Playing the Changes: Jazz at an African University and on the Road

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 Brubeck is an American jazz pianist, bandleader, composer, broadcaster, educator, and former director of the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is the son of legendary jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck. Catherine Brubeck, a South African, has worked in events organization, publishing, and artist management (specializing in jazz) in America, South Africa, and the UK. She was the Project Manager at the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music, initiating and organizing extra-curricular projects and events throughout Darius’s term as director.