CT JAZZ TRAIN REVIVES RAIL CULTURE

IT IS not every day that you will find multi-instrumentalist Mark Fransman trumpeting down a train's carriages or R&B sensation MXO casually playing the harmonica whilst seated across fellow train passengers. This past Saturday was such a day.

- UNATHI KONDILE

No snack vendors nor itinerant preachers on board; just trendy fashionistas, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, young professionals and tourists all taking pictures nonstop, determined to document the entire journey from Cape Town Station to Vlottenburg Station aboard the Cape Town Jazz Train.

“It's funny how these new metrorail train carriages have changed passenger behaviour. They are neater and there is order. I catch the train twice a week. It’s always clean, people use their phones and the doors can no longer be jammed open when the train is moving,” said a friend who asked that I not name them.

A businessman who runs a Jazz Café in Canada could not contain their excitement, saying it was their first time aboard a train in South Africa.

It was last year when Jazz In The Native Yards founder, Koko Nkalashe, broached jazz musician Nono Nkoane with an idea to bring people on board a train and take them to various jazz venues along the railway line.