Two rock/blues bands, from South Africa and Israel respectively, are breaking the mould as they take their hybrid sounds around the world: Blk Jks and the Mojos with Asaf Avidan. RFI meets both groups in a rare break from their breakneck tour schedule.
Johannesburg-based Blk Jks have been around for 10 years but they are only now starting to hit the international music circuits. Their unlikely mix of ska, rock, reggae, kwaito and progressive jazz results in music that is at times a chilling and bombastic mix, at others a moving ballad in one of South Africa’s nine official languages.
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This hybrid approach reflects the sounds created by Asaf Avidan and the Mojos. The Israeli band has broken through thanks to its debut album The Reckoning, nominated for the MTV Europe Awards.
“Why choose the name Blk Jks without the “a”? Well, we tried to make it easy, SMS style.” Molefi Makananise reclines with a broad smile, shrouded in the attractive, if wild gardens of fellow South African musician Dave Reynolds.
The bass player delved in a jazz style closer to Reynolds’s percussive approach before joining the country’s best-known black rock-blues bands in 2004. He’s never looked back since.
“But we’re also named after the notorious police section that used to terrorise and harass the township communities in the apartheid years” he pursues. “On top of that, it’s some kind of weed. You find it in the bush, it sticks to your trousers. We also want our music to stick but in your brain, not your trousers.”
Another knowledgeable smile.
The play on words and self-deprecating humour reflects the dense approach this quartet has adopted, as it seduces audiences worldwide. Their song Mystery reflects a philosophical approach to life that is unusual in this genre.
“Who am I?” asks the bassist. “What am I doing here? In Zulu, we ask ourselves these questions, questions that have no answers. We’re provoking and moving back and forth in time.”
Curiously, this existentialist tack is part and parcel of the Asaf Avidan and the Mojos experience. The Israeli band chooses to ignore the endless cycle of violence in the region it was born into and focuses on more global concerns.
“All these petty conflicts will end in some way or other,” explains Avidan shortly before his concert in the Paris concert hall La Maroquinerie. “The biggest question as a human being is our mortality. It’s more important than dealing with this or that border that will last tens or hundreds of years, but will end.”
The rock band is fronted by the 30-year-old and his chillingly powerful voice. That voice is uncut, raw and totally uncoached.
“I can’t say where my voice comes from,” he states matter-of-factly. “I needed to let out all the tons of emotions I had stoked up. I had left a girl after six years, there were things I had to express.”
Ambivalence and double-edged swords dominate the lyrics in Blk Jks songs, too. Summertime, for example, talks in Zulu of a driver enjoying the summer sun. Little does he know, explains Makananise, that this sun is burning cancer into his skin.
“The same things I like are harming me. It’s a question of good and bad, yeah.”
The group’s unique mix of mbaqanga and rock has been released as an EP in Canada and the US.
They were recently seen on a global stage in the concert opener for the 2010 Fifa World Cup in Soweto, playing alongside Alicia Keys.
Avidan and his Mojos, meanwhile, have shared centre stage with the likes of Bobby McFerrin and Living Colour in a 2010 Carnegie Hall tribute to The Who. Since the RFI exchange in May, the group has recorded a second album, Poor Boy/ Lucky Man, a title that seems to sum up the life of the band’s lead singer.
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