(Nishlyn Ramana)
The Centre for Jazz and Popular Music will present Nishlyn
Ramana in duo with well-loved drummer Bruce Baker at UKZN’s Centre for Jazz and
Popular Music on September 27.
Pianist/composer Nishlyn Ramana performs two suites of
darkly reflective compositions with drummer Bruce Baker. Composed in response
to recent bereavements and the spirits that endure, Ramana's compositions evoke
the grooves of African jazz and the lyricism of European jazz.
Pianist, composer, and musicologist Nishlyn Ramana first
became interested in jazz on hearing an album with Oscar Peterson and Joe Pass
in his last years of high school. He completed a BMus in jazz at the University
of Natal, and later a PhD on contemporary jazz in post-apartheid Durban and
Johannesburg. He has published on SA jazz in the Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and
the journals SAMUS and Social Dynamics. He has been a guest editor of the
African Genres volume of EPMOW (Encyclopaedia of Popular Musics of the World)
and editor of SAMUS.
Between 2007 and 2010, he wrote a music column for the
KZN-based Sunday Tribune.
As co-leader of the intercultural improvisation ensemble
Mosaic, he has performed at various classical, folk, and jazz festivals and
venues in South Africa, several appearances on national television, and at
functions at which Presidents Mandela and Mbeki were present. The group also
performed at the 1996 International Association of Jazz Educators' Conference
in Atlanta, and at the Royal Academy in London in 1998. From 2000 to 2002,
whilst holding a lectureship in jazz at Rhodes, he also taught piano and
performed at the annual, week-long National Youth Jazz Festival.
Ramana’s debut CD A
Thought (2005) includes eight of his original compositions and is available
online via http://cdbaby.com/cd/ramanna.
Recorded while he was an Overseas Visiting Scholar at St John’s College,
Cambridge, it features veteran UK jazz saxophonist Stan Sulzmann as special
guest. Ramana has also composed music for We
Remember Differently (2005) and Le
Boeuf sur le toit (2010), both by Johannesburg film director Jyoti Mistry.
Join The Nishlyn Ramana featuring Bruce Baker at The Centre
for Jazz and Popular Music (CJPM), Level 2, Shepstone Building at UKZN Howard
College Campus on September 27 at 18h00. (Doors open at 17h30) General
admission R60 (R40 pensioners, R20 students). For more details contact Thuli on
031 260 3385 or email Zamat1@ukzn.ac.za
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