Songs About Anxiety
nxiety is a strange, strange beast. Most of us have it, I’m sure. I mean how can we not when almost every day involves worrying about making money or paying rent or arriving on time or avoiding some...
View ArticleSongs about Home
hate having to tell people where I’m from. Home, like time I believe, is an unnecessary construct. By way of convention, Cape Town would be ‘home’ for me. I grew up there, my parents live there and...
View ArticleEssential Music from a Shitty Year
Lloyd Gedye scans 2016’s musical landscape and, in between the grave-stones of David Bowie, Prince, Mandoza and Leonard Cohen, picks 21 albums that made the year just a little bit better. In...
View ArticleA Stand-out from the Sanctum
Artist: Tumi Mogorosi/Gabi Motuba Album: Sanctum Sanctorium Drummer Tumi Mogorosi’s Project Elo took the South African and international jazz world by storm, earning him critical praise and a loyal...
View ArticleMandoza, Nkalakatha & A Divided SA
For a country whose citizens were slowly starting to learn about each other, the late 1990s and early part of a new century were times of nervousness. The racial divides of the past were profoundly...
View ArticleCircle of Ancestors
2016 is turning into an epic year for Shabaka Hutchings. Whether performing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme with The Enlightenment Ensemble, producing cosmic-electro-jazz with The Comet is Coming,...
View ArticleOf Jazz, Payments, Patriarchy and Fair Labour Practices
ou may not yet have read Miles Keylock’s musings on the issues of payments to musicians. If you haven’t, you should: it’s a fine piece of writing. But its content – Keylock’s assertion that young...
View ArticlePhotographing at the International Library of African Music
n July 2015, I visited the International Library of African Music, or ILAM, in Grahamstown, South Africa for the first time. I had approached Diane Thram, ILAM’s director, in 2013 about a proposal to...
View ArticleBongani Madondo’s Sigh: The Real Shit
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain That is pouring like an avalanche comin’ down the mountain - Pepper, The Butthole Surfers, Electriclarryland, 1996 eople are equal....
View ArticlePurple Reign (1958-2016)
When I was growing into being a teenager in the early 90’s Prince was a magician. He was this crazy artist, who I could only reach through my FM radio. Nobody I knew listened to Prince, but across...
View ArticleBeyoncé: The Event, The Spectre
You know what I hate? What I truly despise? The assumption that Beyoncé’s fans (read “the hive”) cannot be a complex set of people who traverse space and place in multiple and complicated ways, the...
View ArticleWatching Boys in Bands
Of all the activities I have thrown myself into over the years, there is one that has dominated an inordinate part of my life. “As a young woman I had one, and only one, intense and ceaseless pastime...
View ArticleLisbon Calling
DJ Marfox, aka Marlon Silva, is, at 26, the king of Lisbon’s new dance-music scene called batida. This genre has over the past few years shifted from informal parties in abandoned buildings on the...
View ArticleTrafficking Gqom to Europe
In this second of a two-part series on selling contemporary African beats to colonial Europe, Lloyd Gedye explores the power relationships in these trafficking circles, and what it means for the...
View ArticleWho Put Tarraxo in the Zouk Bass?
Writing about his latest two-hour mix tape, African Apocalypse, DJ Umb says his main focus was on the Angolan and Portugese bass undergrounds. “I’ve been saying for a number of years that the future...
View ArticleThe Art of Public Space
The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City by Kim Gurney (Palgrave Macmillan) “Someone once described writing about performance art as ‘trying to catch lightening in a...
View ArticleDoodles and Beats
“Music can be called nothing other than the sister of painting, as it is subject to hearing, as sense that comes after sight, and creates harmony by combining its well-proportioned and simultaneously...
View ArticleEl Reco: More Than Special
Trombonist Emmanuel Rodriguez – “Rico” or “El Reco” – died on September 4 aged 80. The death of any great musician is a sad occasion. Even sadder in this case is the way the international press...
View ArticleBulawayo’s Absent Zim Dancehall
Thomas Mapfumo, celebrated at home and abroad as the don of Zimbabwe’s rebel music scene, invited a tsunami of brickbats when he dismissed a music genre that has the whole country talking, if not...
View ArticleKind of New Standard Issue Jazz
Gwen Ansell maps out South Africa’s jazz standards Most reference books define a “standard” as a piece of music that is already widely known, performed and recorded by musicians and recognised by...
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