Oh yeah, I love Jazz

Kalungi Kabuye

I love jazz, and it has been a big part of my life for a long time. All I’m saying is, that genre of music usually referred to as jazz does things to me other types of music do not. A wailing saxophone, or a piano played really well takes me places I’ve never been.

There has been an on-going debate on whether people in Kampala really understand what jazz is all about.

One guy claimed that if people really loved and appreciated jazz, Kampala wouldn’t be one of the very few cities in the world without a regular jazz club. Or that Jazz FM (which plays only jazz) wouldn’t be the least listened to station in this city, the extremely poor signal quality notwithstanding.

He might have a point, because it has been hard to establish a regular jazz place in Kampala. One night, many years ago at the former Viper Club (later Basement, now closed), the late Wilfred Bangirana brought together what must have been the biggest group of self-acclaimed jazz aficionados (addicts, fans, enthusiasts, buffs) to ever get together in Uganda.

It was a magical night, many great instrumentalists were there, and the music was going down really smoothly. Then what does Bangi go and do? He stopped the band and let a bunch of drunk bazungus do karaoke.

That was it, it ended there, and we have never had such a gathering again. Alex Ndawula tried to keep the spirit alive by playing CDs every Wednesday at the Rock Gardens, but he never could get along with the management, mostly of Indian origin, and after one tantrum too many, it also ended.

Later, Harry Lwanga hosted the Tusker Jazz night at Sabrinas, and for a while it almost worked. Visiting musicians would regularly turn up to jam, and many were a budding talent discovered. But sadly, it also did not last, and jazz went into the wilderness again.

The annual Jazz Safari (now in its 5th year) is about the main jazz event in Kampala, but it has become more of a society event where people pay lots of money to cheer on whoever guest artist is in the house that year, and tell all their FaceBook friends about it.

But it does keep jazz right up there in people’s faces, and that is definitely a good thing.

Last year the Jazz Ville opened in Bugolobi, ostensibly as a jazz club. The debate started again - is it really a jazz place? Will they really play just jazz? Can they sustain it? Do they even know what real jazz is, or will they just play instrumentals?
Now, there’s an old story people love to tell. Many years ago a Miss Uganda contestant was asked what her hobbies were. She said swimming, so the MC asked her to name two ‘styles of swimming strokes.’ After careful thought, she smiled brightly and said she does swimming for fun, not for ‘learning strokes’. That brought the whole house down, and everybody was dying of laughter.  But she had a point. As long as she liked what she did, and it made her feel good, who cared whether she was doing the breast-stroke, the crawl, the butterfly, or just floated in the water?

Which brings us back to jazz, and Ugandans. We can analyse jazz to death, trying to understand where it all came from, the hundreds of different types there is, and we will still probably be arguing about it.

Theses and dissertations have been written about the origins and meaning of jazz, and more will still be written.

But it is generally agreed that it all came from music improvisations of African slaves taken to the Americas. From there elements from dozens, if not hundreds, of different of genres of music were added; and through the years different schools of jazz have developed. But through it all it is the aesthetic appeal that really matters, how the music makes you feel. Jazz really has no social classes, although it began as something of an underground sound, and the iconic image many have of jazz clubs is somewhere in a small, smoke-filled basement.

No formality, no rules of procedure, just guys getting together and enjoying jazz. Uganda must be one of the very few places where jazz has taken on a snobbish element, where people wear dinner suits to go for a jazz show.

Okay, it is not an easy thing to play jazz, that improvisation thing takes great skill and a lot of hard work to master, so it is understandable when a ‘master’ will frown down on a guy like Kenny G who takes the easy way.

But at the end of the day it is how the music makes people feel that really matters. You don’t want to be a jazz Van Gogh, with no one understanding or appreciating what you are playing till hundreds of years after your death.

And Van Gogh died a very poor man, and he killed himself. I know I will never play jazz, I made my peace with that a long time ago, but I love it.

The way the pianist takes off to the skies, and the bass guy joins him, while the drummer is leading the way before the saxophonist comes in and tells them all where he’s been, that is why I listen to jazz. Not to learn about chord progressions, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz, or soul jazz. What about jazz fusion, jazz rock, smooth jazz, acid jazz, and maybe Ug jazz?