Marabi Nights: Jazz, "Race" and Society in Early Apartheid South Africa

Ballantine, Christopher. Marabi Nights: Jazz, "Race" and Society in Early Apartheid South Africa. 2nd ed. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012. (1st ed.: Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1993). xvi, 247 pp., figures, CD, appendix, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-1-86914-237-7.

"Music is a site of memory and forgetting, hope and despair, freedom and repression: that is its burden," concludes christopher Ballantine in the afterword of the second edition of his celebrated Marabi Nights (p. 198). This new edition of his classic exploration of black south African jazz focuses broadly on these issues and augments the first edition with a foreword by jazz chanteuse sibongile Khumalo, expanded versions of the original chapters, two strong additional chapters, and a retrospective afterword. This updated publication is a welcome inclusion in south African musicological literature.

Most of the introduction and first three chapters are found in the first edition, so in the interest of space, I direct readers to reviews by veit erlmann (1994), Janet Topp Fargion (1995), and louise meintjes (1996). Here, I focus on sections specific to the updated version and the work as a whole.

In her foreword, sibongile Khumalo situates Ballantine's scholarship in the lived experience of south African peoples and musicians who hold marabi to be an important part of their heritage. She emphasizes the importance of this work to both scholars and practitioners, noting...