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.

Foreword by Christopher Ballantine

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Prelude

1. The Mission
2. The Scene
3. Improvising Education
4. Durban to Detroit
5. The Jazzanian Effect
6. The Jazz Centre and Drinks at Five
7. Some Remarkable People
8. Off Campus and on the Road
9. Continuum

Coda

Appendix 1: Out-Takes

Appendix 2: Documents

Discography

Notes

Bibliography

Index