Playing the Changes

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.

“Darius and Cathy Brubeck take turns narrating this engrossing memoir of their experiences teaching and presenting music in South Africa from the 1980s into the 2000s. Their humility makes it appealing--they are intent on telling it like it was, not in making everything sound rosy. What makes the book particularly informative for all readers, musicians and otherwise, is the level of detail that they provide about life and politics in South Africa during these years, both in and out of academia.”--Lewis Porter, author of Playback with Lewis Porter!

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