Members of the audience at the Reeler Centre were taken to “The Deepest Place” over the weekend as they listened to songs performed by Jacques Coetzee and the band Red Earth & Rust from his latest album, These Narrow Songs.
The blind musician, poet and songwriter launched the album, These Narrow Songs, at Rondebosch Boys’ High School’s Music Department – the Reeler Centre – on Saturday 14 May.
At the event, he was joined on stage by electric and double-bass player Brydon Bolton, drummer Ross Campbell, violinist and violist Terrence Scar, Jamie Jupiter on harmonica, backing vocalists Mikhaela Faye Kruger and Jamie Jupiter, vocalist Fancy Galada and guitarist Jonny Blundell.
Rondebosch Boys’ High School learners (on brass) completed the selection of singers and musicians.
Coetzee, together with Barbara Fairhead, has released four albums under the name Red Earth & Rust. These Narrow Songs is the first for which Coetzee has written the lyrics and the music.
Explaining the roots of the album, the published poet shares that in 2015, he found himself in Kent, England, sitting in front of an upright piano in the house of a friend.
“I was feeling weightless in my new surroundings, but also out of sorts. I had unfinished business in Cape Town: a tangled conversation with my beloved (Fairhead).
“I was looking for the right words to move that cross-continental conversation forward. Suddenly I thought of a moment in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, in which one of the characters says to her beloved: ‘If I can’t find you, I’ll look deeper in myself.’
“By the end of that day I’d written most of The Deepest Place, and a few weeks later I performed it at a small gig at the Wallington Festival. Another good friend recorded that gig and sent a YouTube video of it home to Cape Town.”
Coetzee says that song marked the beginning of a journey that made it possible for this new album to emerge.
