eBusiness Weekly
Prince Rayanne Chidzvondo
“I can no longer endure the dreadful sound of jazz. It pains my ears like a rusted, broken pipe that leaks acid straight onto my heart.” Said nobody ever.
Listening to jazz, with each note like a lounge lizard scribbling along the wall looking for shade, and you, so sultry in that blissful look winding your way down poetic melody, you realise, Jazz is an open ended music designed for open minds.
There are many different types of music in the world. Each one is different because of certain different characteristics that help to make that genre stand apart from all others. Jazz is a type of music that was created mainly by African Americans in the early twentieth century and is a combination of American and African tribal music and rhythms.
Jazz artists in Zimbabwe, are perfect examples of a whole living culture of its own, especially in the hands of the veteran jazz artists who still grace our stages and the new ones emerging to step into their footsteps.
These musicians are willing to give their entire lives to a moment, melody, lyric or chord that will stir the soul, in a world where art is constantly evolving and things changing. That is why we are drawn to it.
Jazz is now almost being treated as a museum piece. It’s now a counterpart of classical music in the conservatory. Or an acquired taste.
From the memories of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday or records blasting at their fullest in a township shebeen, jazz music is a reflection of the cultural diversity and individualism of different souls. The genre is often referred to as the only musical genre that was completely a product of the New World, was a musical voice of the Black Power movement.
As we learn now, in its earliest days, jazz was three kinds of music in one, a folk music, an entertainment music and an art expression. Raven Duchess, a Harare singer and song writer, perhaps short in height as if to confirm the legendary saying, dynamites come in small packages. She is dynamite to reckon with.
Raven embodies folk culture, entertainment and she is an expression of art. Whenever she performs at Jazz Fridays every last week of the month at ArtiSana Gallery Café, the place is always fully booked.
She has performed at the Amanzi Festival, HIFA, Zimbabwe Jazz festival, Miombo Magic Festival, Shoko Festival and Fountain Valley Cetris Lapa (Pretoria). She is a singer, song writer and recording artist who performs at private and corporate events as well.
Her well acclaimed international collaborations include saxophonists Denise Wilkinson (Germany) and Mats Bengtsson. This year, she has collaborated with Matt Austen, Klara Wojtkoskwa from Poland and Jam Signal.
Raven is the realisation of why Jazz players do it standing up. Her voice was her first music instrument and it was natural, impulsive, improvised. Within her father’s old records, the first musical sounds to birth out of her were those of Jazz singers present and past.
Her music is poetic, covering issues such as depression, relationships and culture – issues that are not openly spoken about. “If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.” She says, “I have to feel it first and sing it. I have been doing music all my life so every day when I get up I expect music will be part of it.”
Her father who she credits her own build of self-discipline, now a retired family man who in his free time does stone sculpturing and is a martial arts and swimming coach, forms her fondest jazz memories with the music he played as she grew up.
“I remember my dad playing a lot of jazz as I grew up, I would listen to Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and the band Queen.
“He would dance, and initiate us to dance along with him. I am different in how I have been shaped by artists I grew up listening to, and no one can say I sound like the next artist.”
Born Ruvimbo Mapanda – Raven Duchess – as she has come to be known, named herself Raven, and had the title Duchess bestowed to her. Ravens have different symbolisms in different cultures. She adopted the raven as a symbol of a messenger, thus, she calls herself a messenger. Duchess came about the way she carried herself in everything she did and with discipline.
The raven as a totem is also the keeper of synchronicity. Raven duchess believes she is a master of bending and folding time and space in music. Therefore, you are precisely in the right moment at the right time whenever you witness her grace the stage like the duchess they say she is.
In her beginning, Raven wasn’t too sure about herself, but she showed the determination that required her to move forward as a musician. With her career beginning in her early twenties, she believes her first cries at birth were probably melodic and the nurses danced towards her in attendance.
As we hear often, sometimes it takes one person in a crowd to believe in someone for them to make something out of themself. When someone overheard her singing and told her she was good, it was a private moment but it also became a moment of confirmation that she wanted to be a musician.
“I remember my first stage performance was at the old Book Café Open Mic. A friend of mine asked me to come with them, with a bit of persuasion they asked me to hop on stage. I told myself, if anything went wrong or if I failed to deliver a good performance I would stop there and then and forget about singing.”
“Book Café was a different vibe all in all. If you gave a bad performance, the audience was rarely forgiving, but the second I got there, I had everybody’s attention and they were hooked. People stopped what they were doing to see who was singing. I had hope, a star was born, now I do everything else without self-doubt but confidence, people can always tell when you’re faking it. ” She says.
She started working with Outspoken, people saw her on stage and they saw more future in her than she saw in herself. They started demanding more of her own music at a time where she was performing covers and throwing her own original songs here and there.
“That is how I began my solo career, I started getting recognised in places I went as the amazing jazz singer from the place they had seen me last and it had nothing to do with Outspoken. People would always see me and say ‘we want to hear your songs Raven’ and at the end of the performance, I would get into the ‘please play one more’ dilemma.”
While jazz has always been recognised for its experimentalism and diverse sound, nothing international before quite matches the variety of influences that it has been able to absorb in Zimbabwe.
Over the years we have enjoyed jazz music from artists such as Taka Wekwa Sando, Dudu Manhenga, Prudence Katomeni-Mbofana (who rose to prominence when she was the lead vocalist in the band Jazz Invitation releasing hits such as ‘BP’ and ‘Ruva Rangu’ and Filbert Marova who has created platforms for many Jazz musicians.
“I would have been nothing with local jazz artists who have supported me. Dudu Manhenga has been a big sister. When I started singing, she gave me good advice and always told me ‘I am my sister’s keeper’. I have a song with Dudu, and I have also collaborated with Cool Crooners, Filbert Marova and Silus Miami.”
In a world where black female artists are socialised into supremacy battles and to compete against each other, Raven does not believe in all that, to her it’s much ado about nothing. She believes in the reign of all female supreme artists, without anyone having to step on the other’s toes or side-lining each other.
There’s always an incomprehensible need for people to compare black female artists against each other, as she has often been compared to artists such as Prudence Katomeni-Mbofana.
“My originality is a gift on its own. They will never be another Raven Duchess and I hope to make my mark that way. I have been taking my time to mould myself as a musician and as a brand.
“Music is the art of the soul, and the art I make from my soul is exceptional, I dare anyone to judge.”
“Music is what we have in common, genre is also a common denominator, but at the end of the day we all do things differently. We are sisters and not competition. I have opened for both Hope and Prudence.”
Over the years, Jazz in Zimbabwe has been low-key fading, typically being broken down for the elitist masses. It had slowly started becoming a sound and social scene reserved for the more mature (middle-class) listener.
With new artists from various backgrounds on the rise such as Raven Duchess, they seem to be new audiences drawing in, which can only be a good thing. With more enthusiastic and passionate artists like her in jazz, we’re witnessing new crowds break free from the stifling assumptions that have surrounded jazz for many years.
Having been muffled by its inaccessibility or lack of mainstream prominence, Zim jazz is experiencing the growth that has been stunted but it so deserves.
So this is me . . .
Drinking tea, writing, listening to Jazz.
