African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, Nov 1, 2016
While the volume was slim, in 1993 Marabi Nights was important not only for carving a space for S... more While the volume was slim, in 1993 Marabi Nights was important not only for carving a space for South African jazz in the shadow of the American narrative, but like Coplan and Erlmann before him, Ballantine insisted on the crucial work of politics and culture in both the making and understanding of South African jazz. For musicology as a field, such contextualization was pioneering, following in the epistemological footsteps of anthropology and ethnomusicology. Marabi Nights: Jazz, 'Race' and Society in Early Apartheid South Africa (2012) is an expanded and slightly modified second edition of the 1993 publication, published this time by the University of KwaZulu Natal Press with an accompanying compact disc. What has changed from the first to second iteration of Marabi Nights? This is the core question addressed here. The 1993 Foreword written by Darius Brubeck, who established the Center for Jazz and Popular Music Studies and a pioneering jazz program at the University of Natal from the mid 1980s, has been replaced with a foreword by the gifted jazz and opera singer Sibongile Khumalo. Khumalo locates the work in terms of her own experience growing up in Soweto, under the musical leadership of her father, Khabi Mngoma. She writes about choirs, musical mixing, urban and rural connections,
Event: Engaging Students Through Technology Symposium Year: 2010 Summary: Carol Muller, Professor... more Event: Engaging Students Through Technology Symposium Year: 2010 Summary: Carol Muller, Professor of Music, School of Arts and Sciences, discusses student use of Google products (Maps, YouTube, Docs) and online networking tools to create interactive musical histories. Her West Philly Music website showcases student projects over several years. We live today in a state of \u27continuous partial attention\u27. Instant access to people and information can both engage and distract us. New tools break down classroom boundaries and change the nature of college education. The 2010 symposium explores the creative ways faculty are integrating technologies into teaching, the challenges they face, and the disruptive nature of mobile technologies in lecture contexts.https://repository.upenn.edu/showcase_videos/1057/thumbnail.jp
I consider the current state of jazz in South Africa in response to the formation of the nation-s... more I consider the current state of jazz in South Africa in response to the formation of the nation-state in the 1990s. I argue that while there is a recurring sense of the precarity of jazz in South Africa as measured by the short lives of jazz venues, there is nevertheless a vibrant jazz culture in which musicians are using their own studios to experiment with new ways of being South African through the freedom of association of people and styles forming a music that sounds both local and comfortable in its sense of place in the global community. This essay uses the words of several South African musicians and concludes by situating the artistic process of South African artist William Kentridge in parallel to jazz improvisation.
I consider the current state of jazz in South Africa in response to the formation of the nation-s... more I consider the current state of jazz in South Africa in response to the formation of the nation-state in the 1990s. I argue that while there is a recurring sense of the precarity of jazz in South Africa as measured by the short lives of jazz venues, there is nevertheless a vibrant jazz culture in which musicians are using their own studios to experiment with new ways of being South African through the freedom of association of people and styles forming a music that sounds both local and comfortable in its sense of place in the global community. This essay uses the words of several South African musicians and concludes by situating the artistic process of South African artist William Kentridge in parallel to jazz improvisation.
In this paper I examine izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha, the collection of liturgy, prayers, and spiri... more In this paper I examine izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha, the collection of liturgy, prayers, and spiritual songs composed by South African prophet-healer Isaiah Shembe and his son, Galilee, in KwaZulu Natal in the early twentieth century. The hymns exist in the community in both written and orally transmitted forms allowing for a certain tension between the two modes of transmission. I argue that this tension reflects on the nature of belief as the verbal versus written utterance: between the "Word of God" as carried by the human voice and experienced within the bounds of the body, and the objectified (lied "Word" of the scriptural economy that stressed belief divorced from the body. I write a parallel narrative to my earlier work (1999a), which stressed issues of political economy, musical performance, and ritual practice, to focus on the largely American Christian mission context in which Isaiah Shembe operated in the early twentieth century.
This chapter explores the life and career of Sathima Bea Benjamin, who grew up in Cape Town, Sout... more This chapter explores the life and career of Sathima Bea Benjamin, who grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, during the transition to apartheid in the 1940s. Taking melodies she heard on her grandmother's radio, Sathima developed her own jazz singing voice, weaving in her own compositions. With a life embedded in an awareness of race and gender, she left for Europe in 1962. Her migratory lifestyle took her through tours in Europe, supporting her husband musician and caring for her daughters, to her own career development in New York City as a jazz singer with her own trio—where she continues to record, create, and perform. Sathima's vocality and life-stories reveal risks, freedoms, and creative processes as she creates a counternarrative to the discourses of masculinity in jazz.
African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, 1999
This article is dedicated to the memory ofgumboot dancer Jonney Hade be, or 'C to C ', who died o... more This article is dedicated to the memory ofgumboot dancer Jonney Hade be, or 'C to C ', who died o f cancer in the Centacow mission hospital near Creighton in southern KwaZulu Natal on 12 January 1996. 3 'Lef-light' refers to marching orders-left-right, but in the Zulu language there is no V sound. Frequently, the V sound is verbalised as an '1* sound.
When you are dead [the heavenly messengers] want these notebooks so that they can see what they a... more When you are dead [the heavenly messengers] want these notebooks so that they can see what they are going to do [with you]. You can't go to heaven without [them].... It's just like having a ticket for the train.... When you are dead, they take you to the graveyard. You are not going to go [to heaven] because you haven't got a ticket. You've got to work for it, work for that ticket in this world, because they say that in heaven it is done just as it is in the world. M. Buthelezi, Soweto, 15 Feb.1992
To copy [note] for [note], word for word, image for image, is to make the known world your own ..... more To copy [note] for [note], word for word, image for image, is to make the known world your own ... It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of reality. Hillel Schwartz 1996, 211-2 Despite their prodigious use of recordings in formulating perspectives on jazz history, historians have tended to avoid theorizing the actual status and function of these artifacts_the very artifacts that ... would seem to constitute primary evidence about jazz music. Jed Rasula 1995, 134 There was a time when radio was pure magic ... the magic [came] from entering a world of sound, and from using that sound to make your own vision, your own dream, your own world. Susan Douglas 1999, 28 Just to sit in this dark place, and magic takes place on the wall. For a moment, we forgot apartheid, we forgot there was another world that wasn't good; we sat there, and were carried away by the dream of these American movies. Actor John Kani to Peter Davis 1990, 23 On January 25, 1959, a short but rather glowing review appeared in The Golden City Post, one of South Africa's most popular newspapers targeted at a "non-white" (2) audience. It read: There is no doubt about it, Beatrice Benjamin is the mostest, the greatest and the most appealing girl singer in the Cape, whispers Howard Lawrence. What she did to the audience at Post's show, "Just Jazz Meets the Ballet" was wow. I got it bad when she sang "I Got It Bad." Everybody else got it bad too and they kept shouting for more of that feeling. Most promising singer for 1959. Agreed. [my emphasis] Five decades later the performance of Duke Ellington's music in Cape Town, South Africa may not seem particularly noteworthy. In its historical moment, however, it was a remarkable achievement for a local singer of mixed race to move her interracial audience emotionally with a "foreign" repertory, i.e., a style of song performance far removed from the site of the music's original production. It begs the question of how jazz had become both a naturalized discourse in Cape Town and part of the individual and collective experiences of so many who lived through that period of South African cultural and political history. For this Cape Town-born singer, "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good" has a certain aura. Sathima Bea Benjamin (3) recalls that this Duke Ellington tune created an immediate and steadfast bond between herself and internationally acclaimed South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (aka. Dollar Brand). (4) Benjamin and Ibrahim were each working separately on the piece when they first met at the jazz fundraiser mentioned above. Unbeknownst to them in 1959, through an extraordinary sequence of events, they would come to meet and record with Duke Ellington and his musical partner, composer-performer Billy Strayhorn in Switzerland four years later. Benjamin and Ibrahim memorialized that encounter by performing "I Got It Bad" once again, but this time in the presence of its composer. Two records came out of the 1963 encounter, one featuring Sathima Bea Benjamin (A Morning in Paris, 1997) and the other Dollar Brand, (Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, 1963, reissued 1997). These records signified a climactic moment for South African jazz because while many South African musicians had performed the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in Johannesburg and Cape Town, few imagined they would ever have the opportunity to meet these musicians, or witness them performing live, let alone record in the presence of such internationally acclaimed artists. As the Cape Town jazz pianist Henry February commented to me, at that time for people in his community, travel to America was like travel to the moon. "The only experience I ever had with Americans was through records." (5) Similarly, when South Africans began to travel in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, they report that they rarely met anyone abroad who had any knowledge of South Africa's vibrant jazz communities. …
... The drummers all know that with Sathima you need to bring brushes. Musicians do not accompany... more ... The drummers all know that with Sathima you need to bring brushes. Musicians do not accompany her in the conventional sense, but weave together a musical fabric which allows each voice to find a place and to be heard. ... Sathima Bea Benjamin, exile and the 'Southern Touch' ...
... Muller returned to the USA in 1996, teaching at New York University, and the Uni-versity of N... more ... Muller returned to the USA in 1996, teaching at New York University, and the Uni-versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ... 9 are three more in-depth discussions of three different South African music-dance cultures that emerged with the migration of Black South Africans from ...
African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, Nov 1, 2016
While the volume was slim, in 1993 Marabi Nights was important not only for carving a space for S... more While the volume was slim, in 1993 Marabi Nights was important not only for carving a space for South African jazz in the shadow of the American narrative, but like Coplan and Erlmann before him, Ballantine insisted on the crucial work of politics and culture in both the making and understanding of South African jazz. For musicology as a field, such contextualization was pioneering, following in the epistemological footsteps of anthropology and ethnomusicology. Marabi Nights: Jazz, 'Race' and Society in Early Apartheid South Africa (2012) is an expanded and slightly modified second edition of the 1993 publication, published this time by the University of KwaZulu Natal Press with an accompanying compact disc. What has changed from the first to second iteration of Marabi Nights? This is the core question addressed here. The 1993 Foreword written by Darius Brubeck, who established the Center for Jazz and Popular Music Studies and a pioneering jazz program at the University of Natal from the mid 1980s, has been replaced with a foreword by the gifted jazz and opera singer Sibongile Khumalo. Khumalo locates the work in terms of her own experience growing up in Soweto, under the musical leadership of her father, Khabi Mngoma. She writes about choirs, musical mixing, urban and rural connections,
Event: Engaging Students Through Technology Symposium Year: 2010 Summary: Carol Muller, Professor... more Event: Engaging Students Through Technology Symposium Year: 2010 Summary: Carol Muller, Professor of Music, School of Arts and Sciences, discusses student use of Google products (Maps, YouTube, Docs) and online networking tools to create interactive musical histories. Her West Philly Music website showcases student projects over several years. We live today in a state of \u27continuous partial attention\u27. Instant access to people and information can both engage and distract us. New tools break down classroom boundaries and change the nature of college education. The 2010 symposium explores the creative ways faculty are integrating technologies into teaching, the challenges they face, and the disruptive nature of mobile technologies in lecture contexts.https://repository.upenn.edu/showcase_videos/1057/thumbnail.jp
I consider the current state of jazz in South Africa in response to the formation of the nation-s... more I consider the current state of jazz in South Africa in response to the formation of the nation-state in the 1990s. I argue that while there is a recurring sense of the precarity of jazz in South Africa as measured by the short lives of jazz venues, there is nevertheless a vibrant jazz culture in which musicians are using their own studios to experiment with new ways of being South African through the freedom of association of people and styles forming a music that sounds both local and comfortable in its sense of place in the global community. This essay uses the words of several South African musicians and concludes by situating the artistic process of South African artist William Kentridge in parallel to jazz improvisation.
I consider the current state of jazz in South Africa in response to the formation of the nation-s... more I consider the current state of jazz in South Africa in response to the formation of the nation-state in the 1990s. I argue that while there is a recurring sense of the precarity of jazz in South Africa as measured by the short lives of jazz venues, there is nevertheless a vibrant jazz culture in which musicians are using their own studios to experiment with new ways of being South African through the freedom of association of people and styles forming a music that sounds both local and comfortable in its sense of place in the global community. This essay uses the words of several South African musicians and concludes by situating the artistic process of South African artist William Kentridge in parallel to jazz improvisation.
In this paper I examine izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha, the collection of liturgy, prayers, and spiri... more In this paper I examine izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha, the collection of liturgy, prayers, and spiritual songs composed by South African prophet-healer Isaiah Shembe and his son, Galilee, in KwaZulu Natal in the early twentieth century. The hymns exist in the community in both written and orally transmitted forms allowing for a certain tension between the two modes of transmission. I argue that this tension reflects on the nature of belief as the verbal versus written utterance: between the "Word of God" as carried by the human voice and experienced within the bounds of the body, and the objectified (lied "Word" of the scriptural economy that stressed belief divorced from the body. I write a parallel narrative to my earlier work (1999a), which stressed issues of political economy, musical performance, and ritual practice, to focus on the largely American Christian mission context in which Isaiah Shembe operated in the early twentieth century.
This chapter explores the life and career of Sathima Bea Benjamin, who grew up in Cape Town, Sout... more This chapter explores the life and career of Sathima Bea Benjamin, who grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, during the transition to apartheid in the 1940s. Taking melodies she heard on her grandmother's radio, Sathima developed her own jazz singing voice, weaving in her own compositions. With a life embedded in an awareness of race and gender, she left for Europe in 1962. Her migratory lifestyle took her through tours in Europe, supporting her husband musician and caring for her daughters, to her own career development in New York City as a jazz singer with her own trio—where she continues to record, create, and perform. Sathima's vocality and life-stories reveal risks, freedoms, and creative processes as she creates a counternarrative to the discourses of masculinity in jazz.
African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, 1999
This article is dedicated to the memory ofgumboot dancer Jonney Hade be, or 'C to C ', who died o... more This article is dedicated to the memory ofgumboot dancer Jonney Hade be, or 'C to C ', who died o f cancer in the Centacow mission hospital near Creighton in southern KwaZulu Natal on 12 January 1996. 3 'Lef-light' refers to marching orders-left-right, but in the Zulu language there is no V sound. Frequently, the V sound is verbalised as an '1* sound.
When you are dead [the heavenly messengers] want these notebooks so that they can see what they a... more When you are dead [the heavenly messengers] want these notebooks so that they can see what they are going to do [with you]. You can't go to heaven without [them].... It's just like having a ticket for the train.... When you are dead, they take you to the graveyard. You are not going to go [to heaven] because you haven't got a ticket. You've got to work for it, work for that ticket in this world, because they say that in heaven it is done just as it is in the world. M. Buthelezi, Soweto, 15 Feb.1992
To copy [note] for [note], word for word, image for image, is to make the known world your own ..... more To copy [note] for [note], word for word, image for image, is to make the known world your own ... It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of reality. Hillel Schwartz 1996, 211-2 Despite their prodigious use of recordings in formulating perspectives on jazz history, historians have tended to avoid theorizing the actual status and function of these artifacts_the very artifacts that ... would seem to constitute primary evidence about jazz music. Jed Rasula 1995, 134 There was a time when radio was pure magic ... the magic [came] from entering a world of sound, and from using that sound to make your own vision, your own dream, your own world. Susan Douglas 1999, 28 Just to sit in this dark place, and magic takes place on the wall. For a moment, we forgot apartheid, we forgot there was another world that wasn't good; we sat there, and were carried away by the dream of these American movies. Actor John Kani to Peter Davis 1990, 23 On January 25, 1959, a short but rather glowing review appeared in The Golden City Post, one of South Africa's most popular newspapers targeted at a "non-white" (2) audience. It read: There is no doubt about it, Beatrice Benjamin is the mostest, the greatest and the most appealing girl singer in the Cape, whispers Howard Lawrence. What she did to the audience at Post's show, "Just Jazz Meets the Ballet" was wow. I got it bad when she sang "I Got It Bad." Everybody else got it bad too and they kept shouting for more of that feeling. Most promising singer for 1959. Agreed. [my emphasis] Five decades later the performance of Duke Ellington's music in Cape Town, South Africa may not seem particularly noteworthy. In its historical moment, however, it was a remarkable achievement for a local singer of mixed race to move her interracial audience emotionally with a "foreign" repertory, i.e., a style of song performance far removed from the site of the music's original production. It begs the question of how jazz had become both a naturalized discourse in Cape Town and part of the individual and collective experiences of so many who lived through that period of South African cultural and political history. For this Cape Town-born singer, "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good" has a certain aura. Sathima Bea Benjamin (3) recalls that this Duke Ellington tune created an immediate and steadfast bond between herself and internationally acclaimed South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (aka. Dollar Brand). (4) Benjamin and Ibrahim were each working separately on the piece when they first met at the jazz fundraiser mentioned above. Unbeknownst to them in 1959, through an extraordinary sequence of events, they would come to meet and record with Duke Ellington and his musical partner, composer-performer Billy Strayhorn in Switzerland four years later. Benjamin and Ibrahim memorialized that encounter by performing "I Got It Bad" once again, but this time in the presence of its composer. Two records came out of the 1963 encounter, one featuring Sathima Bea Benjamin (A Morning in Paris, 1997) and the other Dollar Brand, (Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, 1963, reissued 1997). These records signified a climactic moment for South African jazz because while many South African musicians had performed the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in Johannesburg and Cape Town, few imagined they would ever have the opportunity to meet these musicians, or witness them performing live, let alone record in the presence of such internationally acclaimed artists. As the Cape Town jazz pianist Henry February commented to me, at that time for people in his community, travel to America was like travel to the moon. "The only experience I ever had with Americans was through records." (5) Similarly, when South Africans began to travel in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, they report that they rarely met anyone abroad who had any knowledge of South Africa's vibrant jazz communities. …
... The drummers all know that with Sathima you need to bring brushes. Musicians do not accompany... more ... The drummers all know that with Sathima you need to bring brushes. Musicians do not accompany her in the conventional sense, but weave together a musical fabric which allows each voice to find a place and to be heard. ... Sathima Bea Benjamin, exile and the 'Southern Touch' ...
... Muller returned to the USA in 1996, teaching at New York University, and the Uni-versity of N... more ... Muller returned to the USA in 1996, teaching at New York University, and the Uni-versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ... 9 are three more in-depth discussions of three different South African music-dance cultures that emerged with the migration of Black South Africans from ...
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