Fact, ideology and paradox: African elements in early Black South African Jazz and Vaudeville

Abstract

There's much else that could be said; but for our purposes, there are two things to stress. The first is that it was here, in the institution known as "Concert and Dance”, that South African jazz culture was incubated. And the second is that this institution derived its repertoire from two principal sources - the one mainly American, the other mainly local. In a paper at a previous Symposium (the Seventh), I talked about the former - the American source. Today I want to focus on the latter, and look at some of the ways that local music (or certain kinds of it) were incorporated into the Concert and Dance between the 1920s and the early 1940s.