangements, sometimes with added influences from gospel and goema carnival music.

This vinyl album collects together eight splendid examples. The old school is represented by the swinging jazz-funk of Basil ‘Manenberg’ Coetzee's ‘Liberation’ and Robbie Jansen's aptly-titled ‘Cape Joy’. Both saxophonists are no longer with us but their legacy lives on in the work of younger contemporary acts such as The Cape Jazz Band, whose track ‘The Dance of Our Fathers’ showcases the brilliant talents of pianist Ramon Alexander; and Mike Perry, whose track ‘Crossroads Crossroads’ reveals another brilliant young pianist in the Dollar Brand tradition. In between we get the fierce 1970s jazz-rock fusion of Pacific Express, whose line-up included Coetzee and Jansen, and the gentler lilt of ‘7th Avenue’, by that band's guitarist Jonathan Butler, who was allegedly the first domestic black artist to be played by white radio stations in South Africa.