Soap Opera Jazz - the 2005 CTIJF
The carnival of dreams
The Gilberto Gil series
Time Space Change
The revolution will be commodified
The return of the patron
The emergence of the Lion
Reggae riddim and rain
A story ten foot tall
Damn I love Easter
Praise song for the people
Life without waiting for Brenda
Music mines its own business

MAC MCKENZIE. WELCOME TO THE TAVERN OF THE SEVEN SEAS.... AND A STORY TEN FOOT TALL

About one thousand years ago, under the glow of Pleiades constellation and the wink of Hoerikwagga, the table shaped mountain, a tea party was taking place. the Hottentots Tea Party. As the spirits of a thousand gomas gave ecstatic rhythm, the sun that was once man danced across a thousand universes to serve hot sweet tea. The moon cajoled a thousand tall stories, and with one look, a little girl turned a fierce lion into a star in Orion's Belt so that he could laugh at the moon's jokes. There was music and dancing and celebration. There was freedom. There was eternity.

And then the hare arrived. He brought with him a curse from another world that shut the winking eye of Hoerikwagga and ripped the table cloth off the Hottentots tea table. The gomas stopped beating, the gaais stopped dancing, and the sun, moon and stars sped back to their sky, silent and distant.

A thousand years passed in the midst of unfamiliar gods and hostile tongues. Many new faces floated in from other worlds, they had caves for eyes and bodies bent from the lashings of hostile tongues.

The bent ones arrived carrying rhythm and child. A familiar rhythm and dance that the gomas and the gaais knew well. Over time, with the coming and going of the rainstars, and winds chasing of the hyenas, there was no more distinction between the rhythms of the bent ones and the ecstacy of the goma and the gaai. Goma became goema.

And once a cycle, on a day called New Year's Day, these bodies stood tall and their tongues became familiar, as the sun that was once man would dance across a thousand universes once more, the moon cajoled with new stories and the stars in Orion's Belt laughed with with temporary pleasure. They played their music as loud as possible. They painted their faces. They danced like they'd never danced before. Just for one day. Celebrating the hope of liberation that might one day return.

And then another thousand years later, on a day just like today that could well have been just a month ago, with the blessing of the moon on her tall hair a little girl looked up to Orion's Belt and turned her star back into a lion.

The lion came roaring back to earth heralded by the boy in a bubble, the amorous lamb, and an octopus playing all the world's music at exactly the same time.

If it's the end of the world play goema!
The octopus is Mac McKenzie. he's a goema man, but he has all the music of the world in his head. Mac knows so much it's as if he was always there under the table topped mountain. History is Mac's tea party, and he presides over the table mountain serving tea with his octopus arms to the citizens of history, music and freedom. This is Mac McKenzie's world. And the Goema Captains of Cape Town is his band.

Mac comes from Bridgetown, a `frontier township', he shouts with a mock-defensive laugh and a mouthful of black tea. "It was violent, we faced violence in every shape and everywhere we turned. Our nerves were always fried. I'd visit friends in Grassy Park where the `uppity' mobile coloureds lived, and it'd be birds singing and tea with milk and cake at a dining-room table. I thought I was in heaven!"

"Ja, and music was part of that violence," Mrs McKenzie picks up. "There was music everywhere in Bridgetown back then, but as much as you loved it, you could never be a musician. My husband's first wife was music. He worked during the day and played music by night. But you couldn't be a man and be a musician. They system didn't allow for it. Work was life, music came second and wives were way down the line."

So when Mac told his father - who is considered one of the most extraordinary guitar and banjo players this country has ever produced - that there was no way he was going to be a labourer, that music was his fulltime calling, his response was violent. "You want to be be a musician!?" Mr Mac screamed. "I'm not going to have a musician living in my house!" And Mac was kicked out into a world where to survive as a musician you had to be mad and dangerous.

Looking at pictures of a young Mac, he certainly looked dangerous. "People saw me as a bit of a Mohamed Ali," he half brags. "I was in with the gangsters because I was big, strong and could pack a punch, and I lived hard."

"All the girls went mad for him," recalls Mac's first wife Beryl. "He had this great body, this mysterious and manic energy, and girls wouldn't leave him alone."

It was on danger and a manic creativity that Mac thrived. It took him through many incarnations until the big move of the 1980s, the Genuines. A band that redefined South African music, a rock band that became a cult icon. Mac and Hilton Schilder, his collaborator since high school, took the frenetic goema rhythms, added electric guitar, keyboards and punk attitude, and called themselves the Genuines. It was brash and hard and rebellious and the girls loved it. It was a revolutionary music. People couldn't believe that this was goema. Under the apartheid regime their music was banned. In Europe the songs were on top of the charts. Back at home, you can leave your goema outside.

In 2002, Mac, together once more with Hilton, assembled a band called the Goema Captains of Cape Town. The band came together for a live recording session as part of the Wondergigs, a 13 part series of live recordings taking in the breadth of Cape Town music. With the maturity of age and the elegance of experience, electric guitar was exchanged for jazz guitar, keyboards for grand piano and punk attitude for concert hall cool. In came a banjo, double bass, tambourine and trumpet and accordion.

And out came a sound that had never been heard before. It was goema, but it was in the penthouse lounge. Slowed down, sultry, spacious and elegant. Music for dancing in couples, music for romance. Liberation music for a city without slave-masters. Music for a new identity.