Luisa Blignaut

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I love jazz because it is about hope. The first person that reccomended jazz to me was a world record discuss thrower, John Van Reenen. He was also an artist. Some months later I attended a jazz show in a shed at the Hohenort hotel in Cape Town. This was in the 1970's and the tide against apartheid was turning. Black people and white people were not allowed to be together in an establishment that sold liquor. Alas, repression does not scare jazz, it encourages it. I heard music that has been playing in my head for as long as I can remember. It is honesty in a moment, living unedited. Jazz was on Marco Polo’s iPod when he travelled, Hillary and Tensing discussed Charlie Parker on their way to the top of the world. Christopher Columbus lost a note in the new world which Buddy Bolden picked up in New Orleans. Jazz then and now saw horizons that we cannot imagine, notes bent and stretched upon rapid successions of chords, gliding and floating from one scale to another, tumbling down without falling, honking, farting, squeaking unthinkable harmonies. Call and response, harmonics and partials, arpeggios and modulation, polyrhythms and counterpoint, which is which. All within a moment. Jazz is about living, ignoring differences. No room for dirge. Come together it says, but bring your own voice.

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