I am not sure what to make of this. Bill T Jones (creator of the musical “Fela!,” currently playing on Broadway) recently choreographed “Zombie” (a song about military repression) for Canada’s version of “So You Think You Can Dance.”
The Good Life
September 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The promo for South African-US duo Blk Sonshine‘s latest release.
Igor Stravinsky’s South Africa
September 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Long before Sun City there was this kind of thing.
From Time Magazine, June 1, 1962:
Composer Igor Stravinsky was conducting the South African Broadcasting Corp.’s symphony orchestra [that's the state broadcaster] in the first of five concerts for whites only (a sixth was reserved for blacks). Stravinsky had asked that seating be integrated, but the broadcasting authorities coldly refused. The maestro’s opinion: “Music takes precedence over politics. I don’t think about these things because it is outside my competence. I have so many other things to think about.”
h/t: Suren Pillay
The Good Guys
September 16, 2010 By 22 Comments
By Eric Ritskes
Guest Blogger
Review: “Mugabe and the White African“
I love a good documentary. I love to learn about new things and hear people’s story, a chance I might not normally get. I used to think that this form of storytelling was somehow more ‘pure’, as if somehow documentaries were somehow less fictitious than the Hollywood movies which were made-up, make believe – fiction. The difference with documentaries is that they are much more subtle in their spinning of fiction, choosing to manipulate real life in ways that highlight certain causes or beliefs or ‘truths.’ An obvious example of this is Michael Moore’s documentaries but it happens no less in other titles in the genre.
Last night I sat down and watched “Mugabe and the White African,” a documentary chronicling the plight of two White farmers in Zimbabwe under Mugabe’s rule. I had been searching for something to watch and the movie review sites were trumpeting this one as the best, Rottentomatoes.com even going so far as to put it in their Top 10 Best of 2010 movies with a 97% approval rating with reviewers stating: “The film serves as a testimony on behalf of all of Mugabe’s victims” (The Sunday Times, UK); “This extraordinary profile in courage starkly bears passionate and brave witness as two flinty farmers stand up for their rights in a good vs. evil fight” (filmforward.com), and the Los Angeles Times’ critic writing that the two farmers are “two unforgettable heroes.”
David Adjaye’s Urban Africa
September 16, 2010 By 8 Comments
For a while now I’ve been wanting to post some of the images by celebrated architect David Adjaye‘s to “… photograph and document key cities in Africa as part of an ongoing project to study new patterns of urbanism.” It is also part of Adjaye’s “… personal quest … to address the scant knowledge of the built environment of the African continent.” The pictures were displayed at London’s Design Museum till earlier this month as a series of large projections against a backdrop of African beats composed by Adjaye’s brother for the exhibit. David Adjaye visited 46 cities and took 36,000 pictures. Only 3,000 pictures were displayed in the gallery. Some of it gives the impression of holiday snapshots, while others have more to them, like the one above taken in downtown Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, a city once referred to as the “Paris of West Africa.” Here‘s a link to a mainstream review. Anybody went to see it? Would love to hear your reactions of seeing the photographs in the exhibition. The pics here are only a small sample.
(BTW, Adjaye has been commissioned to design the new Smithsonian National Museum of African History and Culture planned on the Mall in Washington D.C.).
Our People
September 16, 2010 By 2 Comments
This past summer at least three prominent figures of the Cape Town jazz scene–the saxophone players Robbie Jansen and Ezra Ngcukana and, most recently, pianist and historian Vincent Kolbe–passed.
The Proper Use of a Vuvuzela
September 15, 2010 By 1 Comment
Geert Wilders, the rightwing Dutch politician was in New York last week to lend support to his American counterparts at a rally in lower Manhattan near the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Then this happened:
On a packed block of demonstrators between Murray and Warren streets, Wilder’s words were drowned out when a slim woman with brown curly hair blew one of those long plastic horns that blared throughout the South African soccer games in June. A big man with a bald head tried to grab it. There was pushing and shoving. A row or two behind, a man in shorts and a red polo shirt bellowed for police. “Get her out!” he screamed. “Grab her by the neck and force her out!” A pair of cops, both African-American women, eventually unhinged the metal pens and escorted the woman with the vuvuzela and two of her friends away. “Pull your bushels over your head and go home,” yelled the man.
The Scramble for Vinyl
September 14, 2010 By 114 Comments
Spurred on by the rise of sampling in Hip Hop and electronic music and despite a downturn in vinyl production, in the 80′s and 90′s a rich vinyl collecting culture exploded in places like the U.S., Europe, and Japan. For years young hip DJs from the city, travelled to forgotten about record shops in backwater towns, the dusty basements of aging record collectors, or the back rows of an inner-city record shop looking for rarities that seemed to pop out of thin air. Collectors scoured their neighbors backyards for rare jazz, rock, and funk, motivated by unnamed sample sources, hoping to find that illusive breakbeat. The best DJs were the ones with the deepest crates. Around the early 00′s, Hip Hop stopped using samples and turned back towards synthesizers, the Internet started a deeper collective crate, and a vital source of inspiration dried up. For collectors, all the stones seemed to be overturned, the market had too many buyers, and people, starting to realize the value of what they had, turned to E-bay to make money off of their collections. With much of the rare vinyl being plundered locally, a few intrepid explorers decided to try their luck in uncharted territory. Of course, they made their way to Africa. The map and scenario (above) may both be a little hyperbolic, but it does seem that the current mad-dash for rare African vinyl could be analogous to Europe’s 19th Century Scramble for Africa, a mad-dash for rare African minerals. There is a trend among rare-groove DJs to “find fortune” in the (re)discovery of musical gems in places where the value of vinyl and recorded music from the past has diminished. Just go to your local record shop (if one still exists) and peruse the display shelves to encounter dozens of new releases celebrating the recently uncovered recordings of Africa’s unknown musical heritage. The image of these guys as plundering opportunists isn’t helped by their reception in “The West”. As one music writer puts it,”Frank Gossner’s DJ sets burst with exclusive tracks that are so rare that they can’t be heard anywhere else on this planet” (from ChoiceCuts.com.) Rare music from planet Africa!?! Who wouldn’t want to get a piece of that?
Music Mondays
September 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment
These guys are obsessed with the elements. The band is named for the cold current that runs up the continent’s southeastern coast line. Benguela is based in Cape Town, South Africa. And this tune is called “Meridian.” It’s from their most recent album, “The Black Southeaster.” You know what the Southeaster does in the Cape. Critics have described their music as “post-rock.” Whatever this all means, we know they’re no slouches: Benguela have played with, among others, the great Robbie Jansen and AIAC’s favorites BLK JKS. Blow away.
‘The Religion of the Contemporary West’
September 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Jacob Collins, writing in The New Left Review, summarizes Regis Debray’s critique of ‘Human Rights’:
[Read more...]
