Jack Momple - making more Jazz history

Hamburg - May 2018

Jack Momple on the 5th Edition of the Cape Jazz album series.
Jack Momple (drums) and Mervyn Africa (piano). (c) P Lee-Thorp

Jack and I go back to the days of Pacific Express in the mid-1970s and I know him as a creative and dependable drummer and a gentleman. I work with him at every opportunity I get.

Being a drummer Jack did not qualify to contribute to a compilation featuring the solo piano but he is the musical leader of the band behind this project so I invited him to sit in with Mervyn Africa to record a couple of versions of the two of the classics of the genre - 7th Avenue (he actually played on the original of the song recorded by Jonathan Butler) and Abdullah Ibrahim's, Mannenberg (which featured Monty Weber on drums on the Dollar Brand original).

The two musicians jammed together in the studio on various takes of the two songs with the idea of using one of the tracks as a bonus cut on the CD version of this album.

Two of the takes were in a very similar tempo so I suggested to Murray Anderson that we might stitch them together into a medley. Murray is both a fine musician and wizard at editing and he created a track from 3 different takes of Mervyn's somewhat liberally improvised arrangements of the two iconic Cape Jazz titles which I am calling, 7th Avenue/Mannenberg Mashup.

Jack is thus fittingly the guest player on the forthcoming volume.

Paddy Lee-Thorp
Mountain Records

(Still editing)




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