When Jazz Met Blues

Martha Mukaiwa

Percival Rinquest

They come in black coats and even blacker moods fading to gray with every splash of whisky, martini or whatever it is that makes them warmer.

Some stop to chat, others feign blindness and duck inside because they’re expecting a full house and they know the best way to listen to jazz is to be in the thick of it.

To have Sean Kamati and Percival Rinquest five feet from their seats as Ghyss McCurley paints with piano and Olav Slagsvold seduces a saxophone blinking bright gold in the blue light of the Warehouse Theatre.

Wednesday night’s empty seats fade into oblivion as everyone leans forward.

Sean K is on stage and everyone who’s there has heard him before and they know that it’s the beginning of something that will grow in his gut and burst out into the air as a voice that growls and tugs and astonishes in effortless falsetto.

The songs are as nostalgic as the fur, pearl and bowler hat homages in the audience.

Grande Dame and director, Ashante Manetti, is dressed like Grace Kelly and grinning at the glory while co-pilot Onesmus ‘Slick the Dick’ Upindi jazzes it up in suspenders near the sound system.

Though she’s prone to goofing off, Helouis Goraseb is a vision and our host on the voyage through the ages. As she does, she changes costume along with jazz era and history projected on a screen with the abandon and mirth of a Gatsby Girl then she introduces Percival Rinquest.

Rinquest of the purple suit, good looks, honeyed voice and enamoring obliviousness.

He sings. Women swoon. And that’s the tune of it.

They faint away again when Playshis the Poet steps out in a tuxedo that knows a thing or two about being a tuxedo and regales the audience with his celebrated rhymes before rapping a little, glaring a little and punctuating the evening with some 1920s mobster mystique.

There are far fewer people than they should be. For the price. For the talent. For something this far from the same old thing.

But those who are there smile, yell and sing along to Kamati and Rinquest’s versions of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, ‘What A Wonderful World’, ‘Summertime’ and ‘Human Nature’ amongst a buoyant blur of others.

At some point Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers do a hazy dance in the background and Louis Armstrong stares into the dark hall from an era that seems so bright, hopeful and full of life, the ghost of it has followed us into the millennium, coaxed us out of our beds on a cold winter’s night and stirred us in a place where jazz meets the blues.

– marth__vader on Twitter or martha@namibian.com.na