UPRIZE!

This soundtrack to the documentary film UPRIZE!, about the 1976 Soweto uprising, is the second release from the South African avant-jazz collective SPAZA, although its recording actually predates the group’s 2019 debut. A moving and mournful requiem for those who lost their lives fighting against apartheid, the album is a mix of black consciousness styles drawn from the South African townships and from civil rights era American jazz. The improvisations of bassist Ariel Zamonsky, percussionist Gontse Makhene and Malcolm Jiyane’s trombone and piano – recorded while watching historical footage – create shifting rhythmic and melodic patterns that evoke the experimentations of Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane and The Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Jiyane’s piano playing deals in hypnotic swirls that channel Thelonious Monk as well as Abdullah Ibrahim and Bheki Mseleku while Nonku Phiri, daughter of the late, great Ray Phiri who played guitar on Graceland, has a haunting voice that oscillates between fragility and defiance in a lineage that runs from Miriam Makeba to Thandiswa Mazwai, but which has a strikingly singular tone that is all her own. Sampled interview clips and other sounds from the film are smartly interwoven into the sonic palette and the results are spellbinding.