PASS live event

From September 28 – October 2, 2010, PASS III plays host to genre-busting music outfits from global Africa dedicated to exploring new musical territory.

This year’s line up features musical giants such as South Africa’s enigmatic, innovative seer and composer-band leader Doctor Philip Tabane & Malombo, who channel the spirits of Venda through rich polyrhythmic African beats and alchemic free jazz improvisation. They play alongside the young jazz guns of the Kyle Sheperd Trio who fearlessly blaze a new musical trail through everything from free jazz to goema grooves and Xhosa melodies.

The ‘King of 6/8 Rhythm,’ Cameroonian drummer/percussionist Brice Wassy is both a legend and an innovator. His Brice Wassy Trio walks the line between advanced tech-iness and the deliberately antediluvian, bringing together nu-jazz and central African riddims, improvisation with sophisticated compositional imagination. Switzerland based Imperial Tiger Orchestra, in a unique collaboration with Ethiopian singer Endress Hassen, chart a similarly timeless trajectory, mixing ancient Ethiopian traditions with killer big-band hooks and fierce grooves that betray a future-forward electronic vision.

Los Angeles’ othaship connection G&D (Georgia Anne Muldrow & Declaime) are equally unafraid of crossing borders. In their hands boom-baps are rewired into improvisational forays and corrupted with tinges of g-funk, electro, soul and modern laptop mayhem. The trans-contextual remixing continues with the gloriously tangled roots electronica of Cape Town’s Johnny Cradle and ravenous dynamism and genealogical eclecticism of Thandiswa Mazwai’s Afro-jazz trio.

Be prepared to have your conceptions of dance music rewired by Detroit beat pioneer Theo Parrish. In his hands techno is a cross-generic tradition of expansive composition that fuses fragments of jazz, ragas, blues, rock, soul and afrobeat into other-worldly sonic sculptures. He shares the control room with legendary producer and selector Mbuso T and his Maf &so Soundsystem, whose street-infected Soweto funk, Afro-jazz and irresistibly thumpin’ house has had South Africa on its feet for the past decade.

Kisangani (DRC) based dance collective Studio Kabako’s More more more… Future takes PASS’ three year long exploration into uncharted territories to new heights. A collaboration between world acclaimed Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula, Afro-punk fashion pioneer Xuly Bët and famed guitarist Flamme Kapaya and his band, and based on the words of dissident poet Antoine Vumilia Muhindo,More…Future simply defies categorisation. It is a pre-Sputnik space travelogue that splices age old rhythms with cyber-punk polemics, explosive dance with experimental theatre, fashion with politics, and mysticism with militancy.

Audiences attending PASS III will travel from St Georges Cathedral, City Hall and the Slave Church in the city centre, to Guga S’thebe in Langa and the Albert Hall in Woodstock.

All shows are R30/pre-booked; R50/door. Tickets are available via Computicket.