Everything I've Learned about Love: An evening of Jazz and Blues with Bheki Khoza

Everything I’ve Learned about Love: 

A journey into the Jazz and Blues of the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s with Bheki Khoza.

A Food, Music and Storytelling Event: 

An intergenerational conversation about how local and global political landscapes shaped personal relationships across time, space, culture and identity through the 80s, 90s and 2000's.

Love. The most ubiquitous and universal of all themes. An obsession, a helpless addiction. A calamity, a projection. A fantasy. A dream. Thich Nhat Hahn writes: ‘to love without knowing how to love wounds those we are trying to love.’ In a country where Gender Based Violence prevails as social norm, it is one thing to consider the plight of the victim and another all together to consider the dark forces shaping the behaviour and actions of the perpetrator. 

So when South African writer and journalist, Lewis Nkosi published his book, “Underground People” to critical acclaim in 1994 - it was not the range of his vocabulary or the perfection of his syntax or spotless grammar denoting quality writing that drew attention as much as the wonder and awe, terror and fear that accompanies a society of people all of a sudden finding themselves exposed to a narrative that completely shatters prior concepts of social structure and hierarchy. 

By reading Nkosi’s work, we are thrust into a world that transcends identity grouping entirely by offering a glimpse into the internal worlds of personas traditionally kept apart by gender, race and class to reveal a nuance and complexity of experience that defies dehumanisation of ‘other’ by revealing just how capable each one of us are of falling into both victim and perpetrator roles - often simultaneously! 

Imagine the freedom fighter who also beats his wife. The battered woman who heroically saves the drunkard from walking into a pole. The farmer whose ambitions to sow seed are wrung dry by the bank. The bank directed by a CEO who still suffers from the trauma of having been sent to bed hungry as a child. The brutality of SAPS officers hijacking a train spewing racist insults even more grievous than the harm inflicted by closed fists suddenly softened by the appearance of a children’s comic book. 

So is the world of Lewis Nkosi. As is the world of Bheki Khoza. There is violence. There is anger. There is desire. There is hope. This is the sound of the Jazz of that time. Fear, confusion, chaos, dysfunction made beautiful. A world in which the shame of victimhood and guilt embedded in moral injury hold equal weight. This is the sound of Blues. Striving, wilting, depression, radical acceptance bestowing the power of anthemic singing reaching up and up and up into the skies: “What shall I do? Where shall I go?” To escape this pain. To free myself of this suffering. 

How did it come to be? Be it conscious or unconscious - that the world we live in associates love as pain. Love as something that lives only in a dream. No. This cannot be. To live on earth is to bear the responsibility of learning how to love and perhaps music can play a far bigger role than previously imagined in teaching us how. To consider genres of music not only as categorisations of sound but also as representations of a mood or a mode of being. And to see how over time everything can change while simultaneously staying the same. 

The shadow we seek to escape changes shape and form all the while remaining stuck to us. Somewhere on the spectrum between femicide as it’s most brutal expression in opposition to the torturous ambiguity of on-off-on-off-again love that sends it’s victims into a deluded stupor. Here we find the bass beat. The four on the floor. The melodic incantation. The rhythmic harmonies. Sopranos and altos, runners and chasers each in their own way, seeking a means to transform the association of love as pain - as suffering - into love as liberation - as healing. 

By flipping between story and song. We give names to emotions for which there have been no words while simultaneously resting left brain requirements for problem solving by providing a safe place to feel, a container to share, a moment to acknowledge every force that has shaped us up until this point alongside the opportunity to decide, to choose and explore - a different way of relating. A new way of loving. Free of limerence, of fantasy, of projection. Of objectification. Of dehumanisation. What does it mean to be here? To love. Not in heaven only. But also, here on earth? 

Come eat with us. Come sing with us. Let’s talk and let’s listen. Let us learn, unlearn, relearn. Equally, as much as it was not vocabulary, syntax or grammar that gave such credence to Lewis Nkosi’s stories. It is neither the complexity or range of chords, progression, rhythm or melody that imbue such a sense of wonder and awe in the work of Bheki Khoza’s music. Rather it’s the sound of an artist who has sat with himself, over and over again making peace with both shadow and light praying, “teach me how to love. Over and over, even in as many years that have passed, let me be like a child once again. Let me love as though I’ve never been hurt.” 

?Details: 

Date: 17 January 2025

Time: 19:00pm

Venue: Zola’s Kitchen, 64 Main Road Kalk Bay

Ticket: R440pp includes dinner and welcome drink | R280pp excludes dinner and welcome drink. 

Dinner Menu: 

Meat Option: Zulu-inspired Beef or Chicken Stew with Chakalaka served with rice or pap. 

Vegan Option: Zulu-inspired Root Vegetable Stew with Chakalaka served with rice or pap. 

Welcome drink: Traditional South African Beer / Glass of Chenin Blanc / Rooibos Iced Tea. 

Isikhati sibuye ngokubili.