"You Can't Listen Alone": On The Sociality of Listening in a Vernacular South African Jazz World

The Center for Jazz Studies invites you to join us for the inaugural lecture of the fall 2008 semester of our Louis Armstrong Visiting Professorship program

"You Can't Listen Alone":
On The Sociality of Listening in a Vernacular South African Jazz World
featuring
Brett Pyper
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
 
Introduced by Gwen Ansell
the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor
at the Center for Jazz Studies, Fall 2008
 
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 7:30 pm
301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

 
Campus Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/philosophy.html

 
Mr. Pyper will discuss the jazz appreciation society, or stokvel, that for several generations has been a social institution of considerable standing in black working and lower middle class communities in South Africa. Members regularly attend weekend-long listening sessions where DJs play their jazz collections and occasionally host live musicians. An elaborate culture of listening has developed in this milieu, encompassing the collection and public presentation of jazz recordings, sartorial display, the enactment of African modes of sociability and surprisingly, given the music that is played dancing. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in this distinctive jazz milieu, Mr. Pyper’s presentation foregrounds the social and aesthetic agency of reception in this vernacular jazz culture, which exists largely outside the ambit of national music and broadcast industries, as well as the popular and academic literature on jazz. In particular, it directs our attention beyond the histories of performers that constitute the mainstay of jazz studies to the appropriation and reframing of this music among self-consciously African communities of reception.