The Equal Spirits
project has its beginnings in Raph Clarkson’s love of South African Township Jazz. With the huge legacy gifted to UK Jazz by South African exiled musicians from the 1960s onwards, British/London jazz of the 2000s and 2010s naturally supported music making inspired by South Africa and South African musicians. Raph found himself playing the music of the SA jazz greats in a variety of ensembles, before developing a connection with SA harmonica and piano player Adam Glasser.

Raph’s interest developed to a point where he wanted to delve deeper, and with the support of funding from Help Musicians UK, developed a project with Adam’s help that led to him touring South Africa in 2018 with three different sets of musicians in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, and for which he wrote a set of original material. Such was the success of this trip, that Raph asked Sonny Johns to produce a recording on a return trip in 2020.

The core rhythm section/ensemble was drawn from the 2018 Johannesburg band, with Nosihe Zulu an audience member for the 2018 Durban gig, who then took on one of the tracks - ‘Skip’ - and wrote her own melody and Zulu lyrics in 2018-19. This led to Raph inviting her to be part of the core 2020 recording.

When it came to the 2020 recording project, there were three essential creative-process threads:

- fully formed compositions (from 2018) by Raph that gave space for improvisation and creative contributions from the core musicians

- compositions (from 2018) that became Equal collaborations alongside Nosihe and NoZaka, with the vocalists often contributing melodies and lyrics to Raph’s (and Amaeshi Ikechi’s) instrumental sketches

- completely democratic group improvisations, that were later edited into structures by Sonny and Raph, and added to with arrangements for and by UK and SA musicians

The 2020 Johannesburg recording took place at Peter Auret’s famed Sumo Studio - and it became just the first step in an organic process of continued editing, mixing, arrangement, further recording and layering, rearrangement, re- editing, re-mixing, etc, over the next year and a half. A series of UK musicians added their creative and instrumental voices to the record, as did core SA band musicians, with Sonny shaping the process towards the album’s final iteration.

UK contributions ranged from a string quartet, an SATB four piece ‘choir’, to sampling/processing by Elliot Galvin, three different percussionists, synths/church organ/Hammond organ, and a horn section including Mark Lockheart and Chris Batchelor (who was part of Chris Macgregor’s Brotherhood of Breath and has toured South Africa with Tete Mbambisa).

At its heart, the Equal Spirits ensemble and Wise and Waiting are creative endeavours that seek to celebrate our shared humanity, our connectedness, and the precious equality of our deepest artistic expressions.