Abstract
South African jazz is a national music, grown in many cities, but the modern “African Jazz” style that emerged in the late 1940s was often asserted and publicised from Johannesburg, because of the city’s role as the hub for white-owned, black-targeted, popular media. The iconography of that jazz era inheres in images of the racially diverse suburb of Sophiatown, destroyed by apartheid in 1955, reflecting a distinctively assertive, multivocal, Joburg jazz sound. Apartheid drove black jazz out of the metropolitan centre, and hounded and restricted it in the townships, a process that intensified in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto Uprising. This chapter sketches that context and maps how jazz returned—and where it returned to—post 1990, through the stories of six venues: Kippies, the Bassline, the Keleketla Library, the Orbit, Maboneng, and the Afrikan Freedom Station. While jazz has “returned” to metropolitan Johannesburg, its presence in the townships, where most black South Africans still live, remains constrained.
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Notes
- 1.
Music organiser Brad Holmes.
- 2.
Interview with the author 22/02/2012.
- 3.
My own narrative elides much, too. For a detailed account of Newtown and its cultural precinct, see Kate Shand’s comprehensive 2010 Master’s thesis.
- 4.
The “homelands” were the fake self-governing states set up under apartheid to serve as labour reserve areas.
- 5.
Soukous, kizomba, afrobeat, and chimurenga are Congolese, Angolan, West African, and Zimbabwean musical forms, respectively.
- 6.
A shabby but historic, formerly white, working-class suburb.
- 7.
Contribution at the Orbit “musicians’ AGM” 27 November 2016.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Remarks at the AFS/Wiser Thelonious Monk panel 29 June 2017.
- 10.
Malombo in this context describes a syncretic musical form, based on the spiritual ceremonies of the Venda-speaking people from the regions bordering Zimbabwe. Tabane’s mother was a spiritual healer and he named his ensemble Malombo, maintaining that it does not play jazz, or even music, but conducts exorcism: the word’s original meaning.
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Interviews
Andrej Damane 17/11/2017
Rangoato Hlasane 15/11/2017
Brad Holmes 16/11/2017
Aymeric Peguillan 16/11/2017
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Ansell, G. (2019). Placed: Dis/Placed—The Journeys of Jazz Across Johannesburg. In: Lashua, B., Wagg, S., Spracklen, K., Yavuz, M.S. (eds) Sounds and the City. Leisure Studies in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94081-6_7
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