Reviews „Gratitude“

This is a band going against the trend. As ever more complex systems take over our world, and digital programs and artificial intelligence define reality, the Rainmakers continue to rely on the power of being human, on spirituality and ecstasy… Music like this is healing.

Hans-Jürgen Schaal, JazzThing, Sept./Oct. 2023

he Rainmakers‘ music contains a Dionysian rush that grabs and transports the listener. But it is also music that is constantly changing and offers points of rest.

Thomas Bugert, Jazzthetic, Sept./Oct. 2023

The Rainmakers‘ music is influenced by African music culture, which gives all the pieces an engaging depth of dimension and their emotive character.

Ulrich Steinmetzger, Jazz Podium, Oct./Nov. 2023

***** One of their many qualities is that the four musicians see themselves as a collective, develop their music together and push boundaries.

Richard Butz, Jazz’n’More, Sept./Oct. 2023

***** One is happy to finally hear sounds in this direction again, and one would simply like to thank Bänz Oester, Javier Vercher, Afrika Mkhize and Ayanda Sikade. Jazz at its best – thank you!!!

concerto.at

***** Improvisational sensitivity, mystical atmosphere and sensitive sounds

Rainer Guérich, InMusic, Sept./Oct. 2023 

One is fascinated and touched after the first few minutes of this album. Because what the Rainmakers conjure up here has an incredible energy and a spirituality of its own.

Guitar & Bass, Oct. 2023 

A firework display with incredibly intense solos from pianist Afrika Mkhize and uplifting, eruptive saxophone expressions from Javier Vercher.

Josef Engels, Rondo 9-23 

If everything called jazz sounded like that, we would love to go there even more!

Pirmin Bossart, Luzerner Zeitung, 22 April 2023

Album Review: Banz Oester and the Rainmakers – Gratitude (forthcoming, Enja records)
Swiss bassist Banz Oester’s quartet The Rainmakers are no strangers to South Africa. In a slightly different incarnation, they played the National Arts Festival and the Cape Town International Jazz Festival as far back as 2015. The quartet itself is 50% South African, with Afrika Mkhize on piano and Ayanda Sikade on drums. For those early visits, the reedman was Ganesh Geymeier; these days, it’s Spaniard Javier Vercher. The Rainmakers arrive this month, on a South African launch tour for their forthcoming album Gratitude. The tour will see them play various venues in Cape Town, at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda and, in early July, Johannesburg. Like 2021’s Playing at the Bird’s Eye and Ukuzinikela, Gratitude is a live album. That’s the perfect context to appreciate the empathy the musicians have developed over the years, picking up, exploring and growing each other’s ideas in the moment. The Rainmakers’ sound has a clear line of descent back to the “spiritual jazz” of the 1960s, identified with John Coltrane and those around him in the States, and players such as Duku Makasi and Winston Mankunku Ngozi here. In South Africa that full, searching, yearning saxophone sound never went out of fashion — you can hear it today from saxophonists such as Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Sisonke Xonti, Mthunzi Mvubu, Simon Manana and more. If they catch your heartstrings, then Vercher’s your man in this group.From this, you may gather that The Rainmakers are, in some ways, a gorgeously old-fashioned jazz group. Four good musicians who simply get together on a stage (often the Bird’s Eye in Basel) and play their own and some other people’s tunes, relishing the space to stretch out and improvise for as long as the conversation stays inspired. The album’s six extended tracks over an hour include compositions by Oester (Transformation), Vercher (Blue Heron), Sikade (Gaba) and Mkhize (Ode to Keith) — a complete, engrossing set at a very good jazz club indeed.Oester has spoken about wanting “to communicate with the other musicians on an equal footing” and that’s certainly the mood of the session. Everybody gets ample space, but nobody grandstands or dominates and it takes until the penultimate track Gaba for us to hear an extended bass solo from the leader. Before that, he and Sikade spend a lot of time lovingly painting sonic scenery for the other two. Sikade manages the colours and dynamics; Oester constructs a reliable, yet subtly detailed, scaffolding. When the drum feature does arrive — flowering from an ecstatic, impassioned conversation with Vercher on Transformation — it’s all the more powerful for that previous restraint.Sometimes, in tight-knit group music like this, I wish there was an option to isolate drum or bass tracks, to hear more clearly the intriguing ideas in that layer of the music.Despite its roots in spiritual jazz, there’s nothing boilerplate even to  that pattern about the Rainmakers’ sound. They are also heirs to the free jazz tradition and to approaches inspired by global music. They can sound, by turns, swinging and spiky; lively and languorous; impressionistic and assertive; tonal, atonal or modal as the mood of each number demands. There are themes you can walk away humming and allusions to waltz, tango, ballad, blues — even raga. None of this bricolage is either careless or appropriative — it’s woven to express a pan-human, joyous vision of freedom. Consider Mkhize’s pianism, whose acknowledged guiding spirit is another self-declared pan-human, Bheki Mseleku. Mkhize has always acknowledged the Mseleku influence but it emerges not in sounding like the late Durban-born pianist — he doesn’t — but rather in thinking through the possibilities of a tune in a very similar way. Mkhize has a similar fondness for taking a straightforward theme and turning it into a Catherine wheel, throwing off musical sparks as it spirals out into space, whether he’s hitting the keyboard with crashing intensity (Jaipur) or picking out delicate flecks of sound (Blue Heron). Mkhize’s Ode to Keith closes the album — a warm, deep blue hug for another influential piano player.  Soloing, Mkhize once explained to a journalist, “is like my grandmother’s food. Only I know when to stop because my stomach is full.” In a collective music such as jazz, everybody in the group has to be as good at listening as playing, to catch that moment when their colleague is ready to pass the sonic serving-dish. The Rainmakers have that gift down perfectly — no spiritual nourishment is ever wasted, and nobody, least of all the listener, leaves the musical table unsatisfied.

By Gwen Ansell

Other Rewiews

Bänz Oester and his Rainmakers belong to the class of musical magicians who emanate a force and spirituality that physically grips the listener and catapults them into another world.

Badische Zeitung

Pure communication. The new live recording of Bänz Oester‘s quartet, The Rainmakers, transmits a joy of playing and musical ideas.

Jazz Podium

A totally unrestrained band who left many audience members thunderstruck.

Jazzthetik 

Festivalgoers had every reason to be excited. A true discovery!

Jazz Thing

Ukuzinikela celebrates the great feat of common, spontaneous music-making.

CD of the Month in Stereoplay

This cross-cultural, cross-continental band is so unique and proves anew that Africa is the motherland of the universal language of jazz – it’s simultaneously like traveling infinitely far away, and coming home.

CD of the Week, NDR

…the immensely successful band Bänz Oester & The Rainmakers.

Spiegel Online

Impressive – and great jazz.

CD-Tipp BR

The improvisations and the interplay unfold from the embers of a simple melody, repeatedly arousing moments of greater intensity, be it in the expression of pure joy or, on the other side of the scale, of contemplation.

Jazz’n’More

Ukuzinikela is a powerful ode to the energy of improvisation.

Berner Kulturagenda

Basically, you cannot make the world a better place with music, but there are bands whose performances improve the world. The Rainmakers quartet belongs in this category.

Der Bund

Anyone who has seen this brilliant jazz band during a performance knows that they can only reasonably be justified with a live recording.

Emder Zeitung

The way the Rainmakers transform „dr Schacher Seppli“, and the equally well-known pop song, ,,Nach em Räge schinnt Sunne“ into the pulsating world of jazz, is delightful.

Fono Forum

Bänz Oester’s quartet radiates an unbelievable joy of performing!

Hamburger Abendblatt

It rarely happens in this genre: after over two hours, Bänz Oester & The Rainmakers were applauded by more than 120 enthusiastic spectators with stomping feet and loud cheers. What happened in the Leeraner Kulturspeicher on Thursday evening can confidently be called a triumph for this still new jazz band.

Emder Zeitung

Not even two minutes had passed, and already associations were awoken for me. I found myself in a kind of spiritual state.

Musikansich.de

The concert of the four „Rainmakers“ in Willisau, on 30 August 2014, left a lasting impression. The cheering audience is audible on the CD. No less euphoric were the media critics: the NZZ praised the «intensity of inspiration and energy», the «Tages-Anzeiger» spoke of a «storm of emotions», the Winterthur «Landbote» referred to a «triumphant appearance». Similarly jubilant are reviews of concerts in Germany and South Africa.

Kulturtipp