A few Sundays ago, we scooted off to 44 Stanley Rd in the Mill Park area for some brunch and came acorss
Ensemble Borsalino lead by Rian Malan, anyway herewith a write up on them
http://www.myvideo.co.za/video/ensemble-borsalino
- quality not great but you'll get the idea
Band that swings to the best of boer, Gypsy and Jewish jazz is a hit , writes Robyn Sassen
Ensemble Borsalino, formed in April, calls itself a boer/Jew/Gypsy band and has taken Johannesburg by storm.
Its repertoire draws creatively from the heady mix of complicatedly related music genres - from Gypsy manouche to klezmer (Jewish jazz), swing and boeremusiek to tango - and it will make you want to gyrate off your chair.
Band leader Rian Malan - better known as a writer - explained, while the band was recording its first album for Shifty Records a few weeks ago: "This is music composed by people who had nothing to lose. They were always outsiders. Pariahs. It's music that will take you to the roots and alleyways of Eastern Europe."
Originally from New York, session percussionist and vocalist Michael Canfield has been drumming professionally since he was six. His CV includes gigs with the best session musicians in the US. He fell in love with South Africa in 1995. "I only had a djembe with me when I arrived."
"Manouche is the work of Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt," said Timon Wapenaar, a classical conductor who writes for Die Antwoord, the Cape Town zef rap-rave group taking the world by storm (they played in London last night). "Its rebirth is linked to that of klezmer." Taking distinctive manouche with klezmer, Ensemble Borsalino realises something unique. There's a touch of East Europe here, a peppering of Greece there.
"Other than Michael, we consist of one Jew and three Afrikaners, which is almost the same thing," says saxophonist Steven "Boytjie" Sidley.
The melding of Afrikaner and Jewish rhythms produces something fresh and audacious that we haven't heard in Johannesburg for a bit. But it's also like a French or Spanish bistro environment. And there are vocals, too: It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing), first made famous by Duke Ellington in 1931, gets the patrons at Il Giardino Degli Ulivi rolling on their chairs and By Mir Bist Du Schoen, (Yiddish for "to me you are beautiful"), composed a year later and made famous by the Andrews Sisters in 1937, blows them away.
The hat from which the band draws its name is Italian.
"It's a rabbi's hat," Canfield said, considering the complicated cultural loyalties the band indulges in.
"The violin is a string instrument with more than 1500 years behind it," virtuoso violinist Wynand Davel added.
"It's not only about genres. You go further and further east and you find these sounds.
"I started messing around with it years ago. The sound I was playing sounded like it came from Eastern Europe. Then I discovered klezmer. Someone lent me a recording of Transylvanian music. I discovered Dawie de Lange from the 1930s and '40s. They're the most different sounds on the planet, but they're similar."
The music fills your whole head and runs all the way down to your feet.
"I decided at 50 I wanted to do this," said Malan. "This langharige (long-haired) boy from the other side of the tracks whose main purpose in life was to meet girls went, at 24, to Los Angeles. And while my interest in the girls didn't wane, there I experienced a resurgence of these music styles."
It's passionate, unpretentious stuff; it reaches deep. The instruments, music and musicians talk to one another well; the audience loves it.
So does the restaurant. Brian and Greta Green, the owners of Il Giardino Degli Ulivi, have actually made the band happen. "The luxury of a residency to enable a band to develop is unheard of," Canfield said. Adding R20 to each customer's restaurant bill to cover the live music, Green's recipe works beautifully. "We became their home by default," he grins. "They are my guys.
What a wonderful way to spend a cold Sunday morning , good food , fantastic sound and frosty or....two ..... Life is good
