Jazz Life

This is a book in progress replete with personal incident and an appreciation of South African jazz history and culture, musicians and the music played. We worked together promoting jazz and jazz education from 1983 to 2006, almost a quarter of a century. One of the pillars of UKZN’s international status was the establishment in 1984 of the first Jazz Studies degree program in Africa, followed in 1989 by the creation on campus of the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music (CJPM) under Darius’ directorship. This popular performance venue and bar enjoys a unique international reputation. We were deeply involved in the complicated cultural politics of the 80s and 90s and consequent institutional transformation. Our book contains sketches of remarkable people (many now deceased), who made music throughout these turbulent and challenging times and tells our own story. It describes many sad, humorous and dramatic events. As a free-lance project manager at CJPM, Catherine Brubeck organized and managed numerous bands, concerts and tours and our book is a narrative about this era from the inside-outsider perspective of the jazz life, its fullness and its limitations under apartheid and thereafter.