Results for "Mongezi Feza"

The Blue Notes: Refugees From Race Hate

by Chris May
May 26, 2022

In late May 2022, three months into the war in Ukraine, the plight of refugees is at the front of our minds. Around five million Ukrainians have become refugees and another seven million are displaced persons inside their own country. The apartheid-era South African refugee crisis was not on this scale. The number of internally displaced ...

From George Coleman to Meeco: Ten Overlooked Classics

by Chris May
May 10, 2022

The only thread running through this installment of Building A Jazz Library is that of unsung quality. No particular artist is spotlighted, nor any particular genre. There are simply ten, randomly selected albums, recorded in the US and Europe between 1953 and 2021, which show jazz off at its finest, but which, for one reason or ...

Township Jazz: A Riot Busting Out

by Chris May
April 22, 2022

Dateline: April 2022. This month the American label Blue Note is launching its Blue Note Africa imprint with South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini's single “Senze' Nina." It is fittingly synchronous that at the same moment, Britain's Ogun label is reissuing two albums by South Africa's Blue Notes, the band which introduced township jazz to Europe and ...

Township Jazz: Unlocking The Vaults

by Chris May
April 8, 2022

Britain is often said to be the first country to have forged a style of jazz distinct from its American parent, during the late 1950s, in part through the influence of London-based players from South Asia. Closer examination of calendars and the historical record, however, shows that South Africa found its own jazz voice at the ...

Saxophone Colossi: An Alternative Top Ten Banging Albums

by Chris May
February 18, 2021

Miles Davis once said you could tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker. You might want to add John Coltrane, you might even want to add Davis. But however you cut it, saxophones and trumpets have been the flag bearers of the music. Trumpets got things rolling and saxophones came into ...

Various Artists: Indaba Is

by Chris May
January 9, 2021

There are probably several reasons why American jazz made the deep and lasting impact it did on South Africa in the 1950s. One may be that the colonial regime which was imposed on the country during Europe's pan-African nineteenth-century landgrab was among the most vicious of them all, and persisted the longest through the apartheid system ...

Mongezi Feza

Destination South Africa (Part 1)

by Ludovico Granvassu
May 22, 2018

Over the past three weeks we've focused on Africa's influence on jazz music. We played music by international jazz musicians who were inspired by Africa as well as music by jazz musicians from Mali to Tunisia and from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe. Now what about South African Jazz? Well, we left South Africa for last ...

Mike Osborne: Force Of Nature - Part 1-2

by Barry Witherden
November 2, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 Some three-and-a-half minutes into Release, the Deram recording of Mike Westbrook's seminal suite mixing Swing classics with Westbrook originals, after a scorching solo by John Surman on “The Few," an alto saxophone cadenza emerged from a free ensemble passage: the tone was penetrating, incisive, severe, the phrasing intense, passionate ...

Lwanda Gogwana: Tradition and Innovation

by Seton Hawkins
September 9, 2017

When South African trumpet virtuoso Lwanda Gogwana released his second album Uhadi Synth (Lwanda Gogwana Music Group, 2016) last year, he reinforced his position not only as one of South Africa's truly exceptional horn talents, but also as one of its most probing and insightful artists and composers. The title of the album itself--the ...