Most times, news about record labels isn’t the most interesting or cheerful: it’s news about closedowns, mergers and monopoly deals with platforms that are bad for original creative music (especially music from Africa) and contribute to the general enshittification https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5 of online life.
There are occasional bright spots, though. One was back in 2022 when Blue Note and Universal Africa launched the Blue Note Africa imprint and supercharged the international profile of Ndududzo Makhathini. (Makhathini’s originality and skill had already been noticed by admiring overseas audiences long before that, right from the days when he was touring the US with the late Zim Ngqawana, so the label shouldn’t claim all the credit – but it certainly helped.)
Despite 2024 being parent Blue Note’s 85th birthday, when you might expect a celebratory flurry of African music, I haven’t seen news about other African jazz releases since the pianist’s 2022 In the Spirit of Ntu. If the imprint has survived, it’s a really terrible communicator – there’s nothing online past January 2023. Such initiatives, you’ll have noticed, have a habit of quietly falling flat after a global music capitalist has taken a loudly-fanfared interest in “Africa”…
That’s not the kind of flavour-of-the-month interest our original jazz scene needs.
So it’s great, early in 2024, to be able to report on a rather different kind of initiative to make South African jazz sounds more accessible to fans in the rest of the world. In mid-January, US label Ropeadope announced a partnership with City of Gold Arts to launch label group Africarise “focusing on the art and music of Africa”. We know independent label Ropeadope already. It’s been responsible, for example, for releases from Mbuso Khoza, Linda Sikhakhane, Mthunzi Mvubu and Bakithi Khumalo – the label’s curatorship certainly has good taste! Look at their artist page https://ropeadope.com/artists. You’ll see a similarly distinctive, interesting selection of artists from elsewhere: contemporary music taking an imaginative approach to root sources and innovative concepts from America and around the world.
Mover and shaker in Africarise is somebody else we know: Jazz at Lincoln Centre’s Seton Hawkins. Hawkins is a longtime visitor to this country with family roots here. In past years he interviewed as many of our jazz players as he could manage for Allaboutjazz. Hawkins has more than ten years in music as educator (he leads JALC’s Swing University programme) , publicist, advocate, independent manager and DJ . Hawkins hosts a one-hour South African jazz show on SiriusXM’s RealJazz channel https://www.siriusxm.com/channels/real-jazz that’s well worth catching despite the time-zone gap.
The first releases from Africarise are due out on April 5: Steve Dyer’s Enhlizweni: Song Stories from my Heartland
https://stevedyer.bandcamp.com/album/enhlizweni-song-stories-from-my-heartland
and McCoy Mrubata’s Lullaby for Khayoyo with a new outfit of US collaborators, Siyabulela, that also includes the now US-based South African trombonist Siya Charles.
https://mccoymrubata.bandcamp.com/album/lullaby-for-khayoyo
They’ll be followed by music from impressive Kenyan pianist Aaaron Rimbui and pianist Thembelihle Dunjana.
I’ve heard those first two: beautiful music that I’ll be covering more fully either here or in my intermittent review slot in Friday at the Mail&Guardian. For now, let’s just say I have high hopes for Africarise: a project helmed by people ith a track record of knowing, respecting and loving the music, on a manageable, un-hyped scale, with a roster of artists who, already with these first releases, start to represent the detail and diversity of how South Africa sounds when it makes jazz.
Listen to more about the project here:
sisgwenjazz 