Jazz in South African Social Clubs (I)

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. Brett Pyper, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, discusses the phenomenon in a lecture entitled "You Can't Listen Alone:On The Sociality of Listening in a Vernacular South African Jazz World." Pyper is introduced by Gwen Ansell, who was the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies, Fall 2008. Click here for Part II.