Placed: Dis/Placed—The Journeys of Jazz Across Johannesburg

Abstract

South African jazz is a national music, grown in many cities, but the modern “African Jazz” style that emerged in the late 1940s was often asserted and publicised from Johannesburg, because of the city’s role as the hub for white-owned, black-targeted, popular media. The iconography of that jazz era inheres in images of the racially diverse suburb of Sophiatown, destroyed by apartheid in 1955, reflecting a distinctively assertive, multivocal, Joburg jazz sound. Apartheid drove black jazz out of the metropolitan centre, and hounded and restricted it in the townships, a process that intensified in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto Uprising. This chapter sketches that context and maps how jazz returned—and where it returned to—post 1990, through the stories of six venues: Kippies, the Bassline, the Keleketla Library, the Orbit, Maboneng, and the Afrikan Freedom Station. While jazz has “returned” to metropolitan Johannesburg, its presence in the townships, where most black South Africans still live, remains constrained.