Acting on a tip from an Ivorian diplomat on the best location to watch Les Éléphants play in NYC, we headed up to Harlem to catch the Côte d’Ivoire–Tunisia match early Saturday morning. New Ivoire is a 17-year-old, 24-hour restaurant on 119th street in a growing West African area of Harlem that is both frequented and owned […]
In the Fall, I (along with two other New School students Rob Navarro and Owen Dodd) created a blog Global Soccer, Global NYC, to document watching world football in bars and restaurants all over New York City. We plan to do some of that with Afcon 2013. The tournament’s opening match kicked off on Saturday between tournament […]
With the help of Bunce Booking and Africa is a Country, Dutty Artz presents the 2nd iteration of the Change The Mood series: Africans Are Real.
New York is an amazing city, especially from a hip-hop perspective. It’s one of the few places on earth where you can see that hip-hop is part of the culture, not just something that you watch on TV. But for me – doing music that is mostly in French and not in some Congolese language that sounds exotic for Western people – it’s a difficult market. I take everything that happens here like a plus one. I’m not supposed to be here.
Towards the final scenes of Restless City, Jessye Norman’s solo soprano voice scales the great buildings and the conveyor belts of vehicles, between all of which a small red scooter navigates, carrying the slim bodies of Djibril and Trina. They are here, in this city, with all their desires clenched in their mouths. It is Norman’s voice, following the music composed by Richard Strauss to the poetry of Herman Hesse, that lifts our two immigrants’ desires up on the currents of her song, skylarks freed into the night sky.
In Toronto-based Dan Yon’s documentary of Sathima “Bea” Benjamin, the Cape Town-born jazz singer, the narration 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.
Merkato is a documentary (view the trailer here) about the largest open-air market in Ethiopia. The filmmakers are trying to raise funds to finish the project through kickstarter.
