In 1994, Brad and Paige Holmes opened a small, live-music venue in the bohemian suburb of Melville in Johannesburg. They called it Bassline, which very soon became synonymous with cigarette smoke, great jazz and nights you wished would never end. They later moved the club to Newtown where it grew in prominence as the ultimate venue for live music, hosting amazing artists like Thandiswa Mazwai, Jimmy Dludlu, Lira, The Soil and Grammy Award-winning group Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

In 2016 word spread like wildfire that everyone’s favourite club was closing its doors forever; this place that held all the promises of a new South Africa, a place where people of all races could come together, share a drink, dance and fall in love was to be no more. But as Bassline starts its new journey with Live @ the Bassline, yet another great story begins with Last Night At The Bassline.

In this book, esteemed music historian Professor David Coplan tells the story of Bassline and the Holmes’s journey in it, thus giving musicians and jazz fans something to hold on to even after its closure. This book is a tangible piece of the magic to take home and savour. And those who were never there will be given a chance to experience this dream.

With more than fifty iconic photographs from Oscar Gutierrez and other great photographers, the book is more than just a memoir. It is a gritty, smoky, passionate slice of time. Bassline will always be a reminder of what it feels like to live the impossible.

In no other society in the world have urbanisation and industrialization been as comprehensively based on migrant labour as in South Africa. Rather than focusing on the well-documented narrative of displacement and oppression, A Long Way Home captures the humanity, agency and creative modes of self-expression of the millions of workers who helped to build and shape modern South Africa. The book spans a three-hundred-year history beginning with the exportation of slave labour from Mozambique in the eighteenth century and ending with the strikes and tensions on the platinum belt in recent years. It shows not only the age-old mobility of African migrants across the continent but also, with the growing demand for labour in the mining industry, the importation of Chinese indentured migrant workers. Contributions include 18 essays and over 90 artworks and photographs that traverse homesteads, chiefdoms and mining hostels, taking readers into the materiality of migrant life and its customs and traditions, including the rituals practiced by migrants in an effort to preserve connections to "home" and create a sense of "belonging". The essays and visual materials provide multiple perspectives on the lived experience of migrant labourers and celebrate their extraordinary journeys. A Long Way Home was conceived during the planning of an art exhibition entitled 'Ngezinyawo: Migrant Journeys' at Wits Art Museum. The interdisciplinary nature of the contributions and the extraordinary collection of images selected to complement and expand on the text make this a unique collection.

""This is one of the best books to have emerged from South African musicology in the last decadeIt opens up a new level of discourse about music during the apartheid era: a level on which the theoretical, the ethical, the historical and the aesthetic play against each other in newly meaningful ways.""
--Roger Parker, Cambridge University (UK)

""Composing Apartheid endeavors to trace the relationships between names, concepts and realities as they variously interacted, and continue to interact, on the musical landscape, and it does so as historically and socially responsible scholarship.""
--Grant Olwage, from the Introduction

"Composing Apartheid" is the first book ever to chart the musical world of a notorious period in world history, apartheid South Africa. It explores how music was produced through, and was productive of, key features of apartheid's social and political topography. The collection of essays is intentionally broad, and, the contributors include historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, as well as ethnomusicologists, music theorists, and historical musicologists.

The essays focus on a variety of music (jazz, music in the Western art tradition, popular music), major composers (such as Kevin Volans) and works (Handel's "Messiah"). Musical institutions and previously little-researched performers (such as the African National Congress's troupe-in-exile Amandla) are explored. The writers move well beyond their subject matter, intervening in debates on race, historiography, and postcolonial epistemologies and pedagogies.

This book includes contributions by Lara Allen, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; Gary Baines, Rhodes University (South Africa); Ingrid Byerly, Duke University; Christopher Cockburn, University of KwaZulu-Natal; David Coplan, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa); Michael Drewett, Rhodes University; Shirli Gilbert, University of Southampton; Bennetta Jules-Rosette, University of California, San Diego; Christine Lucia, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; Carol A. Muller, University of Pennsylvania; Stephanus Muller, University of Stellenbosch (South Africa); Brett Pyper, New York University; and Martin Scherzinger, Princeton University.

"Grant Olwage" is a senior lecturer at the School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Radio has been called ‘Africa’s medium’. Its wide accessibility is a result of a number of factors, including the liberalisation policies of the ‘third wave’ of democracy and its ability to transcend the barriers of cost, geographical boundaries, the colonial linguistic heritage and low literacy levels. This sets it apart from other media platforms in facilitating political debate, shaping identities and assisting listeners as they negotiate the challenges of everyday life on the continent. Radio in Africa breaks new ground by bringing together essays on the multiple roles of radio in the lives of listeners in Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone Africa. Some essays turn to the history of radio and its part in the culture and politics of countries such as Angola and South Africa. Others – such as the essay on Mali, gender and religion – show how radio throws up new tensions yet endorses social innovation and the making of new publics. A number of essays look to radio’s current role in creating listening communities that radically shift the nature of the public sphere. Essays on the genre of the talk show in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa point to radio’s role in creating a robust public sphere. Radio’s central role in the emergence of informed publics in fragile national spaces is covered in essays on the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia. The book also highlights radio’s links to the new media, its role in resistance to oppressive regimes such as Zimbabwe, and points in several cases – for example in the essay on Uganda – to the importance of African languages in building modern communities that embrace both local and global knowledge.