iMbizo yamaKhono - Season 4
A real time documentation of key protagonists in arts culture and heritage communicate wisdom, knowledge and healing through joy. An engaging edu-doccie style combining archives, interviews, live music that embraces cultural heritage and returns it to the community.
Heavily insightful new interviews and recordings combine with audio visual music and heritage archives to reveal the education from African oral history and heritage. Compositions, repertoire and approaches, both ancient and futuristic enlighten seekers to a new form of music learning in South Africa.
iMbizo yamaKhono is a gathering to extend the legacy of South African musical excellence beyond limitations. The preservation and promotion new sounds, styles and approaches to self-expression is a multiplied through gatherings of the arts. iMbizo's bring people. In South Africa interdependence, coming together is an ancient way of life described in the philosophy of ubuntu.
In this expansive Afrocentric quality free music education Web Series, short music education documentaries profile star performers, composers and wisdom keepers. Each education documentary is accompanied with a Pre-Task and Post-Task worksheet engaging the student in further research and musical learning beyond the documentary. A bonus question facilitates knowledge and skills to be shared in an inspired, collaborative and innovative way. iMbizo yamaKhono is perfectly suited to South African syllabus grades 10-12, bridging course to university and as resources for national libraries and archives.
Key themes are agency and action in the creative process. Insight to philosophy, economy, spiritual practice, indigenous knowledge systems, music, healing, cultural memory, general knowledge, creative economy and cultural activism is outcomes based both to syllabus and career.
Oral history and heritage, creations and best practices, both ancient and futuristic enlighten seekers to a new form of music learning in South Africa.
Season 4, uBuntu profiles five unique wisdom keepers of South African musical culture and heritage.
Episode One Afrikan Safari
Follows the journey of Morri Natti a Maasai boy from Kenya relocated to South Africa. A musical anthropologist and fulltime musician for South Africa’s shift to the New South Africa. Morri takes his listeners on a journey through different kinds of music using his own compositions and the many folk songs he has learned on his travels. His unique cross-cultural style, which he calls “mashariki muziki”, combines influences from all over Africa and the world, including Zimbabwean chimurenga, South African mbaqanga and township jive, as well as blues, reggae and even Latin American music. He sings songs in a variety of Southern African languages including Maasai, Kiswahili, isiZulu, isiXhosa, English, Afrikaans, Sesotho, Nyanja, and Shona.
Episode Two: Tsoseletso / Enlightenment
As an initiate of story-telling, instrument making and performance, Mosoeu Ketlele brings much power to the present and future of South African musician. He has travelled all over South Africa learning to play and make different traditional instruments. Hailing from Lesotho, learning from Madosini in the Eastern Cape and the grandmothers of eSwatini, Mosoeu Ketlele is a multi-instrumentalist with one foot in the soil and the other in community development. In this episode Mosoeu explores 4 ancient musical instruments including serotorotoro, mbira, uhadi, ixharra, instrument making, voice and story-telling.
Episode Three: Marabi Melodies
Moss Mogale hails from a musical family steeped in the tradition and culture of the musical North. At the age of 78 Bra Moss is together with his younger brother Jesse Mogale and their CAFCA (Committed Artists for Cultural Advancement) Big Band long running music education project from fMamelodi. CAFCA is a unique intergenerational community project preserves a living archive of two great jazz stories of the North - Marabi and Malombo.
Episode Four: Music Saved My Life
Guillaume Rossouw aka Gill Gap is a musical rebel. Music is a clear path of forever learning and like food, music and the arts relate to every culture on our beautiful mother earth. On the run from apartheid for 22 years, unlearning the evil of societies through community and overcoming anger through music, Gill is a cornerstone of the punk and independent music movements of South Africa. His latest project Provolution provides a steady footing from which to build a career in music.
Episode Five: When there is a will there is a way
Eastern Cape’s soulful jazz singer Retsi Michael Pule has perpetuated a longevity in music that has inspired generations of musicians onto the jazz mission. With a passion for teaching basic singing skills, Retsi infuses and inculcates in the minds of the youth a different approach to singing jazz music. “Music is as wide as the universe!” says the 85 year old.
Filmed over the course of three years at Gompo and Biko Centres, this episode features composer pianist Chester Summerton and footage from the Jazz Against Apartheid performances and Look into Your Future Recordings.
