A duo of African musicians will be playing at the Tucson Jazz Festival next Thursday — singer Melanie Scholtz and multi-instrumentalist Aaron Rimbui infuse their music with their roots and personal experiences.
They’re performing at the Century Room at Hotel Congress, and a 7 p.m. show is already sold out. Tickets remain for the 9 p.m. concert.
Scholtz grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, with her musically inclined family.
“My aunt was an organist in church,” Scholtz said. “I was always surrounded by music. I started learning how to sing when I was four years old, basically as I was learning to speak, I was learning to sing. When I was older, I began learning piano through my auntie who played the organ.”
Scholtz studied opera in the University of Cape Town but she felt the style was not fit for her.
“I didn’t feel like opera represented me,” Scholtz said. “And my father, who played alto sax, kind of pulled me into jazz. The jazz bug felt natural. Then I began songwriting.”
Rimbui is from Kenya and he moved to the United States seven years ago.
“I started with drumming,” Rimbui said. “I didn’t go to school or study music. I started playing the piano in my teens. But then, about seven years ago, I moved to the United States and I’ve been pursuing music in New York City, of all places.”
Scholtz said South Africa is “an epicenter for jazz.” The genre is infused with local rhythms resulting in Cape jazz. But there’s also a prominent presence of gospel and American big band jazz that fuses with the local jazz scene.
For Rimbui, his experience with jazz in Kenya is weaved with rhythms from the Swahili coast, Congolese influences and gospel.
“I grew up in church and that was where instruments like keyboards were accessible,” Rimbui said. “Sometimes people ask me if I’m a jazz musician. And I always say, ‘I’m not a jazz musician. I’m a musician who plays jazz.’ Because I play so many different things.”
“I get asked too if I’m a jazz singer and I too say, ‘No, I sing a myriad of things,” Scholtz said. “Music is music.”
Scholtz and Rimbui will be performing original songs at their show. Scholtz is a songwriter and she said the experience is always personal.
“My father said the way he knows what’s happening in my life through what I write in my songs,” Scholtz said. “Songwriting finds me. It helps heal me and I hope it heals other people too.”
Rimbui said when he works on his music, “it’s him messing around with his piano.”
“Sometimes I’m trying things out and I think, ‘That felt good’,” Rimbui said. “There are times that the music downloads fully into my head. And the piano is tied to me being alive. I had surgery on my hand and when I was in physiotherapy – you know how they have the weights you have to use to rebuild the strength – and I told my physiotherapist I started to play the piano. He said, ‘That was the best thing you could have told me.'”
Rimbui and Scholtz said an aspect of jazz that drew them to the genre was the improvisation.
“What I love about jazz is the freedom,” Scholtz said. “In opera, everything is so contrived, everything is written.”
A musical influence for Scholtz and Rimbui is South African singer-songwriter and actress Miriam Makeba. Her inspiration will be present during the performance.
“Miriam is a heroine to many of us,” Scholtz said. “Especially because of her activism and humanitarianism. She had a hard life but she took destiny by the hand.”
“She paved the way for Africans,” Rimbui said. “She was the first African singer to win a Grammy. And she went through hell, she went through life.”
Music for them is a spiritual experience.
“Music demands you to react immediately,” Rimbui said.
“Yes, I do believe we’re channels for the divine,” Scholtz said. “You know, we’re the soundtracks for people’s lives.”
