The Verses Sessions, started in 2005 by Nicole Moody, are monthly open-mic spoken word sessions at Zula Bar, Long Street, Cape Town and have a staunch following of audience members and performing artists. The voices on Verses, the first ever compilation album of spoken word in South Africa, urge us to Take Heed. And, to quote Yoel Kenan’s introduction on the inside cover of the album, “it’s long overdue on a continent where the oral tradition has been of such importance through the ages.”

“Spoken word” is standing in front of a microphone and speaking your mind. It’s a performance art with a growing following, including familiar names like Kanye West, Lauryn Hill and Joolz. Less well-known but with hugely loyal cult followings, people like Ani Di Franco, Jack Kerouac and Kwame K Kwame, are recognised as some of the most important social commentators of our time.

In Verses you’ll find a diversity of voices from Cape Town. They all have a message. 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.

The artists involved represent the versatility of this medium - beatboxers, rappers, poets and musicians. All (with the exception of Chi, who lives in Johannesburg) are based in Cape Town. Their words reflect the gritty reality of their lives in South Africa today; sentiments of a young country in a changing world, whether it’s about the transient nature of love (and the unending allure of jazz) in Nicole Moody’s “Love and Jazz”, a rail against South Africa’s historically-defined social order in Teba’s “Stand Up”, or the poetically sculpted message of anti-institutionalism of Aiden’s “Take Heed”.

With a caliber of musicians like SAMA award-winning Clare Philips and rising hip hop star Lungelo to induce an atmosphere, the charisma of a lone voice speaking out to the world on each of these eleven tracks, is seductively, enduringly, simple. As Nicole Moody, the founder of the Verses Sessions 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.”