Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 608

Judith Butler on Tahrir Square

"There are many reasons to be suspicious of idealized moments, but there are also reasons to be wary of any analysis that is fully guarded against idealization. There are two aspects of the revolutionary demonstrations in Tahrir square that I would like to underscore. The first has to do with the way a certain sociability was established within the square, a division of labor that broke down gender difference, that involved rotating who would speak and who would clean the areas where people slept and ate, developing a work schedule for everyone to maintain the environment and to clean the toilets. In short, what some would call "horizontal relations" among the protestors formed easily and methodically, and quickly it seemed that relations of equality, which included an equal division of labour between the sexes, became part of the very resistance to Mubarak's regime and its entrenched hierarchies, including the extraordinary differentials of wealth between the military and corporate sponsors of the regime, and the working people. So the social form of the resistance began to incorporate principles of equality that governed not only how and when people spoke and acted for the media and against the regime, but how people cared for their various quarters within the square, the beds on pavement, the makeshift medical stations and bathrooms, the places where people ate, and the places where people were exposed to violence from the outside. These actions were all political in the simple sense that they were breaking down a conventional distinction between public and private in order to establish relations of equality; in this sense, they were incorporating into the very social form of resistance the principles for which they were struggling on the street.

Secondly, when up against violent attack or extreme threats, many people chanted the word "silmiyya" which comes from the root verb (salima) which means to be safe and sound, unharmed, unimpaired, intact, safe, and secure; but also, to be unobjectionable, blameless, faultless; and yet also, to be certain, established, clearly proven. The term comes from the noun "silm" which means "peace" but also, interchangeably and significantly, "the religion of Islam." One variant of the term is "Hubb as-silm" which is Arabic for "pacifism." Most usually, the chanting of "Silmiyya" comes across as a gentle exhortation: "peaceful, peaceful." Although the revolution was for the most part non-violent, it was not necessarily led by a principled opposition to violence. Rather, the collective chant was a way of encouraging people to resist the mimetic pull of military aggression – and the aggression of the gangs – by keeping in mind the larger goal – radical democratic change. To be swept into a violent exchange of the moment was to lose the patience needed to realize the revolution. What interests me here is the chant, the way in which language worked not to incite an action, but to restrain one. A restraint in the name of an emerging community of equals whose primary way of doing politics would not be violence."

Read the rest of Judith Butler's take on Egypt's Tahrir Square ('Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street') here.

Nike Chiefs

While print campaigns for big brands are a dime a dozen, rarely do television commercials feature African football stars who compete in national level competitions on the continent. Perhaps in North Africa and rugby players in South Africa. But for sub-Saharan African sports stars (mostly footballers) that's privilege usually materializes when the World Cup comes around. Think Puma's campaigns for the 5 African countries they sponsored during the 2010 World Cup, the company's specific commercials featuring  Samuel Eto'o and Coco Cola's South African campaign featuring World Cup legend Roger Milla. African players who star in European leagues often get to front TV commercials for European brands shown in those markets. Take for example George Weah who sort of broke the mold on that in Italy or Didier Drogba's Samsung commercial.  They key is they are both African sports stars who made it big in Europe. But what about letting local stars–playing who are not big in Europe–front a campaign? Or spending lots of money promoting the brands of African club football? Check out this slick, arresting commercial, above, that Nike shot with striker Mthokozisi Yende of the Johannesburg glamour club Kaizer Chiefs. This is for the #Alwayson promotion. I have a feeling that if it is replicated for domestic league stars elsewhere on the continent this kind of commercial would soon become the norm rather than an exception like how I am experiencing it now. It is even more remarkable in South Africa given the race politics of its advertising industry. Enjoy.

Kaizer Chiefs

While print campaigns for big brands are a dime a dozen, rarely do television commercials feature African football stars who compete in national level competitions on the continent. Perhaps in North Africa and rugby players in South Africa. But for sub-Saharan African sports stars (mostly footballers) that's privilege usually materializes when the World Cup comes around. (African players who star in European leagues often get to star in TV commercials for European brands, take for example George Weah who sort of broke the mold on that in Italy).  But the idea that big brands would think twice to spend lots of money on a local sports star carrying a brand, may become the exception if slick, arresting commercials like the one above that Nike shot with striker Mthokozisi Yende of the Johannesburg glamor club Kaizer Chiefs, is replicated for domestic league stars elsewhere on the continent. (In South Africa this is all the remarkable given the way its TV commercials still favor white spokespeople.). Enjoy.

South Africa: 'There are no shortcuts left'

So the review I did of Hein Marais' new book, South Africa: Pushed to the Limit. The Political Economy of Change (London / New York: Zed Books, 2011)–which I believe deserves a wide readership–finally appeared this Sunday in the "Book Review" pages of the South African newpaper, "The Sunday Independent."  The published article does not include paragraphs 2 and 3 as well as the first sentence of paragraph 4 which makes for jarring reading. I have copied the original below.

The publication of Hein Marais' South Africa Pushed to the Limit is a welcome addition to the growing list of titles published on the second decade of democracy  in the last few years. It is also a welcome antidote to much of the narrowly focused or sloppily researched, recent literature.

The events of the last few years— broadly South Africa’s attempt to settle into democratic rule and more specifically Thabo Mbeki’'s fall and Jacob Zuma’'s spectacular rise —have been the subject of a number of recent political books.  The most notable are the 900-page biography of Mbeki by Mark Gevisser and the memoir of former ANC Member of Parliament, Andrew Feinstein. There’'s also former "Financial Times" Johannesburg correspondent Alec Russell’'s book, Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa, conveniently published to coincide with 2010’s general elections.

All these books, however, some more successful than others, focus on particular individuals and events.  One book that has recently tried to offer a more general perspective is R W Johnson'’s Brave New World. The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid.   The main claim of the book is that South Africa’s current state is the work of the ANC’s weak and venal leadership. Whatever one makes of this claim, the book as a whole, while provocative, is unimpressive, marred by innuendo and gossip in the place of analysis.  For example, on the basis of no documented evidence, Johnson accuses the ANC of murdering Chris Hani and Robert Mugabe of having a hand in the 9/11 terror attacks and compares the ANC’s dismissal of the small, mostly white opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, to Robert Mugabe’s brutal repression of the MDC in Zimbabwe.

In contrast, Hein Marais’ attempt to cover a wide canvas—his new book comes in at 566 pages, including a 56-page bibliography—comes with rigorous fact checking, documentation, and analysis. South Africa. Limits to Change, Marais’ 1998 book charted the transition from Apartheid to liberal democracy. It became one of the few standard texts for that period among academics and researchers. After that work, Marais went back to his job as an AIDS researcher. His 2000 study of AIDS for the University of Pretoria’s Center for the Study of AIDS–—Google it–—is still one of the best accounts of government’ denialism and inaction around the pandemic in those years.

Today’s South Africa is vastly different from 1998.

Since then, the early “reconciliation” politics of the Mandela era has been replaced, first, by Thabo Mbeki’'s brand of Pan-Africanism, then by his racial class politics and brand of democratic centralism, and now for the first time since the transition a real threat to the ANC’s political cohesion.

Jacob Zuma'’s public persona ushers in a different kind of politics: popular, socially conservative, but also indecisive.  Corruption–—though the arms deal happened on Mbeki'’s watch–—is taking on problematic proportions. And in a continuation of postapartheid (and global) trends, the gap between rich and poor South Africans had become bigger and more worrying among black South Africans.

The new book wants “ to gauge where South Africa’s journey beyond apartheid is headed and why this is happening.”

Marais is a student of history and Pushed to the Limits, not surprisingly, has a long preamble.

Marais traces South Africa’s current conundrum to the nineteenth century origins of modern South Africa’s political economy in minerals and energy, colonialism, Apartheid, the impact of the political transition of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and, more recently, the imposition of a locally produced structural adjustment program in 1996.  These factors along with the choices of the ANC leadership—Marais argues that the ANC were definitely active agents in developing a “neoliberal developmental path,” rather than being manipulated by external forces— have combined to determine the outlines of postapartheid politics as well as the “relative weights” of the main forces contesting the outcome of that process.

Marais is pessimistic about the ANC’s ability to solve South Africa’s “national question.” The reasons: a mix of history, specific policy choices, malfunctioning public systems, misjudgments, and shoddy management or, what he terms, “sheer bad luck.” He gives the new government credit for its numerous social protection and public works programs in the face of mass unemployment. However, he argues these “safety nets” operate in a framework that expresses basic neoliberal “rationalities.” So the social grants get stigmatized as handouts and get slowly privatized. He also discusses the nature of work in South Africa (temporary, informal, and often paying less than a subsistence wage), arguing that such arrangements do not add up to a viable path “to social inclusion and well-being.”   (The sociologist Franco Barchiesi makes an argument along the same lines in his new book.)

Some readers might recognize the arguments of his first book in the first four chapters of Pushed to the Limits.  They should head straight for the second half of the book, which contains chapters outlining what Marais thinks are the key factors influencing South Africa’s immediate and medium-term future, including the AIDS and Tuberculosis epidemics, the ANC’s excessively business-friendly economic policies, and corruption.

Marais argues that while South Africa’s leaders now congratulate themselves for “the largest public health intervention in the world regarding AIDS,” in fact government’s response amounts to “a long fiasco.” Worse, AIDS coupled with growing inequality, imprisons large numbers of South Africans in “a kind of eternal now” and may have corroded their “ability and perhaps the desire to imagine a different world.”

Mandela'’s decision to jettison the RDP for GEAR in 1996—against the wishes of its trade union and communist allies (and ANC voters’ mandate)—is a second key development. Its main outcome, in Marais’ judgment, was to enable South Africa’s largest corporations to “restructure, consolidate and globalize” their operations. They—not Julius Malema or his tenderpreneurs—are the major beneficiaries of the new South Africa. (For example, the old South African Breweries—–now known as SABMiller –has within two decades morphed into the world’s second largest beer brewery and a full-fledged multinational.) Moreover within the ANC the position of conservatives have been strengthened, while the deficiencies of what he calls the “organized left” have been exposed.  The ANC now presides over a “provisional and wavering hegemonic project,” its political character “increasingly indeterminate” and ideologically indistinct.

A third development is the arms deal that he traces to “a handful of top and, and for the most part, trusted politicians.” The deal, worth about US$10 billion, led to Zuma’s firing as deputy president of the ANC, split the ANC, led to Mbeki’s forced resignation (Marais compares Mbeki at the time to Richard Nixon), and in Marais’ terms, dragged key state institutions into the muck and polluted the state.  While “there is no evidence that Mbeki benefited personally” from the arms deal, there is evidence that large bribes were paid. As for Zuma, “South Africa’s Ronald Reagan” (a phrase first used by Alec Russell), Marais, in a welcome move towards substantive debate about issues currently couched in fear and caricature, writes:  “The Zuma phenomenon became a stage for asserting a variety of authenticities—about the meaning of being a Zulu man, a Zulu, a man, an ‘African,’ a ‘South African.’ This is a Pandora’s box the Zuma campaign dared to nudge open. South Africa will find it difficult to replace the lid.” Zuma also wrought kingmaker Julius Malema—“skilled at the flamboyant smear and troglodyte slur and keyed into the normative grammar of lumpen radicalism.”  For Marais, Malema’s brand of populism may become the norm in South Africa where “barefaced accumulation [is combined] with radical posturing and populist savvy.”

The final chapter assesses the outlook for progressive politics. Marais, not surprisingly, concludes the majority of South Africans still identify with the ANC. On the other hand, he is surprisingly pessimistic about the national ambitions of progressive, popular movements both inside and outside the ANC.  COSATU, despite being at the heart of Mbeki’s defeat at Polokwane, has a “surprisingly light organizational weight inside the ANC.” The trade union federation’s main problem is that South Africa lacks “the corporatist foundation for a managed class compromise and it doesn’t have much to show for its attempts thus far to institutionalize such a compromise.”  The outlook for trade union-driven politics is thus bleak.  Reports of the reach of new social movements are romanticized, “overcooked” and the result of “agitprop” by academics and leftwing activists. However, in the book’s last sentence Marais leaves it open: for protest movements, both inside and outside the ANC, “there is a long process of experimenting, building and adapting ahead. There are no shortcuts left.”

'There are no shortcuts left'

So the review I did of Hein Marais' new book, South Africa: Pushed to the Limit. The Political Economy of Change (London / New York: Zed Books, 2011)–which I believe deserves a wide readership–finally appeared this Sunday in the "Book Review" pages of the South African newpaper, "The Sunday Independent."  The published article does not include paragraphs 2 and 3 as well as the first sentence of paragraph 4 which makes for jarring reading. I have copied the original below.

The publication of Hein Marais' South Africa Pushed to the Limit is a welcome addition to the growing list of titles published on the second decade of democracy  in the last few years. It is also a welcome antidote to much of the narrowly focused or sloppily researched, recent literature.

The events of the last few years— broadly South Africa’s attempt to settle into democratic rule and more specifically Thabo Mbeki’'s fall and Jacob Zuma’'s spectacular rise —have been the subject of a number of recent political books.  The most notable are the 900-page biography of Mbeki by Mark Gevisser and the memoir of former ANC Member of Parliament, Andrew Feinstein. There’'s also former "Financial Times" Johannesburg correspondent Alec Russell’'s book, Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa, conveniently published to coincide with 2010’s general elections.

All these books, however, some more successful than others, focus on particular individuals and events.  One book that has recently tried to offer a more general perspective is R W Johnson'’s Brave New World. The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid.   The main claim of the book is that South Africa’s current state is the work of the ANC’s weak and venal leadership. Whatever one makes of this claim, the book as a whole, while provocative, is unimpressive, marred by innuendo and gossip in the place of analysis.  For example, on the basis of no documented evidence, Johnson accuses the ANC of murdering Chris Hani and Robert Mugabe of having a hand in the 9/11 terror attacks and compares the ANC’s dismissal of the small, mostly white opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, to Robert Mugabe’s brutal repression of the MDC in Zimbabwe.

In contrast, Hein Marais’ attempt to cover a wide canvas—his new book comes in at 566 pages, including a 56-page bibliography—comes with rigorous fact checking, documentation, and analysis. South Africa. Limits to Change, Marais’ 1998 book charted the transition from Apartheid to liberal democracy. It became one of the few standard texts for that period among academics and researchers. After that work, Marais went back to his job as an AIDS researcher. His 2000 study of AIDS for the University of Pretoria’s Center for the Study of AIDS–—Google it–—is still one of the best accounts of government’ denialism and inaction around the pandemic in those years.

Today’s South Africa is vastly different from 1998.

Since then, the early “reconciliation” politics of the Mandela era has been replaced, first, by Thabo Mbeki’'s brand of Pan-Africanism, then by his racial class politics and brand of democratic centralism, and now for the first time since the transition a real threat to the ANC’s political cohesion.

Jacob Zuma'’s public persona ushers in a different kind of politics: popular, socially conservative, but also indecisive.  Corruption–—though the arms deal happened on Mbeki'’s watch–—is taking on problematic proportions. And in a continuation of postapartheid (and global) trends, the gap between rich and poor South Africans had become bigger and more worrying among black South Africans.

The new book wants “ to gauge where South Africa’s journey beyond apartheid is headed and why this is happening.”

Marais is a student of history and Pushed to the Limits, not surprisingly, has a long preamble.

Marais traces South Africa’s current conundrum to the nineteenth century origins of modern South Africa’s political economy in minerals and energy, colonialism, Apartheid, the impact of the political transition of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and, more recently, the imposition of a locally produced structural adjustment program in 1996.  These factors along with the choices of the ANC leadership—Marais argues that the ANC were definitely active agents in developing a “neoliberal developmental path,” rather than being manipulated by external forces— have combined to determine the outlines of postapartheid politics as well as the “relative weights” of the main forces contesting the outcome of that process.

Marais is pessimistic about the ANC’s ability to solve South Africa’s “national question.” The reasons: a mix of history, specific policy choices, malfunctioning public systems, misjudgments, and shoddy management or, what he terms, “sheer bad luck.” He gives the new government credit for its numerous social protection and public works programs in the face of mass unemployment. However, he argues these “safety nets” operate in a framework that expresses basic neoliberal “rationalities.” So the social grants get stigmatized as handouts and get slowly privatized. He also discusses the nature of work in South Africa (temporary, informal, and often paying less than a subsistence wage), arguing that such arrangements do not add up to a viable path “to social inclusion and well-being.”   (The sociologist Franco Barchiesi makes an argument along the same lines in his new book.)

Some readers might recognize the arguments of his first book in the first four chapters of Pushed to the Limits.  They should head straight for the second half of the book, which contains chapters outlining what Marais thinks are the key factors influencing South Africa’s immediate and medium-term future, including the AIDS and Tuberculosis epidemics, the ANC’s excessively business-friendly economic policies, and corruption.

Marais argues that while South Africa’s leaders now congratulate themselves for “the largest public health intervention in the world regarding AIDS,” in fact government’s response amounts to “a long fiasco.” Worse, AIDS coupled with growing inequality, imprisons large numbers of South Africans in “a kind of eternal now” and may have corroded their “ability and perhaps the desire to imagine a different world.”

Mandela'’s decision to jettison the RDP for GEAR in 1996—against the wishes of its trade union and communist allies (and ANC voters’ mandate)—is a second key development. Its main outcome, in Marais’ judgment, was to enable South Africa’s largest corporations to “restructure, consolidate and globalize” their operations. They—not Julius Malema or his tenderpreneurs—are the major beneficiaries of the new South Africa. (For example, the old South African Breweries—–now known as SABMiller –has within two decades morphed into the world’s second largest beer brewery and a full-fledged multinational.) Moreover within the ANC the position of conservatives have been strengthened, while the deficiencies of what he calls the “organized left” have been exposed.  The ANC now presides over a “provisional and wavering hegemonic project,” its political character “increasingly indeterminate” and ideologically indistinct.

A third development is the arms deal that he traces to “a handful of top and, and for the most part, trusted politicians.” The deal, worth about US$10 billion, led to Zuma’s firing as deputy president of the ANC, split the ANC, led to Mbeki’s forced resignation (Marais compares Mbeki at the time to Richard Nixon), and in Marais’ terms, dragged key state institutions into the muck and polluted the state.  While “there is no evidence that Mbeki benefited personally” from the arms deal, there is evidence that large bribes were paid. As for Zuma, “South Africa’s Ronald Reagan” (a phrase first used by Alec Russell), Marais, in a welcome move towards substantive debate about issues currently couched in fear and caricature, writes:  “The Zuma phenomenon became a stage for asserting a variety of authenticities—about the meaning of being a Zulu man, a Zulu, a man, an ‘African,’ a ‘South African.’ This is a Pandora’s box the Zuma campaign dared to nudge open. South Africa will find it difficult to replace the lid.” Zuma also wrought kingmaker Julius Malema—“skilled at the flamboyant smear and troglodyte slur and keyed into the normative grammar of lumpen radicalism.”  For Marais, Malema’s brand of populism may become the norm in South Africa where “barefaced accumulation [is combined] with radical posturing and populist savvy.”

The final chapter assesses the outlook for progressive politics. Marais, not surprisingly, concludes the majority of South Africans still identify with the ANC. On the other hand, he is surprisingly pessimistic about the national ambitions of progressive, popular movements both inside and outside the ANC.  COSATU, despite being at the heart of Mbeki’s defeat at Polokwane, has a “surprisingly light organizational weight inside the ANC.” The trade union federation’s main problem is that South Africa lacks “the corporatist foundation for a managed class compromise and it doesn’t have much to show for its attempts thus far to institutionalize such a compromise.”  The outlook for trade union-driven politics is thus bleak.  Reports of the reach of new social movements are romanticized, “overcooked” and the result of “agitprop” by academics and leftwing activists. However, in the book’s last sentence Marais leaves it open: for protest movements, both inside and outside the ANC, “there is a long process of experimenting, building and adapting ahead. There are no shortcuts left.”

Music Break / Bongeziwe Mabandla

Downtown Johannesburg looks remarkably empty in this video for Bongeziwe Mabandla's first track of his upcoming album. Zuluboy throws in his lines in the second half. And a pop-perfect kids choir finishes it.

Lesotho's Independence Day

By Ts'eliso Monaheng*

When I was growing up, Independence Day was quite a big deal in and around Maseru, Lesotho. Besides it being a public holiday, it carried with it the promise of festivities which usually occurred at our national stadium. A lot has changed since then, and some would claim for the worse. But instead of writing about another factory workers' strike, yet another double-digit salary hike for ministers, or a former convict being appointed to public office, I would rather focus on other things — like music for instance. Music is central to our existence as Basotho, and even though we too are victims of the usual cacophony of western sounds dominating our airwaves (with a dip of Kwaito and house, courtesy of our South African neighbours), there are genres which have managed to fare well commercially. Below is a collection of videos sourced from youtube. Some of them are quite dated — our artists seem not to hold Internet presence in high regard at all.

Sankomota's 'Stop the war'. Arguably still the best musical export from Lesotho by far, even though most of the members are no more:

(Honorary mentions: Fatere, Budhaza and Qiloane.)

After a long time bubbling in Lesotho's underground hip-hop scene, Dunamis managed to rise above and get some acclaim with the release of this video for 'Mastered Seed' which received wide rotation on Channel O and SABC1:

(Honorary mentions: Papa Zee, Kommanda Obbs, Stlofa and Skebza.)

Manka le Phallang are but one in a myriad of famo musicians. Along with the likes of Puseletso Seema, Tau ea Mats'ekha, and Apollo Ntabanyane, they were among the first to popularise the genre. This is their 'Ea nyoloha khanyapa':

(Honorary mentions: Famole (RIP), Mahlanya and Chakela.)

And to round up: Lefate. They've split, but not before releasing this video from their album Ha le lapa lea solla. They refer(ed) to their music as 'Mokorotlo', an ode to the Basotho hat which resembles the hill of Qiloane. Their 'Life's like a lie':

(Honorary mentions: Manyofi and Mthibo.)

* You know Ts'eliso as Core Wreckah.

Music Break / Nëggus & Kungobram

Kungobram, an ensemble of French musicians, has teamed up with Togolese slammer Nëggus (here reminiscing about "his land"). Their live act sounds slick. And they're asking for our help to wrap up their first album:

Indian Jazz

UPDATED: Black Atlas is an American Airlines special promotion for African-American travelers. You can see the series of videos on the program's Youtube channel. Sometimes the videos give the impression that African-Americans are new to a region. Like in this video about India. (In the video, alongside all the usual tourist stereotypes, the link is between the ideas of Martin Luther King Jnr and Mahatma Gandhi, is played up for example.) But that is such a misrepresentation about African American travel to South Asia. Just take jazz. Indian filmmaker Susheel Kurien's "Finding Carlton" about bebop guitarist Carlton Kitto and "the bygone age of jazz in India" will hopefully start setting the record straight. Jazz music in India (mostly in Lucknow, Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta), dates back to pre-World War II American military presence there, visiting swing bands, and US State Department sponsored tours by African-American recording artists. The film will also explore the influence of American jazz on Bollywood. (BTW, on his blog, Kurien has a few posts about that connection.) Just on the basis of clips of the film, I can see the film starting to pop up at festivals soon. Tomorrow night a rough cut will screen at the monthly DocuClub, which screens work-in-progress documentaries–here in New York City.

In the first clip (above) sax player Micky Correa talks about Bombay (Mumbai) big bands. A few other legends' names get thrown in.

In the second clip Carlton Kitto tells a story about he played in Duke Ellington's band:

The film's Youtube channel also have clips of Ellington playing in India, video cliff notes on the history of jazz in India by American academic Bradley Shope (parts one, two and three) and the new crop of Indian jazz musicians, like Sonia.

Jazz in India

Too little has been written (or put on the screen) about jazz in India. Indian filmmaker Susheel Kurien's "Finding Carlton" about bebop guitarist Carlton Kitto and "the bygone age of jazz in India" will hopefully start setting the record straight. Jazz music in India (mostly in Lucknow, Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta), dates back to pre-World War II American military presence there, visiting swing bands, and US State Department sponsored tours by African-American recording artists. The film will also explore the influence of American jazz on Bollywood. (BTW, on his blog, Kurien has a few posts about that connection.) Just on the basis of clips of the film, I can see the film starting to pop up at festivals soon. Tomorrow night a rough cut will screen at the monthly DocuClub, which screens work-in-progress documentaries–here in New York City.

In the first clip sax player Micky Correa talks about Bombay (Mumbai) big bands. A few other legends' names get thrown in:

In the second clip Carlton Kitto tells a story about he played in Duke Ellington's band:

The film's Youtube channel also has a clip of Ellington playing in India, cliff notes on the history of jazz in India by American academic Bradley Shope (parts one, two and three) and of the new crop of Indian jazz musicians like Sonia, among others.