South African Jazz musician Zim Ngqawana (1959 - 2011) plays tenor saxophone as he leads his Zimology Quartet at the NYC Winter JazzFest 2008 on the Knitting Factory Main Space, New York, New York, January 12, 2008. (Photo by Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images)
It has been ten years since Zimasile ‘Zim’ Ngqawana died on 10 May 2011.
A flautist and saxophonist, composer and teacher, Ngqawana’s biography and his achievements are well known.
Recalling him on the 10th anniversary of his death is to remember how a South African jazz musician’s life and death.
Zimasile ‘Zim’ Ngqawana, died unexpectedly and too soon – on 10 May 2011 at the age of 51 – leaving bereft a family and a musical community that spanned the globe.
Despite devastating setbacks like his studio being vandalised, the saxophonist and teacher believed that music can heal - part of a vision that shaped a future generation of jazz artists.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
George C. Wolfe,
IN 1929, two years after the setting of
Ma Rainey
’s Black Bottom and about seven months after Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues,” made her last recordings, another stylish Southern blues singer the “Queen” of the genre cut a song with her new husband. On “When the Levee Breaks,” Memphis Minnie looses her guitar on Kansas Joe McCoy, who starts to sing:
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s going to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s going to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay