By Gwen Ansell | BD Live – Wed, Nov 14, 2012
LONG overdue, the internationally recognised achievements of teacher, composer and trombonist Jonas Gwangwa are beginning to received recognition at home.
Last weekend, Gwangwa received the Arts and Culture Trust Lifetime Achievement Award for Music 2012. Gwangwa can also boast an inscription on the Newtown “walk of fame” pavement, a National Order of Ikhamanga (Gold) and a retrospective exhibition about his life and work, Kukude Lapho Sivelakhona, in August this year.
This sounds like a significant set of accolades, but set against a lifetime of struggle for both South African music and South African freedom, and against his international fame, including an Oscar nomination, it remains relatively modest.
Gwangwa began his playing career in the 1950s, and (as did many Johannesburg musicians of his generation) he received his first instrument in the Father Huddleston Band. This was the period when a diverse set of popular music styles — traditional song and dance; imported swing, pop and jazz; local contemporary compositions, and more — were coming together to shape a modern commercial music industry. It was a highly creative time, just before the full force of apartheid’s ideological objections to racial, musical and social mixing clamped down.
Today, that early musical melting pot (when it is considered at all) is often seen as transparent and natural: that was just the way things happened. In fact, the forces that shaped it were complex. The end result from that specific set of ingredients was never neatly predictable. Only one book ever studied the prequel in detail — that is the musical evolution of South African cities from the 1920s, and it had been out of print since the mid-1990s.
So it is welcome that the book, Christopher Ballantine’s Marabi Nights has just been re-published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press in a substantially expanded second edition. Ballantyne mingles academic rigour with a very warm and human approach to his subjects: their memories, impressions and opinions are as important to the text as critical theory is.
This makes the work highly accessible for any reader interested in how South African modern popular music came to be — and serves as an object lesson for aspiring musicologists tempted to mummify great stories in impenetrable jargon.
In addition, the book is accompanied by a comprehensive CD of 25 early and otherwise impossible-to-find tracks dating from 1930-48. These are far more than curios; they illuminate musical roots whose legacy is still audible.
Read more on: http://za.news.yahoo.com/jazz-jonas-gwangwa-lucey-paul-hanmer-033747844--finance.html
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