It was only a matter of time before she embraced jazz. Puoane says she first understood the power of her voice when she joined the primary school choir at St Mark’s in Jane Furse, Limpopo. Back then she confesses to have had a thing for “counting how many people were moved to tears” by her singing. Things didn’t always come that easy. Puoane describes an angry spell in her life when she was studying jazz at the University of Cape Town. Her anger sprang from a combination of “bad boyfriends” and the realization that “people no longer wept” at the sound of her voice. But as she grew up she became more comfortable in herself — other people’s tears did not matter anymore.

Song, her debut album

Now Puoane is making a home in the world. The 2004 Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year has taken her music to New York,  New Orleans, France, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal. She won local acclaim when she performed at last year’s Cape Town International Jazz Festival. That is not to say she has no blues. One just has to listen to her sing He Needs Me on her debut solo album, Song. Her indigo appeal is even more apparent on You Are My Sunshine from the same album. Puoane has the ability to welcome you into a song — and woo you into her swing. Later this year she will travel to Japan to promote Song. The tour comes on the back of a distribution deal to be signed with a Japanese label that she can’t mention just yet. The Japanese release will include bonus tracks not Included in the initial recording.

Quiet Now 2nd Album

It’s going to be a busy year for her. Puoane is lso putting the finish- ing touches on a new album. She Promises an “organic, original and no-nonsense” offering, in the singersongwriter tradition.The album enlists a new rhythm section: bassist Nicolas Thys, who brings seven years of life and work experience from New York, Lieven Venken, who’s also based in New York, on drums and Puoane’s Belgian husband, Ewout Pierreux, on piano. This time they’ll work as a clean quartet without the personnel extensions of the first album, and some of the songs have roots outside the jazz rubric. The band has already started recording in Germany and plans to finish the album by October. Puoane becomes animated when asked about the title. She’s determined to call it Quiet Now because “now it’s my time and everyone else must listen”.

 But she is no jazz prima donna. She relishes collaboration with other musicians and says she’s inspired by those who are more experienced, such as the Brussels Jazz Orchestra — a 17-piece big band — with which she’s worked since 2004. Their latest project will explore the music of the late South African legend Miriam Makeba, whose songs will be rearranged for a big-band format. It’s not yet clear when South Africans will get the chance to enjoy this musical dialogue, but Puoane says she can’t wait for local fans to sample the “amazing musicianship” of the orchestra.

 Puoane’s tribute to Makeba also shows where her heart lies. Although she’s been living in Belgium for six years she says she has no intention of changing her citizenship. As we wrap up our conversation she starts talking about next month’s election and how she’s going to cast her vote. She’ll be back in Brussels by then and plans to be first in line at the South African embassy when the doors open on Election Day.

Meanwhile, she’s got an album to deliver. Quiet Now!!

Writen By: Percy Mabandu

Originaly for Mail& Guardian see: http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-03-31-the-diva-hustler

His feminist non-credentials are betrayed by his treatment of female figures in his work. Louw’s handling of landscapes betrays a settler’s fantasy of an empty un-peopled land available for capture and definition.

Louw favours a dark palette, restricting his colours to the dim tones and grays. This method is, however, more concerned with the want for color and definition than it is with death or loss of colour.

His painterly technique echo the fact of decomposition and rot and his motifs are competently addressed and surrendered to this truth of all existence. These themes of want and emptiness are present throughout his discourse, though more the former than the later.

Louw totally denudes his female figures and imbues them with an aura of shame and the opposite of assertiveness. On the other hand, though his male figures might fall short of returning a confident gaze they are partially and in some occasions fully clothed in “work clothing the only clothing there is”. Hence the voortrekker patriarchal idea of the male as the essential worker is toughened here.

untitled-by-johann-louw

Cast into a gloomy picture plain, these figures fail to return a gaze as if burdened by some public secrete or shame. Louw’s subjects are victimized by his gaze and that of his exhibition audiences.

Arts writer Andries Gouws testifies that, “the human beings in [Louw's] paintings are unrelated to the landscapes or spaces in which they are”, or have been flung. They are also “unrelated to each other”. Disconnected from the land, the figures become vulnerable dispossessed objects susceptible to whatever definition and situation is visited upon them by the artists’ whim and other mechanisms. Louw’s fantasy is exactly that of a colonising settler. The landscapes are dark and menaced by emptiness, thus available for settlement, definition and exploitation. 

untitled-by-Johann-Louw

This is, for instance, different to William Kenbridge’s discursive treatment of his landscapes in the animated film Felix in Exile (1994). Kentridge’s work as Staci Boris observed “poses questions of how landscape is constructed and represented and whose stories it ultimately tells”. Even if these stories might not be told their existence is acknowledged. Louw’s work denies the inherent stories the land might yearn to tell. Perhaps because any acknowledgement of these stories would mean the land is not available for settlement.

According to Gouws, the “women are [just] naked, without being being seductive”. I want to offer that Louw has even denied them their very right to sexuality; this after excluding them from the semiotics of work and industry. Though Gouws reads that sex is present here , “but simply as a possibility of rape, coupling, or possession, [and] not that of pleasure or love”, I want to further offer that Gouws’ reading is possible precisely because of Louw’s conception of feminine sexuality as “essentially victim”.

So the feminine figures and the desolate landscapes are objectified into a patriarchal settler need for victims and prey. They are surrendered and subjected as flock for him to marshal towards meaningfulness and presence,at least in his art.!!

untitled-by-Johann-Louw

Written by: Percy Mabandu

Lefifi Tladi (right) Motlabane 'a Mashiangoako (left)

Thus the 1970s as a socio-cultural site produced a unique type of avant-garde in South African Art. Out of Ga-Rankuwa through a collectivist approach to Art making and culture-creation Lefifi Tladi and the Dashiki collective were shaped into astute vernacular creative intellectuals, something akin to what Antonio Gramsci termed “organic” intellectual and was later expounded on by Grant Farred on Black Vernacular intellectuals.

Dashiki, the band, in fusing music and politically charged poetry to their performances understood that… ”the political is not always pleasurable; but the pleasurable, within the vernacular, is always potentially political…” and so it was at one Jazz Festival in Mamelodi, east of Pretoria, with a defiantly festive crowed. “…as soon as Lefifi appeared onstage carrying one of his drums a forest of clenched fists shot up in the Black Power salute and they roared: JO-MO! JO-MO! The people had nicknamed him after Kenya‘s independence hero Jomo Kenyatta”.

“…the formation of DASHIKI sort of crystallized our political role because it brought us into contact with the Black Consciousness Movement…”  He remembers as he gazes into the air as if he is asking it to remind him.

He adds that combining poetry and music “… was an ultimate devise because it blended beautifully… and it became politically functional in the community… ” Dashiki acquired popular purchase through that mode in which the political and the popular conjoin identificatory pleasure with ideological resistance.

As early as 1966 they had given meaning to the concept of community art project, with a Youth Club they called ‘DeOlympia’ comprising among others Isaac Nkoana, Anthony Molongwana Makou, photographer Matsobane Legoabe… “…DeOlympia was a recreational thing, it was about encouraging more meaningful activities and interactions for our own development. It kept us off the street…”  In 1971 Tladi and the collective transposed the House used for DeOlympia activities into a small museum for contemporary Black art in Ga-Rankuwa. Unfortunately, in 1974 it had to close down. The likes of Sir Isaac Nkoana, Anthony Makou used to work hard giving art workshops at this haven.

Encouraged within Black Consciousness thought the collectivist approach to art making, for one, explodes the construction of artist as individual genius separable from the general society and loftier than the environment that produces him, thus coining the cultural worker as an ideological posture in the broader community of resistance workers. “Through the Cultural wing of the Black consciousness Movement, CUL- COM (Culture Committee)…, Tladi recalls: …we organized a lot of Black art exhibitions at some of the Black universities and schools because we were aware of our people’s ignorance. Bantu education didn’t expose us as a nation to our own creative genius”. On the role of their art practice Tladi relates that theirs “was an instrument in the restoration of the harm done to the senses, apartheid had destroyed our people’s senses”. And, so the populace was always at the centre of their creative efforts because as once noted by Farred, “no post /anti- Colonial struggle can be sustained if it does not contain in it a cultural element moreover one that has popular purchase “

Forced into exile after the 1976 explosion, Lefifi and fellow exiled artists in Botswana established TUKA Cultural Unit. A cultural formation aimed at organizing group exhibitions and sustaining working relations with artists at home in S. Afrika. Through the assistance of the ANC, TUKA members managed to participate in the Pan African Arts Festival, F.A.S.T.A.C in Nigeria. The excursion also provided for a novel opportunity to tour other African countries on their way down to home in the south.

In 1980 Lefifi packed his bags and faced new vistas, as it were, headed for Sweden to study Fine Arts and Art history. Studying in Europe gave a global edge and perspective to ideas shaped in Pretoria’s townships, perhaps, molding what Franz fanon called the global native.

Though not quite returning “home”, in May 1995, the artist-poet-musician held his first exhibition in a democratic South Africa at the UNISA Art Gallery, titled “Xedzedze” Tsonga for “whirlwind”, alongside Fikile Magadlela another firebrand, of Dashiki days. Tladi now lives half and half in the (former) country of his exile and that of his birth: Sweden and South Africa respectively.

Our conversation wasn’t quite concluded, there was a pressing matter requiring his attention. So he lit up a cigarette declaring a wish to quite, his hand unsteady and shaky as he smiled and handed me a CD: Poetry for ARTvanced listeners, it’s an audio anthology of some his poems and Art lectures. He’s signed it:” these are some of our lasting impressions, for Brother Percy”.

Written by: Percy Mabandu