Peter Makurube: A Tribute
It is strange that it falls to me to write a eulogy for Peter Makurube. I am not the best choice. Bhut’Peter had many people who knew him much longer and knew his life’s work much better. I knew...
View ArticleCaptain of Snoops
The rise of Angola’s kuduro sensation His Adidas T-shirt is a psychedelic swirl of flowers, and he looks rather fetching in tight red jeans, black-and-red Nike Air Jordans and a red leather jacket...
View ArticleTravelling Light With Burni Aman
Sometime in the late 1990s, American hip-hop artist Mos Def penned the song Travellin’ Man with Japanese producer and turntablist DJ Honda. It was a paean to the work of the touring artist, with...
View ArticleArt in a Time of Xenophobia
Out of the estimated 2.2 million immigrants living in South Africa, 46% are from Southern African Development Community (SADC) nations. As South Africa emerges from yet another spate of xenophobic...
View ArticleGrahamstown Shows its Jazz Hands
With the opening weekend of the National Arts Festival’s Jazz programme complete, a number of home truths have been made patently clear already. Firstly, the national arts festival offers a far...
View ArticleImagination, Politics and Other Spectacles
Vuma Levin is an artist who finds himself simultaneously at the end of history, and in the middle of it. Amsterdam and Joburg serve as the respective locations of these two historical positions –...
View ArticleUm, Like, WHATEVERLAND
It would be extremely boring/easy to describe WHATEVERLAND as anti-theatre, or “sheer fun” or “abstract” or anything that denotes that, for its three-year (or maybe only seven minutes) run, director...
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...
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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...
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