In this film, which is shot in New York and Cape Town, the life history of South African-born jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin, unfolds through her own reflections and reminiscence, which are woven together with the music she has created and with the reflections of five people who know her work and the milieu which shaped it. In her flat in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where she has lived for thirty two years, Sathima patches together her journeys, literal and figurative, from Apartheid South Africa and 'the pattern of brokenness' from which she hailed, to Europe and a chance meeting and recording with Duke Ellington, to starting afresh and setting up her own record company in New York. The film is a celebration of Sathima's work and a meditation on jazz and diaspora. As it moves back and forth between Cape Town and New York, to the lyrics and rhythm of her music, it becomes, much like the title of her haunting song, Windsong, a reflection on history, time and place; on Apartheid, anti-Apartheid and their legacies, as well as the passionate questions of memory, displacement and belonging.

Sathima Benjamin,

jazz and

postwar “modern” Africa

November 1, 2012

By Sean Jacobs 

Recently the life and career of the South African jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin has been the subject of both popular and scholarly attention. In the last two years alone, she’s been the subject of an excellent documentary film (“Sathima’s Windsong” by anthropologist Daniel Yon) and she is one of four jazz musicians profiled in Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, a new book by American historian Robin D. G. Kelley that interrogates the links and influences between American jazz and postwar “modern” Africa. (The other artists featured in the book are Ghanaian drummer Guy Warren and the African-Americans Randy Weston and Ahmed Abdul Malik.) Most significantly, Benjamin has now collaborated with University of Pennsylvania music professor Carol Muller to produce a book-length study of Benjamin’s life and career, Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz.

Muller (also a South African) and Benjamin wanted to ensure that “both the biographical and the geographical coexist[ed]” in the book. The book is structured like a “musical echo”; it uses “a kind of call and response method.” So each chapter consists of a recounting of Sathima’s life (“the call”), followed by Muller’s reflection (“the response”). Muller, though, takes responsibility as the primary author. (The book is the result of 20 years worth of interviews and archival research.)

Benjamin, born in 1936 in Johannesburg and raised in Cape Town, left South Africa in 1963 to forge a music career in Europe and then in the United States alongside her husband, the great jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim. Muller credits Benjamin with “discovering” Ibrahim; while in Switzerland, Benjamin introduced Ibrahim (still known as Dollar Brand at the time) to Duke Ellington, who recorded Ibrahim’s trio of South African musicians (minus Benjamin) in Paris, thus launching Ibrahim’s international career.

Ellington also recorded Benjamin, but the recording was never publicly released. For long periods the recordings were feared lost, but were found in 1997 and released to critical acclaim as “Morning in Paris.”

That album, and a 2000 recording “Cape Town Love”, recorded with a group of older Cape Town musicians, serve as bookends to Musical Echoes. 

In-between we get frank and rich recollections by Benjamin of her early life—she was at times physically and sexually abused as a child and had a nervous breakdown; and her family did not warm to Ibrahim, whose father was Sotho. We also read about Benjamin’s marriage to the talented and at times dominating Ibrahim; what it was like to be a woman in the jazz world (Benjamin raised two children—her daughter is the rapper Jean Grae and her son is an artist—while running her own label and recording her own music). Her self-imposed exile, the anti-apartheid struggle, and censorship (her most productive period coincided with Apartheid in South Africa) are all covered in stages.

The sections on Benjamin’s childhood and early adulthood double as something of a social history of coloured cultural and social life in Cape Town before the National Party came to power in 1948. The book contains a rich description of talent concerts, dance bands, jazz clubs, and the impact of radio, records and cinema on Benjamin’s imagination and musical education.

While Benjamin was classified as coloured, she rejected that label; instead emphasizing her cosmopolitanism, including her family roots in St Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic as well her connection to New York City, her home from 1977.

While in exile, Benjamin’s racial identity (Muller describes Benjamin at one point as “a women of ambiguous racial marking”) and the fact that she sings in English, complicated her position. The exiled ANC would often exclude her from singing at their events because she was “not African enough” and American music executives and promoters preferred the equally talented Miriam Makeba singing in “exotic” African languages.

The book (part of a Duke book series on “Refiguring American Music”) contributes to a growing literature on the intersection of US-South African cultural politics and history (see, for example the work of Rob Nixon, Robert Vinson, James Campbell and younger scholars like Tyler Fleming). Musical Echoes also contains sections on South African musicians and Cold War politics. Muller reveals Benjamin and Ibrahim’s entanglements with the CIA-sponsored Transcription Center in London—“the most significant site for South African musicians, artists and writers”—throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Sathima was “not enthusiastic” about revealing these connections.

Muller has preoccupations similar to Robin Kelley’s: both aim to complicate jazz history by showing how Africans reshaped American jazz in the twentieth century. For Muller, Benjamin’s transnational travels and influences “constitute a worldwide, comparative, and more equitable representation of jazz historiography” from the “margins of jazz history. The aim is not to read jazz cultures—in the US and elsewhere—in parallel, but “to put jazz cultures in dialogue with each other.” Muller describes Benjamin as “a voice that is incessantly in exile,” negotiating a complicated relationship with New York City, where she lived and performed for much of her professional life, and Cape Town, where she started her career and where she recently returned to live.

* This is an edited version of a review first published in The International Journal of African Historical Studies.