“It is said that writing about music is the equivalent of dancing about architecture. Mick Raubenheimer, however, grasps in Bukowskian prose the embodied, emotional and cerebral qualities of improvisation, as well as the torsions of South African music subcultures. Writing about improvised music requires the disruption of form. Using irruptive anecdotes and in capturing interruptive moments of listening, Raubenheimer comes as close as is possible to the qualities of the music itself.
Staid histories of South African jazz inevitably regulate the music. Mick Raubenheimer captures musical events in all their disruptive singularity.”
Jana van Niekerk is a South African writer living in Cape Town. Her short stories and poetry appear in multiple journals including New Coin, New Contrast, Botsotso and Aerodrome and in collections such as For the Duration (brought out by Botsotso in 2015) and The Garden of the Beloved (the 2021 McGregor Poetry Festival Anthology). She has also published children’s books and romance novellas under different names.
John Mateer’s parents were born in Cape Town, living there until their twenties. From his early childhood, their nostalgia for The Cape was influential on him, even though he was born in the early 70s in Roodepoort, Johannesburg.
In the mid 70s his father took the family to Toronto, Canada, then, suffering ill health, returned two years later to Johannesburg. Shortly before John Mateer was conscripted in the late 80s, he moved with his mother and sisters to Australia.
A yellow haze hid the kopjes. A lonely farmhouse on the arid veldt.
Madge sighed. Too hot and still, as hours gnawed away at the blistering ranch.
She could smell the dust.
No rain. Another drought.
Too familiar, the ground was cracked, the sad garden insulted her, breathed dry futility. She tried to wait patiently, to force coolness over her, to wait for Ted, to relax with him on the veranda, to have their drink.
Just to sit. There would be very little to say. The air was too heavy, like the day.
Expectation as a human feature is naturally flawed. This entity, very easily and perhaps deceptively so as someone more cynical might say; promises a lot without any guarantees that the promised or anticipated will be fulfilled. Thus disappointment is usually experienced in the end when our expectations are not met. To minimise the full impact of disappointment in case the desired outcome does not materialise, we are often encouraged to “manage our expectations” by not having much expectation in the first place or none at all.
