SYDNEY — Songs of Protest, Songs of Struggle is a benefit concert for Green Left Weekly and Actively Radical TV. It will be held on Saturday, February 19, from 8 p.m. at Burland Community Hall, King Street, Newtown. Following are brief introductions to some of the featured performers.
Trude Aspeling is a well-known jazz performer around Sydney and has recently made a video of four of her songs produced by Actively Radical TV. Last month, she was featured in the new magazine. Australian Jazz and Blues.
Trude was born in South Africa, where she was involved in music on a community level, in church choirs, in the huge carnavales which take place in Cape Town every year. Her family nurtured her interest in all sorts of music — jazz, blues, classical, sole and funk. She attended a politically aware school which refused to raise the flag on South Africa Day and encouraged students to boycott venues and areas which promoted segregation.
Her parents migrated to Australia nearly 20 years ago to get a better life for their children. Trude saw coming to Australia as an opportunity to do what she wanted and to be judged on merit rather than colour.
Jamming at pubs in her youth began her musical career. As people got to know her, she was able to start her own band and went through different periods developing different styles of music. Her first real opportunity to tour came with Dollar Brand, a South African jazz pianist; they toured Europe for four months.
On returning to Australia, she formed a band which concentrated on South African jazz. Often fighting to change traditional ideas on how to play jazz, Trude set out to play her own music, receiving no support from any commercial outfits, which didn't know how to market the music. Trude has played many anti-apartheid benefits and candlelight vigils, using the opportunity to focus on those who were oppressed in South Africa.
Thami Mlotshwa was born of a South African father and a Zimbabwean mother, and has lived in many African countries. Thami says he always sang as a child; his mother would make him stand on a table to sing for all the visitors who came to the house.
As a singer, says Thami, you are a voice of the people from wherever you come from. Not a political singer, Thami says he sings only how he feels, which represents his people's desire to be free. He says he has always been involved in struggle, and calls his music Songs of Freedom.
Music allows people to look into a mirror and see themselves in the music and say, yes that's me. Thami also dances; he says he is a very traditional dancer, having picked it up from his mother, father and family. Thami says that culture is the ultimate weapon against all obstacles of life.
Thami wants to spend his life educating Australians about African music and bringing it into the mainstream of Australian music.
Alan Dargen is from Lake Evela in the Northern Territory. He began to pick up the didgeridoo at the age of two, though not really learning to play till he was five. He did his first professional performance in Paris at the age of seven.
Today he is an internationally known didgeridoo player. He has produced two albums to date and is working on a third, on the Natural Symphonies label. The first, Bloodwood, and is the didgeridoo with jazz and blues; the second one is called Reconciliation and is a combination of didgeridoo with pre-Celtic Irish horns. The new album will be a combination of African music with drumming and percussion from West Ghana and Senegal, pan flutes from Bolivia, singing in Spanish, Afrikaans and Pidgin from New Guinea.
Alan says his aim is to get the didgeridoo known as a musical instrument. He has been working with all kinds of music, including jazz and blues, with the didgeridoo. In September he is touring with a bluegrass player from Nashville, and he's working with Jimmy Barnes in June. The biggest concert he ever did was with a French jazz player before 210,000 people at the Bastille Day festival in '93 in the south of France.
He says while there is 10% of the population who are radical and support the struggle of the Aboriginal people, his main aim is to open the eyes of ordinary people. Getting people to listen to the music is important.
Mark Love from KOZMAPOP says he decided as a child that he wanted to play music. He was taught classical music and attended a drama and music teaching course. He has been in and out of a number of bands and played at a couple of Channel Seven's telethons in Brisbane.
Originally from New Zealand, Mark grew up in Casino. He does keyboard and vocals and composes his own music. He describes his music as cosmic grooves. The idea behind that is he discovered he likes to dance whereas the mentality and level of most clubs can't handle dance in a band structure so he created cosmic grooves.
Mark likes meditation and finds it has a connection with music. He points to the tribal elements and the idea of a rhythmic trance within dance. In the West, we dance to escape and to indulge ourselves, whereas in Africa they do it for a specific healing purpose. So Mark's music is about fusing the two elements — hence the name KOZMAPOP for the band which Aldo Deakin and he are involved in. People Pop, as he calls it, is trying to reach people in their own language.