Sketches

#IfYouCantSeeMe So this is how it's looking now: 25 June. Loit Sols & Churchil Naude 30 July. Mandla Mlangeni 27 August. Derek Gripper and Reza Khota 24 September. Provisionally Mac McKenzie, but perhaps Hilton can move here, and Burni Aman does October? This is also Coffeebeans official 10th birthday party. 29 October. Hilton Schilder, but maybe he does September and Burni does this gig? 26 November. The Khoi Khonnexion, feat Garth Erasmus, Jethro Louw, Glen Arendse. 31 December. This is something of a wild card. Potentially Ntlantla with As Is (featuring L2Z). That would be the right riot. Maybe Ernestine? 28 January. Keenan Ahrends 25 February. Ernestine? 31 March. State of Kassava, featuring Ncebakazi Mnukwana and Viki Mangaliso I've also been thinking about Tebogo Louw, and his Zayn Adams tribute. The day before Zayn passed, we were talking over our backyard fences.  We spoke about the industry, about composing and performing original material, about a...

Have you tried to find snoek in a restaurant in the Central City? What about umngqusho or chakalaka? Why is it that if you want `culture' you visit a township? Why is a City Tour a tour of only the original Cape Town city, and not the broader city, as if nothing out of the City Bowl is Cape Town? Why is the East City the neighbourhood surrounding the City Hall and the Granary, and not as far as Khayelitsha and Muizenberg? Can we change the city by changing the language we use to describe it? Can we tell its story well if we as citizens are excluded from the narrative? Cape Town is a great place to be, don't get me wrong. One of the reason's it is great is that it's a city that demands a lot of questions, which makes it challenging and stimulating. And isn't that fantastically, disgustingly, middle class? That the extremes of the city make it stimulating? How different would the perspective be of someone who lives on the poor extreme, where the quest is for surv...

Our Beer Route , launched in November 2011, was featured in a story in the New York Times on 10 August about the explosion of craft beer in South Africa. Beer Route in New York Times

Goema is a music of liberation.  It is a music of transcendence. Cape Town is a pirate city. We are a pirate of cultures. It's like Cape Town has pirated pieces of the whole world. Everything is gathered here. Cape Town is a port city after all, absorbing the world over hundreds of years. It's a touch of Europe, a little bit of India and Malaysia, it is a piece of Africa, there's Brazil in here and there's America and Israel and Maputo. Cape Town is not one thing: it is many things in one. The music of this city with multiple identities is called goema. The name originates with the Khoe people. The Khoe women played a drum, it was called a goma, because of the ox skin that covered the drum. The women would play and the men would dance. Over hundreds of years, bantu tribes migrated south, missionaries arrived, colonisers laid claim and slaves were imported to the city. As the music of these worlds collided and became a common language, the goma became goema. Th...

Goemarati - you are welcome. Designing an inclusive intervention I'm not a designer. I trained as an actor and film-maker, and became an entrepreneur. But I've learned that design is at the heart of everything that we do - if not always entirely by design. So that makes us all designers, in an unconscious way. In people's homes, decisions have been made about where to put this painting in relation to that picture, where the chair stands in relation to the sofa, the pot plant in relation to the graduation certificate. These are all design decisions, but very few people doing this would consider themselves as designers.  Enjoying the foodcourt at the Manenberg Goemarati I watch my son, he's 14 months old, plot his routes. Even at this early stage of life, design is central. When we walk out of the apartment, he has a specific routine. He always turns right out of the door. He touches the geyser outlet pipe on the wall. He touches the neighbour's g...

Dirty secrets? Not really. The Baxter is a public entity, audited, all dirty washing aired, and or turned into a production. No, the Secrets of the Baxter is a new experience that I'm excited about, something that Coffeebeans Routes has created in partnership with the Baxter Theatre. Sometime in 2010, Michelle Constant, CEO of Business Arts South Africa, joined one of our Jazz Safaris, and shortly after met with Baxter Theatre CEO Lara Foot. Michelle called me after the meeting and said Iain you have to have to have to meet with Lara and talk about creating a theatre tour together. So Lara and I met. And then months later, after lots of thought, myself and Lana Paries started putting things together. Very quickly we hit on the right mix, and in June this year we tested it out. Below is what it looks like, we think its a winner, will be interesting to see over the coming summer season how it does. Expect to see a lot about it in the media over the next year. We anticipate th...

The St Louis Jazz Festival, in St Louis, Senegal Back in 1999, I attended the WOMEX World Music Conference and Marketplace in Berlin. One of the most interesting sessions there was one looking at creating a pan-African festival circuit, much like what Europe has, with festivals connecting, and making it possible for artists to tour festivals in Africa. 12 years later, we're perhaps marginally closer to that, but we certainly haven't made the kind of progress that was anticipated. Political instability is one reason, funding another, but one of the most crucial, I believe, is the lack of good, cost-effective, regional travel options in Africa. As you know, it is damn expensive to travel within Africa, far more so that to travel from somewhere in Africa to Europe. From the Sauti za Busara festival, Zanzibar, Tanzania, East Africa's most important festival  That is now starting to change. Once upon a time, there was Air Afrique, which made a lot of things poss...