Two of South Africa’s finest musicians, Johnny Mekoa and Ray Phiri, died recently. The permeable terrain between genres their careers negotiated, is being replaced by rigid marketing categories.
Robin Kelley, University of California, Los Angeles
It took ages for one of African jazz’s hidden masterpieces to be reissued. Still today, four decades later, 1976’s ‘African Songbird’ tells volumes about the politics of the time.