Photo: Dawid Laskowski.

Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Four Blokes at Jazz Hastings

Legendary South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo will be leading his quartet – he calls them his ‘Four Blokes’ – at Jazz Hastings September session on Tuesday 3rd. Julian Norridge reports. 

The four have been described as “one of the best bands Moholo-Moholo has led in a long, illustrious career”. It features long-time collaborators Jason Yarde (well known to Jazz Hastings devotees) on saxophone, Alexander Hawkings on piano and John Edwards on bass.

Born in Cape Town in 1940, Louis has been a seminal figure since his emergence with the legendary Blue Notes in the 1960s. Since then he’s played worldwide with a veritable who’s who of modern creative musicians and with classic line-ups such as Brotherhood of Breath. He also led his own band Spirits Rejoice.

Another important milestone in Louis’s career was the forming in 1990s of his nine-piece band Viva-La-Black, which became the first black group to tour South Africa, arranged by the British Council, as the lifting of apartheid and full freedom became imminent.

The other three ‘blokes’ in the quartet are also at the cutting edge of modern creative jazz. Hastings knows Jason Yarde as a highly sought after saxophonist who has played with several leading groups and is also a renowned composer who has been commissioned by, among many others, the London Symphony Orchestra.

Most recently he’s been a key member of the highly successful Hastings-based sextet Hexagonal, who played one of their earliest gigs at Jazz Hastings.

Alexander Hawkings is a remarkable pianist and composer whose voice has been called one of the most “vividly distinctive… in modern jazz”, while John Edwards is a true virtuoso whose staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role.

Together, they are magic. “Listen to the …quartet to understand how, in this music, the individual and the collective can simultaneously attain equal importance: a most elevated state of being,” as one critic wrote.

Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Four Blokes Jazz Hastings, Tuesday 3 September, East Hastings Sea Angling Association (on the Stade behind the lifeboat station). Doors open 7.45pm for 8.30 start, tickets £10 on the door, £3 for under 18s.

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