This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

23rd December 2007

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The perverse enthusiasm of the tabloid press for the more sordid details of the Taliep Petersen murder trial has, amongst other things, blurred a rather important fact: Petersen was first and last a supremely talented musician, and it is for this that he should be remembered. The Kramer-Petersen Songbook is an attempt to reinforce such assertions; it is not a tribute show per se (although it certainly pays tribute) but rather, according to David Kramer, “It’s about remembering a partnership, and what was achieved in that partnership.”

Appropriately, memory provides a kind of thematic continuity in the production. One is reminded that most of the musicals created by Kramer and Petersen are retrospective in nature – trying to remember a lost place, a person who is gone, a golden past or a history that doesn’t seem to be recorded. When we meet to discuss the show, the morning after an emotional opening night at the Baxter Theatre (where their first musical, District Six, premiered in 1986), I ask Kramer about this aspect of their song-writing.

“Taliep was a wonderful partner in exploring suppressed histories,” he notes. Petersen could, after all, easily have become one of those people whose “stories in the apartheid years were not told.” Working with Petersen, Kramer “came to realise that there was no acknowledgement outside the confines of District Six for so many wonderful singers and musicians. That lack of acknowledgement meant that they were invisible people. When we started, in the eyes of ‘the establishment’, District Six had largely been forgotten. There was the bulldozing, people were removed – then it was no longer a political issue. It wasn’t something that coloured and white people spoke about. When the musical came along, it started that conversation again with an outpouring of grief, and the need to revisit it became very apparent. But the process had not taken place up until that point – the success of the musical provided an emotional focus.”

In Act One of The Kramer-Petersen Songbook, many of the numbers performed are taken from this, their first and most famous show, including the celebratory “Heart of District Six” and “Klop Klop”; the political outrage of “The Law, The Law” and “Blind Man’s Curse”; and the poignantly melancholic “Broertjie My Bra” and “Seven Steps of Stone”. The other songs in this half are from Kat and the Kings (1995) and Fairyland (1991), both of which have narrator-figures looking back at their youth. Kramer admits that this is a preoccupation of his – the man “looking back nostalgically to his glory days. I suppose I must have a latent fear of getting old and not achieving my potential. I certainly had a strong sense of that when I was younger. So the has-been character, the forgotten sad old man sitting at the pub drowning his tears, is a recurring image in my work.”

The second part of the Songbook, however, affirms that as a song-writing duo Kramer and Petersen were concerned with communal as much as individual histories. The last work that they created together, Ghoema (2005), traces influences on the music of the Western Cape dating back to the days when slaves from south-east Asia and east Africa mixed with Iberian mariners and Dutch colonial administrators. Kramer says that he and Petersen were fascinated with this process of “fusion” and its implications for notions of culture, race and language: “The paradox is that culture affects everything, and yet in an individual sense doesn’t exist. Let’s say, for instance, there’s a ‘Bo-Kaap culture’, whatever that is. It’s a simplistic notion that, living in the Bo-Kaap, you would be Muslim, wear a doekie, eat koesisters on Sunday and samoosas on Monday, and have a so-called ‘Malay’ culture. But when you get down to the individual, like Taliep, you discover that the guy has a passion for Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. He doesn’t do the stereotypical things, but is able to operate within a cultural identity. Culture is just the history of ideas in your head – each person has his own set of software – but as you take the long view perspective, these generalities come out. So we operate under assumptions about cultural identity.”

Audiences of the Songbook will hear traces of Spanish guitar, Portuguese fado, sea shanties and fishermen’s songs even as their ears pick up the rhythms of funk, soul, rock’n’roll, shoo-wop a capella numbers, blues, jazz and even an acoustic beat produced by clothes hangers, shoes and a belt.

It’s not all about looking back. Poison was written in the early 1990s, but songs like “Danger”, “Bottleneck” and “Friday Night” confront the problems of drug abuse, gangsterism, alcoholism and other social ills that beset the Cape Flats today more than ever. Kramer relates how, even though those songs were relevant when they were written, “Taliep said, ‘It’s way over their heads! They’ll only appreciate it after ten years!’ ... and he was right.”

The Songbook, which runs until 19th January, is performed by a cast of eight – some of whom have a connection to Kramer and Petersen dating back three decades. Despite a few problems with the sound balance, the vocal range on display is impressive, while the saxophone melodies that weave the numbers together are particularly enjoyable. The dancing is energetic and, visually, the show is a treat: imaginative lighting, striking use of silhouettes against multicoloured backdrops, fine costumes and even ingenious use of mannequins to create a troupe of minstrels.