WHAT WOULD MAKE a man risk his life by balancing precariously on one hand with his legs above him, on a rain-soaked ledge of a building high above a city half covered by mist? That’s what acrobat Hans Prignitz did in 1948 in Hamburg, as a favour to […]
TRIBUTE TO STEPHEN ELIOVSON. TALENT IS A strange thing. Sometimes it flashes its feathers with an incendiary focus that is too wild for its environment. Jazz guitarist and master-musician Stephen Eliovson was a performer who had the talent and wisdom to harness that fire, but alas, he held […]
TRIBUTE TO MANU DIBANGO BY ELIZHAN DUVENAGE. CAMEROONIAN SAXOPHONIST, PIANIST, vibraphonist and composer, Manu Dibango, fondly known as Papy Groove, played an important role in innovating jazz in the last several decades. He was celebrated for his own brand of Afro-jazz, and cherished for his 1972 dance album […]
TRIBUTE TO MAUREEN DONNE BY HENRICO GREYLING. A HONEYED VOICE, overflowing generosity and someone who lit up the lives of others with her blissful spirit, Maureen Donne was an exceptionally talented jazz vocalist and tap dancer who not only conquered South African stage, but also showcased her masterful […]
A TALE OF lust and evil, worthiness and bias in the face of a racist society, teeming with some of the western world’s best known covers, Porgy and Bess seems to cock a snoot at everything that serious opera traditionally was about. Conceived and written by two Jewish […]
REPLETE WITH ITS jazz dives, camaraderie and poetry, its dinginess, brothels and gangs Sophiatown aka Kofifi was a suburb in Johannesburg that was an apartheid loophole until 1955. It was the one place in which black people could live in relative harmony with people of all colours, free […]
THE INTERSTICES, RIFFS and possibilities of jazz, from this side of his baritone sax and that, were the central motivating energies of Don Albert, who gave South African jazz a voice in print, radio, television and the internet for over 50 years. He died on April 20, 2019 […]
SOUTH AFRICAN ANTI-APARTHEID activist Stephen Bantu Biko (1946-1977) remains arguably one of the most urgent and compelling voices for South Africa’s contemporary youth. He was everything that a young intelligent man with moral fibre and passionate beliefs should be. And the horrible trajectory of his premature death at […]
HE’S DEVASTATINGLY SUAVE but quietly spoken; he’s funny and earnest at the same time and when he sits at the piano, the world becomes a friendlier place. Meet Charl du Plessis who performs a week-long season at Auto and General Theatre on the Square in Sandton, this week. […]
THERE ARE SO many “wow” moments in the South African stage version of The Color Purple: The Musical, you’ve got to hold onto your seat with both hands. Supported by a set that features diagrammatic representation of space and texture, a cast that sparkles with magnificent voices and […]
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