Musicology & Ethnomusicology

A Home Within: Sathima Bea Benjamin

Singer/composer Sathima Bea Benjamin grew up in Cape Town watching movies and listening to jazz records from America. Rejecting a life under apartheid, her career took her to New York, where she now lives. In conversation with Gwen Ansell, Ms. Benjamin discusses, with sung and recorded illustrations, the emotions and debates American music stirred among Cape Town's jazz players and singers, and how America responded to the African contribution to jazz and world culture. Ms. Benjamin is accompanied by Onaje Allan Gumbs, piano.

Jazz in South African Social Clubs (II)

South Africa is unusual in that jazz is the center of a lively popular music culture in that country, and not just a niche market. A major part of the South African jazz audience are members of organizations known as stockvels, which are part savings clubs, part music appreciation societies, and part social networking and patronage hubs. Gatherings there typically involve not only listening to jazz records, but improvising dance performances to them.

Conversation with Miya Masaoka and Vijay Iyer (I)

Miya Masaoka is a composer, kotoist, and sound artist.  She has created works for solo koto, ensembles, mixed choirs, live electronics, and video that have been presented across the world.  Discussing her work with her is composer, pianist, and scholar Vijay Iyer.  Ms. Masaoka talks about how her and her family's experiences as members of a persecuted minority, Japanese Americans, shaped her works that deal with Japanese artistic traditions and with subaltern social groups--and even with marginalized biological subjects such as plants and insects.

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