The jazz evenings at the Royal Country Inn, Dundee, offered something different from the usual entertainment dished up in Northern KZN.

The Amandla Freedom  Ensemble  performed to an appreciate, eclectic audience, including a group of tourists from Capen Town.

The Amandla Freedom Ensemble highlights the compositional material of bandleader Mandla Mlangeni (trumpet) and executed by an impeccable dynamism by the ensemble in the form of Tumi Mogorosi (drums), Ariel Zamonsky (bass), Oscar Rachabane and Nhlanhla Mahlangu (tenor saxophones).

Mlangeni’s Amandla quintet wraps elliptical melodies in three-part horn harmonies, rich with impasto, swinging like broken chandeliers. The Soweto native’s compositions pull from church hymns; traditional rituals learned from his uncle, who was a sangoma, or healer: American postbop; the Ornette Coleman Quartet; and the bounding, interwoven cycles of Eastern Cape music.