Presenting

OffShore Jazz Band

Quintet

OVERVIEW

Offshore – referring to the prevailing wind loved by every surfer – came into being organically around 2005 when Martin Wolfaardt, Jonno Sweetman and Paul Gibbings turned listening sessions into extended jams – inspired by the jazz masters and by the Knysna forests that were their first audience.

Martin opened a venue in Plettenberg Bay around 2007 – the aptly named Surf Café – where itinerant musicians could drop in for a session. Offshore were able to learn from a series of wandering masters, including Gary Thomas – a leading interpreter of the music of Monk on guitar – and Sam Thomas – a Berklee alumni with a PhD in ethnomusicology who introduced the locals to Klezmer and Andalusian music. Local jazz legends also came to hear of a nascent scene on the Garden Route. Jams with Buddy Wells and Marcus Wyatt led to broader exposure and an invitation to play the Cape Town International Jazz Festival in 2008.

Offshore also met Jonathan Crossley who so enjoyed the unschooled freshness of their sound that he invited the trio to Johannesburg to collaborate on his funk jazz debut – Funk for The Shaolin Monk. That year the band also released their second album, Incident, featuring Wells and Crossley and Wyatt.

Performances at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival followed in 2011 and 2016 – the band also won funding from Swiss Helvetica for a South African tour in 2017. Over the years the joy that inevitably overflows when Offshore take the stage has inspired
regular reunions – each of which reflects the extraordinary evolution of the participating musicians and the organic growth of the original material that forms the basis for the improvised journeys they embark upon.

THE BAND
The present incarnation of the band comprises a handful of South Africa’s most adventurous and beloved cross-genre musicians.

BUDDY WELLS – Saxophones
JONNO SWEETMAN – Drums & Percussion
REZA KHOTA – Guitar
MARTIN WOLFAARDT – Piano
ROB NEL – Bass Guitar

Buddy Wells on tenor and soprano saxophones is one of the most prolific and admired saxophonists of his generation. Apart from having performed at almost every iteration of the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, (CTIJF) Buddy has graced international stages that include several North Sea Jazz Festivals in the Netherlands, the Swedish Jazz Celebration in Stockholm, the National Jazz Scene in Oslo, the Nehru Centre in India, the Festival d’Automne à Paris and the Oslo Jazz Festival. His recording credits include true legends of the art form including Tribe, Kyle Shepherd, Bokani Dyer, Feya Faku, Oliver Mtukudzi, Moses Mololekwa, Feya Faku, and Winston Mankunku Ngozi.

Jonno Sweetman on drums and percussion has earned his place as one of the most versatile and creative proponents of his instrument. A regular performer at the CTIJF, Jonno also tours the globe with various projects playing everywhere from major festivals to intimate jazz clubs like the legendary Birds Eye in Basel, Switzerland. His extraordinary ability to cross genres allows him to improvise with jazz monsters such as the Kyle Shepherd Trio, Carlo Mombelli’s ensembles and Swiss-SA collaboration Skyjack just as easily as he rocks out with blues masters Dan Patlansky and Albert Frost. He has also branched out as a sensitive and compelling singer-songwriter.

Reza Khota is a guitarist/composer who has performed, recorded and toured
professionally in South Africa and Internationally for over 25 years. His albums have been reviewed and recognised in the global jazz media. Over the years he has established himself as a guitarist with wide reaching abilities with two releases as band leader of his own quartet, several others in collaborative bands and many more as a guitarist with other artists. The Reza Khota Quartet released their second album – Liminal, in 2019. In 2022 Khota recorded on Tumi Mogorosi’s album, Group Theory – Black Music. Committed to subverting the expectations of a music industry that has overdetermined what it means to be an African musician, Khota and his fellow musicians have intentionally sort new ground.

Khota was also an artist in residence at the University of Western Cape’s Centre for Humanities Research from 2015-2018. In 2025 Khota completed a joint PhD in History at the University of the Western Cape, and in Art Science at the University of Ghent. His thesis reframes histories of West African guitar music, taking a contrapuntal approach to reading the history against the background of slavery, colonisation, emancipation and independence. It also presents a contrapuntal method for composition from a South African positionality that moves beyond the taxonomic modes of representation historically found within the discipline of ethnomusicology. Khota currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship in the UK-SA Bilateral Digital Humanities chair in culture and technics at the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC. His work as part of a cohort of
scholars posits a renewed aesthetic education both as an intervention into the
relationship between the human and technology and as a basis for reimagining a postapartheid future.

Khota is currently working on a studio album with the new free jazz ensemble: Proof of Life, along with drummer/scholar Asher Gamedze and bassist Sean Sanby. He will also record his third studio album as a bandleader of the Reza Khota Quartet in 2026. More info: http://www.rezakhota.com

Martin Wolfaardt on piano writes much of the material for Offshore. He draws on a love of classical music – in which he received his grounding – his immersion in the deep canon of jazz from bebop to the present day and a fascination with world music and the avant garde. Wolfaardt has performed with and written for a range of musicians including Guy Buttery, Wendy Oldfield, James van Minnen and the late Dave Ledbetter.

Rob Nel on bass guitar is a living embodiment of the idea that “if you find a job you love you’ll never work a day in your life”. Straight out of the SADF Rob joined the Backwater Blues band and discovered that love. He worked as a side man with Afrikaans musician Anton Goosen before starting the highly original “B-World” which garnered radio play and comparisons to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. His immersion in jazz came playing with “Interzone” – a powerhouse of jazz fusion in the 90’s. In the early 2000’s he toured extensively with funk-jazz ensemble Golliwog. Since then, Rob has been doing the supportive work that every great jazz bass player knows well – making everyone he plays with sound great.

The essence of Offshore is a deep love of music prior to categorization, a mutual respect among the musicians present and a connection to the silence out of which all creativity emerges.