Guest Post by Lara N. Dotson-Renta
Paris has always been renowned for its culture and support of the arts. Yet, as France has grown into an ever more pluralistic society, the traditional image of what constitutes art in France must evolve as well. Younger generations of artists, many immigrants of African origin, are now reconfiguring the arts in France on their own terms. Their artistic production embodies experiences of travel and adaptation via the integration of the cultures and traditions of their respective countries of origins along with aesthetic and quotidian experiences that reflect daily life in France. Particularly in the realm of music and film, the blending of African tradition with French popular culture and youth genres has fostered a vibrant arts scene that, while initially seen as of/from the margins of both society and the arts scene, is actually renewing ‘mainstream’ culture in dramatic ways. You just have to scan the pop music featured in Hinda Talhaoui’s Paris is a Continent Series on AIAC. One proponent of this new artistic vision is Alain Kasanda (Apkass), a Franco-Congolese musician, spoken word artist, and founder of the O’rigines Foundation and the Ghett’Out Francophone Film Festival. I interviewed Alain at the Trinity College International Hip-Hop Festival held in Hartford, CT, in March earlier this year. [Read more...]
Parisian Africa: The artistic intersections of the Métropole
Music Break. Adam Glasser
Via Waldo Muller: “Adam Glasser video shot in the legendary Kohinoor appliances & music store in Market Street, Johannesburg. In the early 2000s, Kohinoor still stocked hundreds of sealed (mint) jazz & soul vinyls, all super cheap. Seems like they still have LPs, I spotted some in the video. Plus a young Miriam Makeba lookalike. Glasser will bring [his] harmonica to the Cape Town International Jazz Festival 2012. It’s a piercing sound but uplifting in small dosages.”
‘South African History !X’
Fresh off a Japanese tour, Capetonian jazz musician Kyle Shepherd returns with a third album entitled ‘South African History !X,’ which, he explains in the video above, “pays homage to the languages of the first nation people” and brings to the front’s South Africa’s slave holding past. Featuring an all star cast of Jono Sweetman on drums, Shane Cooper on bass, Buddy Wells on sax and the late South African jazz legend Zim Nqawana, this looks like it’s going to be a great listen. [Read more...]
Sathima Bea Benjamin’s Windsong
Last year, Sean and I happened to be at a conference in Toronto where Dan Yon was showing his film on Sathima “Bea” Benjamin, the Cape Town-born jazz singer. Although she is one of the formative figures of South African jazz music, it is her estranged husband, jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who is far better known. The film, “Sathima’s Windsong” (2010) moves back and forth between New York City, where Benjamin was a long-term resident, and Cape Town, where she began singing as a young girl during the forced removals instituted by the Group Areas Acts. The narration bridging the two cities, and Benjamin’s multitude of losses (and gains) is interspersed with the melodic imaginative leaps that only a voice such as hers can bridge. Only her voice lies between two cities, and immeasurable, oceanic longing: her song making tentative vocal incursion and excursions, in and out with the tide and forces beyond her control.
New book on ‘how modern Africa reshaped jazz’
Following his lengthy Thelonius Monk biography, historian Robin DG Kelley, has a new book, “Africa Speaks, America Answers,” on how “modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered the politics and culture of both continents.” The book covers the careers of four artists. Ghanaian drummer Guy Warren and South African jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin* — who both made careers in the United States — are featured. The African-Americans Randy Weston (piano) and Ahmed Abdul Malik (bassist) make up the rest.
Batsumi’s cascade of sound
By Dan Magaziner*
South Africa’s 1970s are rightly remembered as a time of rising militancy. From the universities to the docks to the schools–the decade saw the rise of Black Consciousness and Steve Biko’s calls for a radical reorientation of black culture towards the struggle for political and mental liberation. We curate our memorials to that decade with raised right fists and confrontations between uniformed students and uniformed police. But by choosing to title his column in the SASO Newsletter, “I Write What I Like,” Biko called above all else for unapologetically creative responses to the tensions of the moment. Black South Africans answered this call in a variety of ways, some stridently political, others defiantly original. Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote and others answered his call in words; Dan Rakgoathe, Winston Saoli, Louis Maqhubela and others on canvas. Batsumi answered with a cascade of sound.
Founded in Soweto in 1972, in 1974 Batsumi recorded an album that will be re-released later this week by Matsuli Music. The music is stunning, from the moment the album opens with Zulu Bidi’s searching bass, and expands to include horns, flute, what sounds like a didgeridoo, drums, voices and Johnny Mothopeng’s guitar. This is the past, reaching out to the present to remind us that we still don’t understand. Today Biko and Black Consciousness’s legacy as a political movement is contested and debated, invoked across the political spectrum and twisted to fit present-day concerns. But Batsumi is closer to the truth of that moment. This music doesn’t preach, it doesn’t declaim, it doesn’t sloganize – but it also doesn’t offer flee from the radical demands of its present. Indeed, although these tracks are not stridently political they are by no means escapist fare, suitable for shuffling dance steps at late night shebeens. Take the third track, “Mamshanyana.” It opens with Mothopeng’s acoustic guitar, the spare, patient twang of which could not be more different than the township jazz sounds we associate with this time period. (The amazing quality of this remaster is most apparent here, incidentally – you can literally hear the subtle reverb of the strings.) Drums, bass and organ, join, come together, voices crest, flute and sax echo. As it builds, it swings, coalescing into a uniquely compelling statement of intent. By the time and sax and flute solo over organ, bass and drums, Batsumi has got you.
Music Break
Dub Colossus member Samuel Yirga “plays one night a week in Addis’s only jazz club/coffee bar, where the way he mixes Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock with Ethiojazz has won him a cult following.” He says:
I take traditional music and turn it around, and people in Ethiopia are starting to listen to the way it swings now. Our musical culture is under attack from inside and out, it’s all rock bands, hip-hop groups and pop singers, and nobody can afford to run a big band.
Via Real World Records.
Music Break
I first saw Kesivan Naidoo play at the Independent Armchair Theater in Observatory. I was living around the corner at the time. He played drums in Tribe, a band fronted by pianist Mark Fransman. Much has changed since then. Naidoo is now sought after and fronts his own bands. These include Babu and Kesivan and the Lights. The video above, from a 2008 performance in Grahamstown in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, shows Kesivan and the Lights taking on “Timelessness,” a composition by the late Bheki Mseleku.
And since it is Sunday, here’s a link to a 15 minute Youtube video of Kesivan and the Lights being joined on stage by trumpeter Feya Faku. BTW, that’s Fransman on the piano.
When Monk met Dollar Brand
From historian Robin Kelley’s retelling* of the day in 1964 that Thelonius Monk met the South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, then still known as Dollar Brand:
… [Monk and his wife, Nellie] were at Kongresshaus in Zurich where Monk gave another successful concert. After the show, a tall, lanky black man with a heavy accent came on stage and introduced himself as Dollar Brand–one of those unusual names Monk dug. He told Monk that he was a piano player from South Africa who had just arrived in Switzerland with his wife, singer Bea Benjamin, and his band, bassist Johnny Gertze and drummer Makaya Ntshoko. They had fled their country in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. The trio had a regular gig at the Cafe Africana and he invited Monk and Nellie to come hear them if they had time. He didn’t stay very long, but before he left, “[I] thanked him for the inspiration. [Monk] looked at me for a time and then said: “You’re the first piano player to tell me that.”
