Abby Cindi - No Limits 2022.mov

This concert performance was conceived as an arts research-based activity within a broader oral history project aimed at honouring jazz veterans. It was part of a collaboration between the Cosmopolitan Collective and the Mamelodi Arts and Culture Forum with the Wits School of Arts and the History Workshop. Although the project has multiple stakeholders and role players, this creative output focuses on musical imagination and re-imagination in dialogue with the music of a jazz veteran and activist who was being honoured through this performance, Abbey Cindi. Attention here is cast on his earlier album, which was reissued for the Jazz Day concert, <i>the United States of Africa</i>. The performance was split into two sets. The second half consisted of Cindi performing a selection of tracks accompanied by a four-piece band. The first half, the central output here, offered an all-vocal interpretation (except for a snippet featuring a guitarist, Mark Aranha) of musical pieces in early singing and compositional styles that preceded and shaped aspects of the cultural context that later informed Abbey Cindi’s sound. In this first segment, drawing on my choral interests as a practitioner and researcher, I adapted and arranged his and other compositions. These five-part vocal arrangements were sung by a group I co-founded, No Limits.