Johannesburg — LAST week saw the announcement of the STANDARD BANK YOUNG ARTIST award winners for 2008, and this is the second year that a Cape Town-based player has taken the crown for jazz. In 2007 it was saxophonist Shannon Mowday; for 2008 it will be pianist, composer, teacher and producer Mark Fransman.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider that adjective "young". The Standard Bank award system, like the African National Congress Youth League, lends itself easily to snide comments about sheltering the oldest youths in the business. Fransman, at 31, just about makes the cut, yet, along with Mowday, he is one of the younger recipients of the jazz award in recent years. There are reasons for that, many of them to do with the apartheid education system.

In the past, lack of educational opportunities made it hard for a player of colour to attain status quickly. While those days are over, their legacy is that many truly great jazz instrumentalists are now too old for the young artist crown and work in a context where no other appropriate accolades exist.

Unlike the South African Music Awards -- which are, in any case, often a farce for jazz -- the great strength of the Young Artist awards is that they are not linked to products in the marketplace, but are judged on current work and future promise.

Fransman has both in container loads. He grew up in Cape Town under the musical eye of a choir-teacher mother, studied with a classical piano teacher, and completed his pre-university music studies at the Belville Academy, from where he headed almost straight to the stage for an FNB Vita-winning role in the Kramer/Petersen musical Kat and the Kings.

A scholarship took him to the University of Cape Town (UCT) where he studied for a jazz performance diploma and played with many of the other UCT young jazz lions, including guitarist Selaelo Selota and singer Judith Sephuma, as well as the city's veterans, such as Winston Mankunku Ngozi.

Since then, he has worked in a range of contexts, from the fearless improvisation of Tribe with Buddy Wells and Kesivan Naidoo to the acid-jazz inclined music of Strait and Narro, which mixes club dance grooves with tributes to John Coltrane and Horace Silver. That band, which Fransman leads, made its debut with tracks on The Johnnie Walker Jazz Impressions compilation and has since released a full CD, Ahead. Strait and Narro played at the 2004 Athens Olympics, and Fransman has shared bills with many distinguished international artists, from Pharaoh Sanders to Danilo Perez. Fransman has also produced several albums, including Zillion Miles, the solo debut of Strait and Narro vocalist Melanie Scholtz.

But it's live that Fransman makes his most compelling impression. Working with trumpeter Feya Faku and a team of international support players at Grahamstown two years back, his flair for intricate rhythmic and harmonic structures held audiences spellbound. In club gigs with Tribe, his ferocious duets with drummer Naidoo powered the music along: in equal parts street and spirit.

Some listeners hear echoes of Bheki Mseleku's meditative chords in his playing. What the two certainly share is a spiritual approach that Fransman happily acknowledges: "All of my music has a message."

It will be interesting to see what Fransman does with his Grahamstown concerts. Such is the range of his music (he plays many instruments beside his mainstay of piano) that they are unlikely to be predictable affairs.

But as we applaud Fransman, we need to remember the many deserving artists who are not "young" enough for this particular prize and have no prospect of any other. It is yet one more argument for the establishment of credible South African jazz awards, where mature playing talent can be rewarded even without a catalogue of recordings.

Lastly, the tragedy of reggae singer Lucky Dube's murder is by now old news. Nevertheless, condolences are in order. Dube was instrumental in inspiring an authentically South African reggae voice, and his successors (including groups that infuse flavours from reggae into much more contemporary sounds, such as 340ml) owe him a huge musical debt. May his spirit rest in peace.