URBANA — Playing the Changes, a book by Darius and Catherine Brubeck, follows their establishment of a jazz education program during apartheid-era South Africa. The Brubecks will spend the week across Champaign and Urbana, sharing their documentary film about Darius, and include performances by Darius, a world-renowned musician.
On Wednesday, April 23 at 5 p.m., the Brubecks will give a presentation about their book. And the following day, Darius will perform at Krannert Uncorked.
Morning Edition host Kimberly Schofield spoke with the couple about how they brought jazz, education, musicians, and students together during a time of discrimination and segregation.
SCHOFIELD: In the beginning of the book, it describes what ‘playing the changes’ means when it comes to jazz, but also in relation to some of the work that was done in South Africa. Would either of you mind describing or expanding on that?
CATHERINE BRUBECK: We were in South Africa during a the major transition. We were there from ’83 to 2006 and of course, in 1990, Nelson Mandela came out of prison. 1994 was the year when everyone could vote; finally, democracy had arrived. So we’d moved from a government that had laws for all the different races. So we saw, we were part of the change.
DARIUS BRUBECK: As far as ‘playing the changes,’ of course, we’re punning on something that’s technical in the jazz world. If you take a standard, you know, something that everybody knows, you improvise on the chord changes. You maintain the structure, but you solo on it, and you play completely spontaneously. And that’s kind of metaphorically what we did in the education system by introducing jazz onto a predominantly white campus-not by law, but in fact, because there were so many barriers for other people in terms of secondary level education, in terms of finance and so forth-simply bringing so many Black students on campus by having a jazz program really brought some much wider social change. We were kind of playing some changes on the campus and encouraging exactly what the United States of America is officially turning against. I could say diversity, equity, inclusion. It took me a long time to learn why those were considered bad things, but we certainly were doing that, and at the time, I must say that was in line with official American policy and businesses boycotting South Africa and that sort of thing. So we were playing the changes and we were improvising. We were finding allies. We were avoiding legal traps. We were fundraising. We were ducking and diving and then coming out loud and strong. Things kept changing, especially during the first 10 years after Nelson Mandela was elected president, everything became a lot easier. And there was kind of a 10-year celebration after that, but the first ten years, wow.
SCHOFIELD: What prompted the idea to try to bring this type of program into a university there?
CATHERINE BRUBECK: I had retained contact with Professor Christopher Ballantine, who was the head of the music department at the University of Natal, as it was then called. It’s now the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It was really his vision to incorporate a jazz program at the university and he’d already done it with ethnomusicology. So he contacted me and said, “Would Darius be interested in applying for the post?” which was then, I think Darius said jazz theory-
DARIUS BRUBECK: No, not even jazz theory. Just music theory.
CATHERINE BRUBECK: Just music theory. Sorry, yeah, just music theory.
DARIUS BRUBECK: The one subject no one in any academic music department really wants to teach because students hate it, it’s useless, you don’t use it at all the day after you pass the exam. But you gotta do it for some reason-
SCHOFIELD: You gotta do it!
CARTHERINE BRUBECK: Right, and so the thought right from the very beginning was that if he did accept this music theory post-I mean, he had to apply with a lot of other people-if he got it, Chris Ballantine’s idea and ours, of course: we would find a way of turning it into a jazz position, which we did. It wasn’t just a straightforward decision. Once the application process went through, they did invite Darius to take the post. But even then, we were a bit doubtful, because of, you know, there were kind of boycotts, cultural boycotts, and it looked as though it might extend then to education boycotts. I had a political past, so we kind of connected with big movements, African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress to see what they thought of the idea of our going to South Africa. And they were in a position where they felt they were getting nearer to democracy and that things were going to change, and they wanted people in institutions to be there, preparing the way.
SCHOFIELD: Is there something you can share, as far as student response? What was that like?
DARIUS BRUBECK: We had a lot of interest, instantly. If you introduce a program that people really want and didn’t have before, you get national interest, not just local interest, and since we were the only one, we had the advantage of being able to recruit from the whole nation, effectively, if people could get there. So there was a very positive reaction. But then one had to deal with various barriers, like having-and this will not translate well into the American system, but like you have SATs. In South Africa, and kind of British model, colonial model world, there’s something called a matrix exemption, which means you have so many points for courses passed at a high level. Well, we just didn’t have Black students, at first, who had that qualification because of the education being inadequate in the first place. And then as the 80’s warmed up, literally, schools burning down during riots, it was just too chaotic. So we had to campaign for and achieve adjustments in the educational system and bridging to bring these students on to campus. But it was successful. And I have to stress this, it was successful because the students contributed so much. They had so much to offer. As musicians, they were, you know, kind of an interesting social group. And there were a lot of white students who, because of apartheid, never sat next to a black person-
CATHERINE BRUBECK: In an equal situation.
DRIUS BRUBECK: -yeah, you know, it started a lot of conversations and so the student response was hugely positive. But then we had to transform the institution, which, you know, it was a big ship to turn around, but I must say, a little bit of success led to a little bit more. And we built up alliances and networks. And, you know, it sounds like a big claim, an impossible claim, maybe, but we actually did it with the help of a lot of other people. I have to say that.
CATHERINE BRUBECK: I just want to clarify the word ‘student’ because we recruited musicians that were already quite well known, but who couldn’t read music or anything like that. So we had older students…because they didn’t have the right qualifications, they weren’t regarded as real students, but we just let them come to everything, and their contribution was that…because they were such good players in ensembles, they really helped the students who had all the right qualifications but weren’t as good of players. So it was a real mixture of both sides gaining-
DARIUS BRUBECK: Mutual appreciation. Peer-to-peer learning.
SCHOFIELD: I imagine the ethnomusicology that had been studied helped with this. Was that incorporated into these programs or did it help you navigate everything?
DARIUS BRUBECK: It helped me navigate everything. It wasn’t incorporated in an academic sense. My mindset was already, you might say, my default perspective is multicultural, rather than looking at jazz as a very specific American idiom. And Durban is on the Indian Ocean. It has the largest Indian population of any city outside of India. So we had all of these cultures interacting anyway. From having a symphony orchestra, which was largely of post-colonial heritage, trying to keep the European tradition going, to Indian classical music, then you know, to Bollywood, Christian revivalist church’s traditional music, you know, wonderful traditional Zulu music, like in Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The younger listeners might not know about them, but you know, you could hear them on Paul Simon’s Graceland album, for example, a great guitar tradition. So there was a lot going on, and the thing was not to come with the mindset of adding something independently of that, or, heaven forbid, replacing that, but just saying, you know, ‘what can we do with all of this in the context of a jazz course?’
CATHERINE BRUBECK: And I will add that South Africa did have a jazz tradition because very early on, long before apartheid, everyone was exposed to jazz music on radio and in films. But then once the nationalist government came in, the Afrikaner nationalist government in ’48, things started being shut down, cut off, completely. But nevertheless, there were famous South African jazz musicians like Hugh Masekela. So there was a tradition there to also build on.
SCHOFIELD: Is there something specific that you hope people take away from the talk or the book playing the changes?
DARIUS BRUBECK: Without in any way pretending to have answers or be prescriptive-because we’re old, we didn’t grow up with the Internet or things like that-culture changes and evolves over a lifetime. But with all those disclaimers, we hope this will inspire people now, especially in America, to find out how they can play the changes.
CATHERINE BRUBECK: Jazz has been music, certainly in South Africa, that was ‘for the struggle,’ as they called it. There was a slogan which said, ‘jazz for the struggle and the struggle for jazz,’ which, of course, jazz today is no longer popular music as such. It’ll always be there, like poetry or something, but it’ll never be huge. But I think, as Darius says, we want to inspire people to try and speak out and play their music.
DARIUS BRUBECK: Find their community.
CATHERINE BRUBECK: I mean, jazz is such, I suppose, having started off really too as, a kind of music of freedom, really.