In Cape Town, the Verses Sessions at Zula Bar, Long Street, were started in 2005 by performance poet Nicole Moody. Each session showcases a featured performance poet, a live band/musician and the open-mic session that has garnered a cult following of regular performers, viewers and reviewers. Amid an atmosphere of eloquent, incisive performance poetry backed by live music, the inspiration for Verses, the album, arose. In Verses, you’ll find a diversity of voices from Cape Town, reflecting the versatility of the medium – beatboxers, rappers, poets and musicians. They all have a message. “Let’s Start a Revolution”, “A Moment of Silence”, “Homage to Britney Spears” – the titles alone tell you that, but the gist of what is being told comes across in full-blooded emotion with the voices of the artists mingling with music. Sultry messages of love and lust twist into cries of pain and betrayal; voices spitting-mad with history's injustices peter out into whispers of hope. Laments for ancestral heroes and even-keeled denunciations of the social system speak boldly, plainly, frankly. All (except for Chi, who lives in Johannesburg) are based in Cape Town. Their words reflect the gritty reality of their lives in South Africa today, the sentiments of a young country in a changing world. It’s the transient nature of love (and the unending allure of jazz music) in Nicole Moody’s “Love and Jazz”, a rail against South Africa’s historically-defined social order in Teba’s “Stand Up”, a poetically sculpted message of anti-institutionalism of Aiden’s “Take Heed”. Providing the musical backdrop to the artist on this album are musicians like SAMA award-winning Clare Philips and rising artist/producer Lungelo. The voices on Verses urge us to Take Heed. And to quote Yoel Kenan, "it's long overdue on a continent where the oral tradition has been of such importance through the ages." The charisma of a lone voice speaking out to the world on each of these eleven tracks is seductively, enduringly, simple. There’s something that speaks to us as individuals, that asks us to pause and reflect. As Nicole Moody says in her introduction to the album: “…maybe you’ll see something of yourself in them. Maybe you’ll hear something riding in between a verse that’ll inspire you. Maybe you’ll recognise your own story.”