Playing the Changes

Jazz at an African University and on the Road

By: Darius Brubeck, Catherine Brubeck

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Hardcover | 9 July 2024

At a Glance

Hardcover
344 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
25.4 x 17.8

Hardcover

$287.75

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Catherine and Darius Brubeck's 1983 move to South Africa launched them on a journey that helped transform jazz education. Blending biography with storytelling, the pair recount their time at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where they built a pioneering academic program in jazz music and managed and organized bands, concerts, and tours around the world.

The Brubecks and the musicians faced innumerable obstacles, from the intensification of apartheid and a lack of resources to the hardscrabble lives that forced even the most talented artists to the margins. Building a program grounded in multi-culturalism, Catherine and Darius encouraged black and white musicians to explore and expand the landscape of South African jazz together Their story details the sometimes wily, sometimes hilarious problem-solving necessary to move the institution forward while offering insightful portraits of South African jazz players at work, on stage, and providing a soundtrack to the freedom struggle and its aftermath.

Frank and richly detailed, Playing the Changes provides insiders' accounts of how jazz intertwined with struggle and both expressed and resisted the bitter unfairness of apartheid-era South Africa.

Industry Reviews

"Playing the Changes is entertaining and profound in equal measure. It tells the story of a remarkable passage in the history of music and the performing arts in higher education, especially at UKZN but in South Africa more widely. Darius and Cathy Brubeck were central to the miraculous chemistry that made it all happen."--David Attwell, author of J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing

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