There’s a treat for Mother’s Day on Sunday (at 6pm) with piano man Charl du Plessis live at Pretoria’s Atterbury Theatre performing the Gershwin Songbook with his ensemble trio for this award-winning show. Diane de Beer takes a look...
The thing about pianist Charl du Plessis is that he keeps his career flying high by sheer ingenuity. Pianists don’t have the easiest career path, especially if they want to make a living from performance.
But Du Plessis has found a way. His latest project is the Gershwin Songbook, pictured above far right, which he locked into because of his love for the composer – and naturally, an inbuilt audience.
“I identified strongly because he was one of the first classical musicians who infused his music with jazz sounds,” notes the pianist. “He took jazz into the concert hall.”
He started working on the music in 2008, but immediately knew he needed a voice to make this one work.
“He is popular, of course, for Rhapsody in Blue, but his songs are what added the X factor to his career.”
That’s why he decided to involve Musanete Sakupwanya: “He was a jazz singing student at that time at the University of Pretoria where I taught. I loved his voice and thought the show would be a good test for him together with my jazz ensemble trio.”
Since then they have been flying and these past seven years they have been performing at all the top festivals across the country, as well as many theatres countrywide.
At the end of 2013, they recorded the show and then he left it for a year.
“I’ve never done that before with any of my recordings,” he confessed.
Then he brought in producer Peter Auret to edit and mix. In the middle of that process he heard that he was nominated for a Sama for Baroque Swing and the previous year, Auret had won a Sama for his engineering on Du Plessis’s album, Pimp my Piano. Serendipity?
“We did the recording for this one in three days, but that was because of the live show that had been done so many times. All of us were extremely comfortable with the music. It’s almost like a live album,” he says, “very few takes.”
Speaking about Sakupwanya, Du Plessis says he is originally from Zimbabwe, has in the meantime become a professional singer and is also a tae-kwando champion.
“He breaks pieces of wood with his kicks and pounds bricks in half, but is an elegant and quiet person with a voice that is both creamy and clear.”
Sakupwanya was part of Nataniël’s The Moses Machine, but essentially, he was Du Plessis’s choice because he has an “old-fashioned approach to the music which is right for Gershwin’s period”.
The songs featured on the album include I Got Plenty of Nutin’, Embraceable You, Someone to Watch Over Me, Our Love is Here to Stay and Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.
Du Plessis explains that he tried something more “contemporary and funky with Summertime and here Sakupwanya could bring his pop and R&B influences to the music.”
Rhapsody in Blue, the full 15- minute piece, has been reworked for the trio, another first, believes Du Plessis, and other instrumentals featured include Fascinating Rhythm, I Loves You Porgy, I Got Rhythm and The Man I Love.
“I am extremely proud of the album,” says Du Plessis. Gershwin Songbook is his seventh and the fourth with his trio which includes his two partners, Werner Spies (bass) and Hugo Radyn (drums). They have been performing for nine years.
“I feel as if I’m in a Gershwin state of mind. I can’t get enough of his music,” he concludes.
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