Africa

Conclusion of the performance/talk with Sathima Bea Benjamin, Gwen Ansell and Carol Mueller. Click here for Part I and here for Part II.

Singer/composer Sathima Bea Benjamin grew up in Cape Town watching movies and listening to jazz records from America. Rejecting a life under apartheid, her career took her to New York, where she now lives. In conversation with Gwen Ansell, Ms. Benjamin discusses, with sung and recorded illustrations, the emotions and debates American music stirred among Cape Town's jazz players and singers, and how America responded to the African contribution to jazz and world culture. Ms. Benjamin is accompanied by Onaje Allan Gumbs, piano.

Gwen Ansell discusses the strategies that South African musicians and radio stations used to overcome the apartheid regime's efforts at cultural cleansing by introducing black audiences to jazz, and thus making jazz "the quintessential music of struggle" in that country. Click here for Part II.

South Africa is unusual in that jazz is the center of a lively popular music culture in that country, and not just a niche market. A major part of the South African jazz audience are members of organizations known as stockvels, which are part savings clubs, part music appreciation societies, and part social networking and patronage hubs. Gatherings there typically involve not only listening to jazz records, but improvising dance performances to them.

This talk examines the music festival documented in 2004 called Banlieues Bleues, which featured African American musicians from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music.  These musicians used improvisation to empower and give voice to children of color from marginalized Parisian suburban communities.